Etiqueta: Coral Herrera Gómez

Publicado el

Maybe it’s not romantic love, but just boredom.

Maybe it's not romantic love, but just boredom.

Maybe it's not that we're in love with love, but that we need strong emotions.

Maybe we're not falling in love with men, but with how they enjoy life.

Why do we get bored?

Because all our basic needs are met. If we had to spend the day searching for food, clean water, shelter, warm clothing, then we wouldn't have time to get bored, nor would we be invaded by existential emptiness.

We get bored because our day-to-day consists of producing, reproducing, and consuming: it's a cycle of routines where it's hard for us to find meaning in life.

We get bored because our lives are monotonous and with very little change, which is why we enjoy watching the crazy lives of celebrities through screens: parties, dinners, dances, travels, romances, weddings, baptisms, divorces, inheritances, family feuds...

We love novels and movies where characters are constantly facing death, risking their lives, passionately loving, living on the edge, and transforming throughout the journey.

We're hungry for emotions and change: we feel like robots and dream of an intense life because we're numbed, hibernating on the couch, living everything through a screen, especially during this year of pandemic: our family, social, sexual, and romantic relationships have been minimized. So have our horizons: being within four walls leads us to yearn for something magical to happen that completely changes our lives.

Women who feel bored

Boredom is political: patriarchy wants all of us bored, entertained with beauty, and obsessed with romantic love.

The more bored we are, the emptier our lives become, and the more dependent we are.

The more dependent, the more vulnerable we are to romantic addiction, and therefore, the more submissive we are and the more obedient to patriarchy's mandates.

To understand why women get so bored, take a look at the toys girls play with. Everything is pink: they've taken away all the other colors of the rainbow, our world is small and monochromatic, revolving around money and beauty, romantic love, and motherhood.

Girls as young as six already know that boys are the geniuses,

and within a couple more years, they realize that their greatest passion should be the love of one of them.

Women fall in love with men who are in love with life and know how to enjoy it.

It's possible that we might not even fall in love with them truly, but with their freedom, their energy, their ability to savor life, to have fun, to learn, to meet new people, to carry out their projects, and pursue their dreams.

Perhaps we don't need a man to escape boredom: maybe what we need is to find pleasure in things other than romantic partnerships and the ideal family.

Men's Passions

Men cultivate their passions and find pleasure in countless areas of life: music, art, sports, knowledge and science, technology, spirituality and religion, magic, culture, politics, and economics...

The great geniuses of Human History are men who were obsessed with what fascinated them, men who forgot about the world while composing music, painting pictures, sculpting, writing novels, searching for fossils, climbing mountains, diving into the depths of the sea, flying in contraptions, researching exciting topics, advocating for human and animal rights, forming unions or political parties, exploring the boundaries of nature, discovering new stars and planets...

Meanwhile, we have few examples of passionate women. The only women we see in movies and novels are women obsessed with a man, and who are miserable if the man mistreats them or ignores them. They are always alone and bored, have no emotional bonds with other women, and if they do interact with others, it's to make them suffer.

 

Women Who Suffer for Love

They don't let us enjoy life because they tell us that we were born to suffer, to give ourselves up, to sacrifice, to endure, and to give up everything for the love of a man.

Most girls are educated to dedicate their time and energy to looking beautiful with the ultimate goal of being chosen by a man as a wife.

Girls who don't fit into this role quickly realize that their passions are not "girly things": patriarchy makes us believe that "normal" women enjoy shopping, reading fashion magazines, and spending afternoons at the beauty salon.

This is the feminine model they offer us: egocentric and narcissistic women who spend all day looking at themselves and taking care of their beauty, their only treasure. Their only goal is to be loved.

That's how the Disney princesses we idolize in childhood are portrayed. They live alone and waiting, locked up and bored, sighing and combing their golden hair a thousand times until the most important moment of their lives arrives: when the prince comes to rescue them.

How are we educated for boredom and suffering?

Firstly, we are taught that pleasure is for men: for us, it is considered sinful.

Secondly, we are made to believe that one must sacrifice to find happiness, and that one must give up oneself to enter the realm of romantic paradise.

Thirdly, we are taught that happiness is individual, when in reality it is collective: we cannot be happy if those around us suffer, and if we do not all have the same rights.

How are our passions extinguished? They inject us from a young age with the Great Passion of Romantic Love, which flourishes and grows inside us, becoming the center of our lives and overpowering all other passions.

They make us addicted to romantic love, which is why when asked, we do not know what gives us pleasure, and we do not know what makes us happy. For some women, it takes years of therapy to discover what they truly need to live well.

We are educated to worry and occupy ourselves only with our physical appearance, promising us that love will come to us through beauty.

This is how they manage to focus women on themselves and their great romantic passion, and not worry about the rest of the world.

They make us believe:

  • that we have come into this world to be beautiful, to love, and to care for others.
  • that love always comes first.
  • that it's normal for us to give up our affections, our projects, and our hobbies when we enter into a partnership.
  • that nothing we do matters.
  • that we must dedicate our time to superficial things that are of no importance to society.
  • that women who pursue what truly interests them must pay a high price: they end up alone.
  • that women who have succeeded in doing "men's things" are unfeminine, lonely women, odd women that no man desires as a wife.
  • that if you deviate from the norm, you will end up alone, and no one will want you - this is a constant threat.
  • that men do not want women engrossed in their own dreams, but rather engrossed in them.
  • that men want women who are good wives and good mothers.

 

What models of femininity are offered to us?

We barely know about the women activists who fight for human rights, nor do we have role models of women who care about their community and their planet.

Women who struggle to survive each day amidst the exploitation, poverty, and violence of patriarchy, and women who are building a better world, remain invisible.

What do the famous women in our culture do? Generally, they sing, dance, act, pose, fall in love, get married, have children, and get divorced. They are role models for the girls who idolize them.

Dreaming Women

When we are asked what we desire, what gives us pleasure, many times we don't know if these are our own desires or ones we have learned.

When we see women who haven't made romantic love the center of their lives, that's when we realize that maybe our dreams aren't really ours. They've been manufactured to make us believe that happiness lies in the love of a man and in motherly love.

We invest tons of time, energy, and resources into these dreams, shaping our lives around them.

Our dreams enslave us because in them, the most important thing is a man. Without them, we cannot be happy. Our emotions depend on a single man, and they change according to his behavior.

Not just our emotions, but also our self-esteem and life projects depend on relationships with men.

What happens when we are without a partner, or when we don't find a partner?

Our life loses its meaning, and we are terrified of the emptiness. We don't know why we're alive or what to do with our existence. We feel incomplete because we've been told a thousand times that we are halves, and without the other half, we are nothing, we are nobody.

Rebellious Women

Feminism advocates for the right of all women to pleasure, enjoyment, and living a good life.

That's why we want to educate girls to be autonomous, to not become addicted to romantic love, to learn to enjoy life just like boys, to feel equally free as them, to unite with each other, and to find the meaning of life in their dreams, passions, and networks of affection, rather than in a single person.

Feminist women are working within ourselves to better understand who we are, to connect with ourselves, to discover our own passions, and to find spaces and time for our own pleasure.

And we know it's important because patriarchy wants us to be sufferers, embittered, and frustrated.

We also know that life is more than just work, caregiving, and consumption: we have the right to have fun, to immerse ourselves in other worlds, to share our passions with other women, and to celebrate that we are alive.

That's why we are working to demystify the ideal of the couple and the happy family, to remove men from the center of our lives, and to place ourselves there instead.

We have so much love within us, and we don't have to waste it on just one person. We have an enormous capacity to love many people at once, to enjoy life, and to bring joy to others as well.

So if they want us to be bored or in love,

they will find us passionate, joyful, and in rebellion,

because life is too short!

Coral Herrera Gómez

 

Artículo original: Igual no es amor, es aburrimiento

Publicado el

There is no reward for suffering for love.

For women to voluntarily dedicate themselves to suffering for love, the patriarchy had to invent the romantic paradise. Love is like a religion: they ask us to pass through the valley of tears with resignation and assure us that in the end, we will be able to enter the gates of heaven to enjoy eternal, wonderful, and perfect love. But there is no reward, no paradise as a prize for enduring.

Women are raised in a culture of endurance, sacrifice, and renunciation with the promise that at some point in their lives, they will be rewarded and receive their prize. In Princess stories, this is the main message conveyed to women: if you suffer and endure, if you wait patiently, if you persevere and remain loyal, he will realize and fall to his knees before you, promise to love you forever, and you can be happy.

It's the perfect trap for women to care for men with problems: they seduce us with the idea that our love can conquer all, and with great patience and tenderness, we will change the ogre and turn him into the Prince Charming. Our role model becomes the Beauty who transforms the Beast by enduring his mistreatment. We fall in love with the scared and traumatized little boy that resides within every monster. Women tend to feel pity right away for these babies who demand love in a misguided manner, convinced that our love will save us both, and that we will be rewarded for being so good, generous, patient, and loving.

However, there is no reward. There is no prize, no possible paradise when we "for love" give up our freedom, our rights, our passions, our projects, our self-care. There's no way to give and receive love under conditions of suffering and abuse. It's impossible to build a healthy and beautiful relationship, and happiness cannot be achieved when we carry the burdens of others and they become our own problems.

When women come together with men who have problems, what happens is that we take on the responsibility for their well-being, and guilt is immediately triggered. We believe that we could do more or do it better, but nothing seems to satisfy the suffering man.

No matter how submissive, obedient, and accommodating we are, they won't love us more for behaving as expected of us, nor will they treat us better. On the contrary, our masochism exacerbates the sadism of those who know they hold power.

Our victim status will never provide us with the eternal love we were promised. It doesn't matter how much we suffer, how much we endure, or how much effort we put into saving the poor man who doesn't know how to love. Truly, sisters, there is no reward, no prize, and no paradise.

Alcoholics are not saved by love, gamblers, drug addicts, and violent men do not become good men through love. Each person must come out of their own hell if they want to and if they invest energy into their personal work, but no one can pull someone out of depression, their childhood traumas, their accumulated hatred, their pettiness, and misery.

There is no paradise in exchange for suffering and hardship: life slips away as we wait for the romantic miracle that never arrives. Penelope waited for Odysseus for 30 years, Sleeping Beauty waited for her Prince for a hundred years, and thus all the women of warriors and princes spend their lives, waiting for him to return, or for him to change, or for a miracle to lead us to the romantic paradise we deserve.

In all the stories, women wait and endure, but in reality, very few actually enjoy happy endings where the man redeems himself from his sins, stops being emotionally wounded, or solves his problems to make his princess happy. And usually, the price we pay for enduring is too high: suffering leaves a mark on our bodies, our brains, and our hearts, it deteriorates our mental and emotional health, makes us look unattractive, and ages us.

We cannot afford to waste our short existence waiting for the situation to change or for the other person to change. We can only change ourselves. We cannot squander our energy trying to save our loved one from their problems: we need partners by our side who know how to care for and love us properly, who can give their best in the relationship, who are generous and supportive, who know how to share and be there for us in both good and bad times.

Let's demystify love so that we can love with our feet on the ground, so we can love each other without hurting ourselves, and to avoid abusive and exploitative relationships, so that no one can take advantage of our need to be loved.

We need to be realistic and love in the present, here and now, without being complacent, without victimizing ourselves, without believing that our love will change them in the future. The only time to enjoy love is in the present, so let's forget about rewards: paradise is on Earth, and in the good moments you can experience with people who know how to love you properly.

Coral Herrera Gómez

Artículo original:  No hay recompensa por sufrir por amor

 

Publicado el

Among us: empathy, camaraderie and sisterhood

 

If you've never knelt before a man, if you've never suffered from partner violence, if you've never had to serve a man and work for him for free, if you're proud of yourself because you don't depend on a man economically or emotionally, it's normal that you find it difficult to understand why so many women in the world are suffering exploitation and violence from their partners.

But surely you can work on empathy within yourself to try to understand that the victims are not to blame, and that there are women who have been raised to be addicted to romanticism and to spend their lives taking care of a man, enduring, tolerating, and sacrificing themselves for him.

Romantic love is a trap for many women because the whole system is geared towards making us believe that happiness lies in marriage and family, even though the statistics on gender-based violence, violence against children, violence against the elderly, and violence against pets within the "happy family" context tell us the opposite.

Home is the most dangerous place for women, and for millions of them, escape is impossible. The more children they have, the poorer they are, the more trapped they become.

But there are also free and economically independent women who are imprisoned by love, and they could get out of it, but they don't. It's because we've been made to believe that suffering for love is rewarded, and they have to realize that it's a lie. That suffering has no reward and is not worth it. And that takes time.

Why is it so hard to leave? Because we have the myth ingrained in us, and love is a very powerful and addictive drug.

Not all women are clear that we haven't come to this world to suffer, not all know they have the right to a Good Life, not all have the tools to take care of themselves and to defend their freedom and human rights. Not all women have feminist women nearby to help them open their eyes.

So please, show some empathy if you've already opened yours. It doesn't help to talk about women who suffer for love from a position of superiority: each one needs her own time to escape the hell. From the outside, it's easy to judge and say, "I would never allow a man to treat me badly." But from the inside, many can't leave even if they want to. Some have resources and a support network, others are alone and don't even know that the emotional, sexual, and domestic abuse and exploitation they suffer is gender-based violence.

Some manage to free themselves, others never do, and others lose their lives along the way, murdered at the hands of their abuser. It's not a personal problem that everyone has to solve on their own, it's a social and political problem, it's a collective issue, and it's a matter for everyone. What we need to do is help and care for each other, and create networks of mutual support.

If you have already liberated yourself, or if you've never been in the prison of love, be supportive and help others remove the blindfold, open their eyes, and escape the cage.

We are making a revolution and we need cooperation and teamwork; on the path to liberation, we must all go together.

Coral Herrera Gómez

Original en Español:

Entre nosotras: empatía, sororidad y compañerismo