THE WAYS THINGS ARE

I’ve known a man for years, in great shape, great life, his own home, children settled, housed, grandchildren highly educated, he sailed through life. Yet he rattles on about how hard life is on him. He always pours a slosh of imagined misery on me when we run into each other, until one day I told him, ‘Get a hobby and take your mind off yourself. You’ve nothing to complain about.’

Some don’t know they are alive; others don’t want to be dead. The mega-rich, with the help of money-flooded AI tech and advanced science, are searching for youthful immortality. There’s talk of implanting brains into machines until solutions evolve. What if solutions entail scary movie content about old brains being implanted into freshly dead, young bodies, no questions asked about how the person died? Beats illegal organ selling by a light year.

Does any sane person want to be stuck in the skull of a robot or some other tech container in the hope of solutions? The ability to enjoy a drink, nice food, sex, shared love, is gone when touch or taste is removed. Emotions find responses in our living bodies, metal, wires or chips can’t replicate.

Then there’s Avatar-digital immortality, allowing the ability to chat with a holographic dead loved one, its persona created from general information given by the bereaved. Could it cause problems with AI-contrived answers? Not all AI feedback is perfect. ‘Did you ever cheat, darling?’ ‘Yes, dear.’ Whoops!

Being feminine was once considered a complimentary term used by some men who liked to keep women in dolly roles approved by them. Strong women kicked against the typecasting and wrote their own scripts. Feminism became what the individual wanted it to be.

Recently, there has been a swing-back to the notion of the bully male once more wanting to put women into their ideal. Women will still rebel and suffer physical and mental abuse for it.

However, when other women impose notions of what the body-perfect sexual woman should be on other women, it depletes the receiver’s own sense of worth, as with toxic men, making them feel less of themselves. The Kardashian plastic doll family have been in the news again thanks to Kim’s much hyped false public hair thongs.

Why are these women so adored by other women who slavishly follow their vacuous examples supposedly exemplifying the perfection of femininity? Everyone knows that what they look like is not how they would appear if they hadn’t the wealth to keep themselves ‘perfect’. The Kim thongs, The Ultimate Bush, sold out. Did the women who bought them do so to give the men in their sex lives a laugh, or did some buy because the ‘bushy carpets’ made them feel their own pubic growth was inadequate?

Unquestioningly following influencers should make a woman stop and think, where is my own sense of self? Am I a robotic body that willingly allows someone else to use my lack of confidence for their own selfish profit? Whatever your opinion of Kardashian, she is smart in business or has great advisers, a money-magnet. She, like others, insists on keeping her ‘maiden name’.

I add mine to my husband’s, not to shout ‘This is me!’, but to remind, we Irish have our own language. For some women it implies feminine assertion: ‘I want my mother’s name.’ But we usually get surnames from our fathers, our mothers got theirs from their fathers. Why not pick a female name by deed to call yourself if you feel strongly? Mary Marian, Helen Hellenford, Linda Lindringham, claim your own female name.

We are all imperfect; we never are what we want to be physically, that’s life. Find what makes you special, work on that. See false images for what they are, and belong to yourself, there’s no one else like you, why become a manufactured clone.