So, I had my first mentoring session with Susan today. Not sure I liked it much. It had the effect of taking away most of my comforts.
Her big message today was not to get sucked in by all the messages in sitcoms, on social media, on the TV news and in the opinion pieces in the weekend newspapers with their selective statistics demonstrating that I’m being discriminated against, as that gives me the perfect excuse for not achieving. Her opinion is that these do-gooders are doing a lot of harm by turning gullible people (I hope she wasn’t referring to me) into victims.
According to Susan, unfair things happen to men as well (I’d never thought about that, don’t like to really), but, as men aren’t brought up in a culture that swamps them with messages that they’re hard done by, they tend to forget it and get on with things, rather than letting the unfair event disable them and committing the injustice to memory for recollection some years hence as yet another anecdote about ways men are discriminated against.
According to Susan, all of these messages are counter-productive to my advancement and happiness in the workplace and elsewhere. She claims men couldn’t disable women half as effectively as what some women are doing to the rest of us, even if they wanted to, and why would they anyway? She told me that for the next week I was to take note of the countless ways that our culture harms me by providing me with plausible excuses to fail.
I’m not too sure about this. It seems to make me responsible for what happens to me. What an uneasy feeling I was left with at the end of the session.
On the other hand, I did like the idea that the rest of my life could be largely determined by my own actions rather than by what gender I happened to be saddled with at the millisecond of conception. I really think that a lot more time should be allowed for such an important decision, and that the about-to-be-conceived individual (their unassigned soul?) should get some say in it. Just because someone is a fast swimmer doesn’t mean he or she has other desirable qualities. I will refrain from giving the obvious examples.