Can Feminists Fall in Love?

A slightly edited version from the Pub:

Wearing bikinis and lingeries may be considered the triumph of feminism. As we glance through the gossip magazines and sexually appealing images in calendars, we should bear in mind that nudity offers substantial female confidence. Instead of regarding their bodies as areas of potential shame, women are finally able to display their physical candour and identities through various styles of bikinis and lingerie, mitigating the tension of the equality between men and women. However equal they may get, feminism is in violation of the fundamental law of seduction, forcing us to give away a vital ingredient of love, namely, romance.

Seduction is an art that is never easy to master. The irony is that it seems easiest to seduce those we are least attracted to instead of the ones we actually like, because the ones we desire elicit in us a sense of inferiority as compared to the perfections we have located in our beloved. What makes seduction difficult is that it lies not in revealing our character as a whole, far from offering a sense of intimacy, it is founded on the display of our finest qualities, because the desirable versions of ourselves are often not ours to summon at will. But how may we carefully administer the correct dosage of our admirable virtues? How can we ever be sure this or that virtue may appeal to our beloved?

The usual solution, and often an effective one, is to be modest. But as long as modesty stems from our crippling sense of inferiority, we often appear to be extremely reserved, and on some occasion, have the need to lie. Hence the experience of seduction is inevitably bound up with that of an actor. It’s because we need to take on a self that is not entirely our own in order to seduce the angelic face we happen to be dining with. All of a sudden, we are stripped of a sense of individuality and reminded of the anthropological wisdom that we are all social animals, that our existence is critically dependent on the others.

But what does it mean to be modest? One common answer often comes from fashion. But it is often an ambiguous one. The traditional view of how to modestly dress aims to unearth the desirable parts of skin textures yet cover some of the most intimate parts to assure masculine blindness until one is, perhaps, granted intimate access to one of the most sensitive and softest tissues among our sensory organs. To be modest is therefore to temper our modern need to be nude. The evolution of fashion, however, suggests there is no proper distinction between nudity and modesty today. What is modest in women's fashion constantly involves with the active participation of a desirable form of nudity. Wearing bikinis and lingerie get on fashion runways as much as those who conform to the traditional dressing code.

Of course, modesty suggests far more than that. Aside from fashion, we may also need to be modest in our manners and behaviours. As for a man, besides a constant need to display his wit and humour, he may need to suppress his usual tendency to swear and engage into conversations regarding pornography and a rather superficial appreciation of feminine physical beauty, and instead be drawn to offer fine knowledge of various types of wine and the like. Whilst for a woman, she may refrain from being far too outspoken, though occasionally may be permitted to ventilate bits and pieces of her intelligence, and suggesting a belief in the openness in sex. How could one be oblivious to the fact that men are highly deluded by the concept of virginity.

The current trend of acclaiming feminine identity through nudity therefore risks harbouring an opposite sentiment that does away the romantic conception of love and inspiring an unfair neglect of the merits of being reserved and modest. Not only it ignores the vital role seduction has to play before embarking on a romantic journey, it also renders love impossible, because many are seduced just because of the absurdly reserved behaviours mentioned. Modesty is the mother of love.

Perhaps it’s time to readjust the values advocated by feminism. The limits of feminism make a case for the impossibility of romantic love and seek to destroy some of the best qualities possessed solely by women. One of the best parts of civilisation lies not in promoting the equality of both sexes, but instead in how to express their inequality in a desirable, democratic way.

W

On Ancestors

In ancient China, it was not uncommon to witness signs of ancestor worship. If it was important in ancient China, it was perhaps because it was believed that people might be able to foster luck by tracing back their ancestral roots. Unfortunately, this tradition can hardly sustain in the modern secular world. It's not just because people no longer entertain the superstition of the blessing of their ancestors, but it's also because all sorts of new technology conspires to kill their ability to be alone and unstimulated, thus lacking the essential patience to study the tablets inscribed with the names of their ancestors.

But, of course, ancestor worship has deeper implications than just mere psychological value. In the west, people, unlike the Chinese, traditionally tend to lack the rigours to embark on the journey of extensive research into the origin of their families and trace them through successions of generations. They are instead drawn to an ancestral memory that is rather myopic, a curiosity that is quenched when they touch on the generation of their grandparents. The remaining work is left for the historians.

Though the people from the west generally exhibit a lack of interest in the origins of their own families, their love of ancestors is beautifully expressed in the modern form of biography. If we pay close attention to any biography, we can hardly pass their first page without a symmetrically constructed family tree. If family tree is essential to understanding the life of a great man, it is because it's interesting to follow a series of births and alliances which lead us to a chosen creature. The study of family tree not only suggests that greatness and genius may be passed on through genetic and cultural heritage of one's family, but it is also studied in the interest of ventilating a fantasy of how the ancestral experience of the recorded subject may mirror our own, so we may escape our financial assaults and the chatter of societies and aspire to greatness.

Whatever motives we may be inspired by studying the Chinese tablets or reading biographies, they wish to harbour within ourselves a distinctive sense of belonging and continuity. Just as our societies are formed by our past to establish their own identities, our need to understand the genesis of our own families is essential to knowing who we are. Biographies and the Chinese tablets offer a vision of a logical, complexly related world, that every generation of our family members must be traced and recorded in order to wage a war against amnesia, thus acquiring a sense of the self. It's because we will be nothing if we don't know who we are. Only through a sense of belonging and continuity, we may fortify our own identities within our souls.

But the majority are bombarded with the idea that not everyone is worthy of a biography. But to record the bits and pieces of ourselves is to foster a memory for our descendants to which their sense of the self is anchored. The creation of our own biographies helps unfold certain versions of themselves which are not theirs to summon at will, which cannot be arrested by mere experience. It is a sobering reminder that we will one day also become ancestors. So what must we do? Create a biography in either literary or visual form and assure a proper environment for our descendants so they may grow out of it without being lost.

W

On Memory

My piece for the Pub:

It's always tempting to lay your eyes on Central in the morning. A trip to the Starbucks coffee may offer us the best scenario for sight-seeing. In any morning on the weekdays, we may be in solemn awe of the landscape of Central being carpeted by a flock of black suits, rushing into Starbucks Coffee so they may rejuvenate themselves for a long day of work. The endorsement of Central values cannot be more obvious. The adoption of the American middle class lifestyle hints at a refusal of local values, which hardly warrants a restaurant of local flavour anything beyond ordinary pedestrian appraisal.

If drinking Starbucks Coffee is a vital ingredient for Central values, it is perhaps because a paper or plastic cup that carries a familiar green logo suggests a vision of more international tone. Rather than straying into a local restaurant for a ham and egg sandwich along with a cup of coffee blended in a style of local flavour, a cup of Starbucks may actually align us with an upper level in the pyramid of social hierarchy. Small wonder why Hong Kong is an international city.

However much Starbucks coffee we may drink, what is interesting is the fact that our desire for a cup of Starbucks stems not from our tendency to cherish work values, but, rather, from our romantic fantasy to centre our values rooted in a traditional American middle class routine. Behind the Starbucks drinking ritual hardly suggests our effort to reconcile the kind of happiness typical of the bourgeois outlook with financial necessity, rendering the surface more superficial than it seems. A sip of Starbucks in the morning may offer solutions for our fallible souls, for it carries the correct dosage of our missing virtues that are only deemed discoverable in the West.

This is, perhaps, precisely the reason why such scenario provokes a feeling of distance. But everywhere is like this in Hong Kong nowadays. While many may acknowledge the notion of historical value, but hardly there is anyone who offers sympathy for sentimental value. We may learn how our society and identity are formed by the past and traditions in order to acquire a sense of belonging and community. Our government may venture to do away the Tsim Sha Tsui Bus Stop and deprecate anything of sentimental value, yet too seldom they realise the merits of most buildings in Hong Kong lie not in their historical value, but, rather, sentimental value. Having breakfast at a restaurant of local flavour may not summon back a range of old yet valuable traditions, but the fact that being sat there might invite us to attend to a collection of life-enhancing thoughts in order to acquire a sense of the self.

What originally furnishes our sense of belonging and community is not merely architectural styles that offer aesthetic relief which reminds us of the past, it is also the resemblance of style and taste that triggers our bondage to what we may call a Proustian moment. Promoting ourselves to remember something often leads to an undesirable result. It often requires the charity of a friend's patience for us to utter the bits and pieces that seem to stretch too far to recall at all. True memory is different. It can only be experienced only accidentally and occasionally. Instead of being forced on us by another intrusive question of a friend, our memories might have only been returned to us only by an incidental encounter of a similarly constructed fried rice six years later in a restaurant.

The key to harbour our sense of belonging is whether that particular restaurant or this particular street can grant us access to certain emotional textures that only memory can attend us to. The problem of Hong Kong is that the landscape and what constitutes its soul fluctuate too much. Only through memory, our origin of birth may not be muddied up to a point where soul-searching is impossible.

Both physical and metal landscape of Hong Kong fails to recover a distinctive sense of community, belonging, and continuity. It deprives us of an essential medium to express our need for communication and commemoration, an attachment which can only be registered through memory, which only our will can transubstantiate through a material medium. Not until too long, we may no longer be able to tell others who we actually are nor we can remind ourselves of it.

W

The Herd Instinct Revisited

Here's my piece for the Pub:


The criticisms of the herd instinct might appear so common that they start to sound rather cliche nowadays. Though we are often reminded how it may strip us of our true identities, we still tend to be reluctant to detach ourselves from the bondage to the masses and establish our "i-confirmation". If the mass values are cordoned off questions, it is because they are deemed too implausible to be the targets of scrutiny. To start doubting the commonly accepted beliefs is to risk overthrowing the indisputable fact that great minds are scarce, that we are unlikely to be the pioneers of previously unknown truths.

Perhaps our tendency to follow the flock lies in the anthropological fact that we are all social animals. Rather than exaggerating the gravity of free will, our existence is actually critically dependent upon the existence of others. We can only be intelligent if others possess the same level of reasoning abilities. We can only be humorous if others are funny enough to get our humours. Small wonder why Aristotle remarked that friendship is essential to wellbeing.

However, humans are no machines. How seldom we may prefer to be obedient drones rather than creative originals. But how then might we solve the conflicts between the herd instinct and individuality? How might we discover our own identities if we are continuously forced to burden ourselves with the heaviness of inhabiting the same mentality? Is it impossible to reconcile mass values with our unique selves?

Mass values, at one level, might be easily regarded as deluded versions of truth, yet at another level they reveal something more than meets the eye. Mass values may be considered in the same light as fashion or wearing make-up. The quest to search for a decent pair of high heel shoes or a certain kind of mascara from Bobbi Brown provokes our philosophical sentiment to understand who we are. If we have a desire to understand ourselves, it is perhaps because identity is an inherently complicated, obscure notion, that one can bear various identities in different stages of life. Why do we have different identities? It's because we constantly succumb to new experience and are forced to harbour new visions about ourselves. Confused, we are therefore liable to adopt the suggestions forcefully made in the clothes and cosmetic section of a magazine to fit in a socially recognisable form. Similarly, the herd instinct works in the same mechanism. Unsure who we are, we need to surrender to the masses and begin our process of soul-searching.

Though I might have been charitable to the herd instinct, we should not deduce from my previous line of argument that the accusation against the flock is largely undeserved. To acknowledge the merits of the masses is not to legitimately consign them to respectability. Whatever sympathy we may have for the masses, it seems far from being inaccurate to generalise the herd between two acerbic notions commonly associated with them, namely, stupidity and ignorance. If stupidity and ignorance are the hallmark of social eminence, how might we tender the mass values as something valuable to justify the lifelong search for our souls?

The solution perhaps lies not in struggling to break free from the herd, but rather, in educating the masses. Much of the criticism has been focused on the individual self, but hardly there's any criticism focusing on the masses as a whole. What is valuable in educating the masses is that there are values perhaps the entire human race should hold dear to: democracy, science, emotional sensibilities etc. However democratic we may get, even in the most democratic society, there are never enough democratic participations, most notably, voting. To refuse to vote is to refuse to participate in the promotion of common wellbeing. Who could disagree freedom is desirable? Who could disagree science is the most reliable agent to civilisation? Perhaps only the exceptional few seem to suggest the otherwise.

The herd instinct might not muddy our identities as it tends to suggest. But the major criticisms against the flock push us into a baneful direction where we might hardly progress. What's important is the education of the masses instead of the other way round. How many years before the mass values might actually become praiseworthy?

W

On Love At First Sight

A slightly edition version from the Pub:


Whatever consumerist ethics might be vigorously practised by modern women, they seem far from being able to escape from the customary female logic- that we should never fall for logical factors such as money and physical appearance. The whole language of love has been corrupted by the sound assumption that our falling in love is based upon a mixture of ignorance and desire, rendering us liable to make false additions to an already muddied notion of self. If we should never fall for first glance, it is perhaps because the reality is always in the habit of disappointing us. A partner with an angelic face who supposedly possesses the ability to read Oscar Wilde's works may end up pinning her interests firmly on an issue of Cosmopolitan and a Hermes handbag.

Hence, in the mature account of love, before we are granted legitimately the right to fall in love, we are apt to investigate in depth about what opinions our partners may hold regarding science, politics, morality, and even daily habits. Instead of strictly following the traditional concept of how two sexes might align together, which is that of money and social status, we should look for in our partners logically irreducible elements: intelligence, emotional sensitivity, talents in the arts and crafts etc. In short, the cliché concept of "inner beauty". How easy a natural archaic impulse might be transformed into an artificially designed empirical notion.

If maturity indicates the quality of truth, then we might be forcefully led to abandon the inherently presumed distinctive differences between men and women, for men are liable to surrender to a superficial romantic logic easily triggered by the invitations of the appreciation body forms, make-up, fashion, and facial symmetry. We are forced to re-evaluate the politically incorrect gender stereotypes: in the mature account of love, women paradoxically analyse their romantic experience according to reason, while men submit their thinking to intuition, emotions, and impulsive desire. Why is it paradoxical? It's because when dealing with other issues in life, these two sexes tend to be consigned to exactly opposite categories. The feminists might have been in the right.

However, our instinctive curiosity to understand who our partners are poses a threatening problem. If the mature account of love is threatening, it is because understanding too much destroys romantic fantasy. Perhaps the easiest people to fall in love are those whom we know nothing. Our attraction for our beloved ones stems not from our constant intimacy with them, but rather, our lack of understanding of them. People who bear angelic faces tend to be able to carefully administer doses of illusion and reality, that faces happen to be aesthetically constructed in Golden ratio should be able to collect evidence which indicates signs of intelligence, femininity, and innocence around the eyes, noses, and mouths, an utopian image that could only be destroyed when they pick their noses aggressively without a handkerchief and display an excessive interest in the prices of high heel shoes. How seldom we acknowledge the inherent normality in our loved ones; how easy we might slide into a romantic pathology when love reveals its insanity.

Moreover, the modern world, with the help of technology, is changing with an incalculable speed. Our lives are filled with various experiences which are deemed too implausible to be identical with others. Is it sane to think what constitutes our partners' souls will remain the same? Is it sensible to secure our love of regularity for those who operate within the same mortal coil? If our desires and opinions are susceptible to change as time varies, why, then, can't we expect the same from our partners? The same burden no longer inhabits the same soul. Most of us are in fact not aware of our blind submission to Platonic utopia where eternity is praiseworthy and change is despised.

Therefore, the art of securing a romantic conception of love lies in an understanding absenteeism- a conception that is only possible when we don't know who our romantic partners are, but rather, who we think they are. So should we fall in love at first sight? Yes, always fall for first glance. Love without its romantic elements ceases to be love. Apart from the exceptionally rare cases in the romantic history, most depressing endings of romantic affairs are likely to result from the ones rooted in friendship and the like. It's only the romantic experience that we are after.

W

How To Take Your Time Through Public Transport

Back in the days before capitalism has become a legitimate economic philosophy, many valued a person for who he was rather than what he had. Capitalism, however, reconfigures the evaluation process and lends the idea of success to physical possession rather than its spiritual equivalent. Owning a Mercedes is therefore an indication of the quality of life. How easy one's ethical integrity might be determined by one's physical properties.

Though taking public transport might have violated our social hierarchical identity, though it might suggest something contrary to the Protestant virtue of hard work, to favour private cars instead of public transport is to risk inspiring an unfair neglect of values that might have only been arisen from, say, taking buses and a misguided enthusiasm for values that are often assumed by owning a car. The former, a sense of silent immobility and novelty, and the latter, a sense of freedom and solitude.

If public transport is often regarded as inferior to a Porsche, it is perhaps because it is likely to inspire monotony, having to stay fixated on a same routine every single day. Riding on a bus also suggests that the notion of who we are is critically dependent on others, that our existence is of no value unless the passengers who sit next to us or behind us accord us with signs of respect. Moreover, having neighbours sitting next to us also hampers us to move our joints and limbs freely, thus bringing physical discomfort, that our decisions to articulate our bodies are actually determined by the external rather than the internal.

Driving alone, on the contrary, avoids rehearsing the same driving routine. It offers opportunities to escape from the everyday rituals, especially the traffic, and conspires to rejuvenate us with a sense of novelty. Driving also seems to restore the value of solitude. Rather than going along with the value that a densely populated city might tend to suggest, driving celebrates the virtue of being alone and acknowledges the prided status of individual, making allowance for meditation, and liberating us from the flock, for the herd mentality may unfairly consign us to disgrace and others to respectability.

However, to condemn taking public transport is to fail to place it in a proper context as to what it may offer in life. If public transport has to be given its due place in our monotonous lives, it is because it might prompt us to think far more easily than clinging ourselves to our computer desks in office or in our rooms. Though we tend to pass by the same sceneries in a bus, we are likely to be assisted by the flow of the landscape, which is susceptible to change, inspiring us with a sense of novelty rather than monotony. We are also forced to investigate human behaviours which we often easily ignore- the lady who is dying to get on a bus, the man who is rushing to the metro railway station, and the man who is exchanging business ideas on his mobile phone. The sense of novelty, therefore, lies in the diversity of human behaviours and the flexible exterior decor and the advertisements of shops, which help anchor new reflections to life.

Of all modes of transport, buses are perhaps the best aid to thought. They lack the monotony that planes and metro railway are likely to inspire, the unbearable quickness that a taxi might ferry us to the destination, and the slowness that a tram is insistent to offer. If riding on a bus nurtures our ability to think, it's not just because we are confronted with a scene of novelty, but it's also because we are reluctant to think properly when thinking is what we are supposed to do, just like we are forced to write a publishable essay on demand. Riding on a bus allows us to abstract all the headphones snares and the talking that surround us, through taking in the passing scenery, offers us a sense of silent immobility to observe the seemingly silent mobility of the external world. It retains a peace of mind in us which is essential to contemplation.

If we are inclined to forget the benefits of taking public transport, it might be because driving our own cars subjugates us with the illusion to recover a sense of freedom. Instead of leaving room for us for introspective reflections, driving tends to divert our attention to the roads, for the fear of car accidents or our absent-mindedness for the traffic lights, forcing us to focus on our self-preservation instinct rather than bringing us back into contact with ideas and emotions that are of importance to us. It can only foster a form of rather unwelcome solitude, namely, loneliness, which only wears us out with an excessive longing for love.

Hence our travelling to work correlates with our desire to travel. What is beneficial about travel is that it allows us to get away from the habitual and the tedium, and encourages us, through the unpredictable changes around us, to unearth the visions about ourselves that previously lay buried in our hearts. If public transport is able to inspire us through the moving sceneries, can we not conclude that our travelling to work or school follows a similar trajectory? If we travel because we need not only a break from our domestic setting, but also from ourselves, doesn't riding on a bus similarly allow us to reflect on our lives from a height we are unlikely to reach unless before and after work?

Public transport can also be a remedy for loneliness. It recovers a sense of community, that though we may be lonely, we are consoled by the fact that we are not alone in loneliness, that many are similarly lost in thoughts and emotions. It brings us back a tight city feel, as opposed to a feeling of soullessness, reminding us of the fact that a city should be dynamic and needlessly be condemned to silence. Humans are still at heart social animals whose existence is critically dependent on the external world.

Travel is not necessarily a luxury. Though we may not be able to afford a trip to Europe or Japan, we can certainly afford a few dollars to start our journey on a bus to appease our yearnings for change.

W

Parental "Love" and Friendship

Here is the piece I wrote for the Pub:

If Chinese folk wisdom assures us that we should listen to our parents, it is perhaps because life experience is the anchor of the wisdom of life. Friendship is undoubtedly very important in childhood. It not only allows children to harbour a sense of friendliness and mutual equality, but it also tends to display versions of ourselves which we adults who are driven by financial necessity long to side with but can't, rendering cynicism unfavourable. Out of all parents from around the world, the Chinese parents are perhaps the best role models in this aspect.

Back in childhood, our parents clearly understood the importance of friendship. Rather than letting us select our friends based solely on our subjective criterion of what is favourable, our friends were often subject to the rigours of rational examination of who they really were. This exquisite enquiry heavily involved with a spirit of philosophical research, an endeavour to acquire a thorough understanding of the genesis of our friends, and most of the time, even their families. Our parents forcefully reminded us of the darker side of human nature, that things in the reality tended not to operate as what we used to read in those fairy tales. Therefore, a range of historical questions (that might trace far back to the time of their forebears) were necessarily provoked before we could legitimately open our intimate selves up: "Where do you come from?", "What do your parents work?", "Where do you live?", "What are your hobbies and interests?" and the like. How easily our autobiographical longing might find its outlet for the most genuine expression.

This tradition has been passed on down to this day. Behind the love of parents lies the art of how to select friends properly, inviting modern children to form a new coil of thought to reflect on what an ideal friend should be like: material success rather than its spiritual equivalent. Whenever they hit on a difficult problem in friendship, they are likely to be assisted by the possibility of turning to their parents, who offer them advice after they investigate the matter into the depth of waters, until the children can unravel their confusions without pressure.

Hence status and wealth are the promise of a good character which must necessarily nurture an ideal friendship. The young have been taught to value a friend for what they possess rather than who they are. It induces them to marvel at the belief that status and wealth can actually clear out the rough edges that one's character originally clings to, that people who come from such background are perhaps the best aids to bring them back into contact with emotions and ideas that are of supreme importance to them.

Moreover, Chinese parents also invite the young to harbour a feeling of suspicion at heart after they meet new friends. It's not just because they are too young to acquire the ability to separate illusions from the reality, but it's also because the Chinese tend to be critically cynical of the inherently good nature of the human species. Whenever their children meet new friends, they are likely to generate assumptions that throw their children on the negative versions of human nature, forcing them to suspect the unusually superficial friendliness displayed by their newly acquired companions.

Having analysed the Chinese parental approach to friendship, can we not conclude that parental "love" has enormous impact on how the young might deal with the one of the most complex elements of life called "friendship", that it actually helps shape the character necessary for the path children have to embark on in this commercial world? The French essayist Michel de Montaigne once remarked that "each friend has to give himself so entirely that he has nothing left for others." Chinese children are deprived of the chance to live according to this maxim. Small wonder why many Chinese don't want to be Chinese.

W