Unruly Women Have More Fun
Transcriber: Federica Bruno
Reviewer: Amanda Zhu
Do you know why blonde jokes are so short?
Because, then, men
can understand them, too.
Studies show that blondes
actually do have more fun,
but I know another group of women
who have even more fun
and who don’t need to tell bad jokes
or put men down to have a blast.
And these are the unruly women.
(Cheers)
They are about having fun
but also about taking responsibility.
For more than 25 years,
I have studied gender issues
as a cultural sociologist,
and it is clear to me
that the unruly women
are part of the answer
in creating a better, balanced world,
(Audience) Yes.
a world that we desperately need.
You already know
that the environmental balance
is proven to be out of order,
but statistics show us
that our mental well-being
also is out of order.
Fifty percent of the population
suffer from stress on different levels,
Twenty to thirty percent
suffer from anxiety,
and the same numbers go for loneliness,
Twenty percent suffer from depression.
And all of these numbers
were already increasing
before covid-19 hit us,
and especially
within the young generation.
This has cost our society tons of money
and massive loss of life joy,
and has deprived the young generation
a better future than their parents’.
So instead of having created a world
where humans can thrive,
we have constructed a society
for human machines.
On the surface, it might seem
hugely effective,
but it stands on the broken backs
and hearts of people.
So obviously our system isn’t working,
and that is why we need a new superhero:
the unruly woman.
(Audience) Yes.
Who is she?
An unruly woman has freed herself
from the restraining and suppressing
expectations to her female existence;
in other words, her gender.
Instead, she follows what makes her happy
and gives her an emancipating power
to co-create a better, balanced society.
So an unruly woman both changes the world
and has fun at the same time.
Hallelujah!
While I was preparing this talk,
a memory came to me.
As a child, I often felt like an outsider.
And when time came and the other girls
started to grow breasts and kiss the boys,
I still looked like
I had just left kindergarten.
So now I also looked like an outsider.
One day, we had a party
at my friend’s home,
and we were all dancing together,
having a good time.
And then I had to go to the toilet.
When I came back, all of the others
were kissing, two and two,
and I just froze in the doorway
and didn’t know what to do with myself,
so I escaped to the garden.
First, I didn’t understand
why I remembered this story,
but then I recalled
how the rain broke loose
and how I first felt even more singled-out
and pitied myself.
But just at that moment,
I turned my face towards the raindrops
and connected to the liberating power
of this beautiful, tender summer rain.
And I spread out my arms
and started laughing and dancing,
getting completely soaked.
For me, this has become
the image of unruliness:
a laughing, dancing girl in the rain.
So what does it mean to be unruled?
What do you think
when you hear the word “unruly”?
Free?
Wild?
Rebel?
Tiresome?
Uncontrolled?
Teenager?
For me, being ruled is being governed
by society’s existing norms,
values and expectations,
many of which have suppressed
women for centuries,
leaving us with the unbalanced
society of today.
Being unruled is to reject
these expectations
from society, culture, and history
if they conflict with
your own beliefs and talents.
Instead, you let yourself be ruled
by your own heart’s desire.
This does not make you egoistic,
unsympathetic or anti-social.
On the contrary,
an unruly woman knows that when you,
when she takes care of herself,
she has much more to offer the society,
plus she has the strength
to support others.
In the words of Nobel Prize winning author
André Gide,
“Loving yourself isn’t vanity;
it’s sanity.”
This unruly position
also sets you free to experience fun.
When you can follow the things and persons
in life that makes you happy,
you create an overflow of joy
that you can share with others.
For centuries, though, women have not had
that much to laugh about,
because we have been ruled
under three different areas on life
that are most important -
our beauty, our sexuality,
and our sociality.
And it is time now that we take back
the ownership of these three areas,
and that is exactly
what an unruly woman does:
she owns her own beauty,
sexuality, and sociality.
But what does that, in fact, mean?
Beauty is typically
about appearance and aesthetics
and about being pretty
and living up to some fixed standards,
but unruly beauty is not about that.
I will give you a beacon of unruly beauty:
Oprah Winfrey.
(Audience) Yeah.
Why her?
It is not because of her struggle
with her weight,
which she has been very open about.
It is because she has had the courage
to talk about issues
that have interested especially women
in a way that has made her
one of the most influential persons
in 25 years,
according to the CNBC.
And she is ranking higher
than Mark Zuckerberg on that list.
When you own yourself, when you own
your own beauty like Oprah does,
you give yourself the right
to appear as you want,
to take your space as you want,
and so you can contribute
with what you think is important,
and so you change the world.
The challenge is that women
have always been connected
to the traditional
understanding of beauty.
And the explanation for that
is that in nature beauty equals health
and, ultimately, fertility.
So in order for our species to survive,
men have, logically enough,
hunted beautiful women,
giving them the highest status.
Is that still true in 2021?
Oh, yeah.
Well, it is.
(Laughs)
It is because we’re still nature,
and no, because we are also culture.
Nature is not the problem.
Nature is just sex.
Culture is the problem.
Because we still see 12-year-old girls
featuring on the cover
of fashion magazines
all dressed up with makeup and high heels
as if that is what every girl
should strive for.
And we still have
too many young girls hurting,
cutting, starving themselves
because they loathe how they look like
and cannot acknowledge
their right to shine and thrive
regardless of their physical appearance.
If we want a better, balanced society,
we need to change the cultural
understanding of beauty.
Change it into one
that centers around the joy
of appearing as we want
and taking your own space as we want.
So what about you guys?
(Laughter)
Do you dare to shine and take your space?
Do you want to own your own beauty?
(Audience) Yes.
Good.
In your hand, you might have a cell phone
or maybe you have a computer
in front of you,
and the reason why it works
as a communication device
is because of Hedy Lamarr,
and Hedy Lamarr is a perfect image
of unruly sexuality.
Who was Hedy Lamarr?
She was a beautiful
Austrian Hollywood actress
and a brilliant scientist,
who was, sadly enough,
never fully acknowledged for her invention
of the technology behind Wi-Fi,
GPS and Bluetooth.
Sexuality is normally about lust
and sex and orgasms.
However, among psychologists,
it is common knowledge that our sexuality
is the creative life force,
is simply the center
of the creative life force.
Creativity is what has developed
our civilization.
And if we want a better balanced society,
we need more diversity as we create
and shape the world of tomorrow.
And that is why we need
more unruly women
to invent more, create more,
contribute more
so that our solutions
and services and products
have a much wider range than today.
(Audience) Yes, yes.
How can we do that?
By eliminating the fifth
most used lie amongst women,
which is I have only slept with five men.
(Laughter)
This I found out some years ago
when I made a small study
about women’s lives,
and the interesting question is,
of course,
why do we lie our number down?
The reason is that apparently women
are not to be horny and willing
when following their own lust
if they want to be socially respected.
So instead of experiencing
the enhancing power
of feeling loved and alive
and energetic and creative
when pursuing their own desire,
we shut it down and make it wrong.
But if we want a world with new solutions
to existing and future problems,
we need more unruly women
to own their own sexuality and creativity.
(Audience) Yeah.
What about you?
Do you dare to feel your own lust
and create on your own terms?
Do you want to own your own sexuality?
(Audience) Oh, yes.
Great.
(Laughter)
In 2012,
Jyoti Singh was beaten, gang raped,
and tortured in a bus in Delhi
and died 13 days later from her injuries.
Two years later, Ram Devineni
published a popular comic book
about the superhero Priya,
who survived a brutal gang rape
and since became a protector
of women and survivors.
Her superpower is simply
the power of persuasion,
which can motivate people
to make changes voluntarily.
Priya is a liberating image
of unruly sociality.
Sociality is not only
about taking care of others
and creating good relations
and a sound social community.
Sociality is also about letting yourself
be the person that you want to be.
For ages,
sociality has been a woman thing.
Women are both the biologically
reproductive sex
and the socially reproductive gender.
This means that women
have had the primary responsibility
for stabilizing
the existing social structure,
and we do so in bringing up our babies,
training them to be good citizens.
And if that goes wrong,
the mother is often the one who is blamed.
And that is why we still experience
mothers killing their daughters
in the name of honor
and women stating
that they come after the dog
in the family.
An unruly woman does not find her purpose
in sacrificing herself or her daughter,
and like Priya she does not let herself
be ashamed by a crowd
that doesn’t acknowledge
her right to create her own life.
Instead, she finds a crowd like you guys
that celebrates her as she already is
and who understands
that sociality and good relation
are a mutual thing
and mutual responsibility,
and both are the cornerstones
of a sound social community,
which has been proven
in a number of studies.
I am the mother
of three wonderful young men,
and it is my belief
that we need - as a society -
men to be more unruly, too.
Because they are also, yeah,
they are also caged in
by what masculinity is.
So, why are they not to be valued
for their tenderness, kindness and caring?
And why are tears and vulnerability
still a stigma for males
when in fact feelings
are just clever human nature?
We should all dare to be able
to follow our dreams
and be the person that we like to be.
And what about you?
Do you want to own your own sociality?
(Audience) Yes.
I dream of a society
where nobody is judged
or constrained by their sex
and where the term “gender”
simply does not exist.
Instead, we are human beings
with a different set of skills
and interests and longing
and needs and dreams.
And we come together in the wonderful task
of co-creating a much better, balanced,
and more humane society.
But we are not there yet,
and that is why I will invite you all
to become members
of the unruly women’s club -
(Audience) Yeah.
or better still, actually, to become part
of the unruly people’s movement.
(Applause) (Cheers)
Both to co-create a much better society
and to have more fun.
And if you lack inspiration
to become more unruly,
I have a suggestion.
Next time the rain falls upon you,
start dancing.
Thank you.
(Applause) (Cheers)