Sweet Little Lies

As a facet of my enduring fascination (my family calls it obsession) with martial arts, I tend to do a lot of associated reading, in which ninjitsu and ninja are recurrent terms. But what are ninjas doing in books on martial skills?

Ninjas were, according to Western imagination, the ultimate warriors. They could be invisible, they had superhuman skill and strength... but the truth is, they were spies and assassins. They weren't warriors at all, necessarily. As much as we like spy movies and the James Bond franchise, we still don't much like the idea of spying. It goes against the grain to admit the need for duplicity, for betrayal as a given. And yet, we all do just that. We all lie – whether in shades of white or grey or black. Whatever the lie or the motives for it, it's still an untruth. And it's essential to nature, to life itself.

After all, what is a predator's camouflage if not a lie? The natural world, the animal and plant kingdoms are stuffed to the brim of little lies to promote the longevity of the individual and the species.

So maybe we should admit and even embrace the fact that honesty can be overrated, and the mouse's strategy of lying his way out of trouble in 'The Gruffalo' is a valid one.

Nothing Left To Lose

Freedom, if Kris Kristofferson is to be believed, is another word for having nothing left to lose. He’s not the only one to think so – the idea of not having roots in order to spreads your wings, of not having ties in order to be more reactive, more flexible – these are not new or even radical concepts. We stymie ourselves by giving ourselves things and people and commitments to worry about, to consider before we can choose a course of action.

This is why warrior caste societies went to very sophisticated lengths to avoid tying their warriors down with possessions while at the same time, giving them a sufficient stake in the society to want to fight for it. The entire Spartan world was set up around this idea.

Hollywood loves it – take away the hero’s love or family and watch him tear the world apart to get it back, or get revenge. He can be as spectacularly reckless as you have the budget for because he has already lost what he values most. He has nothing left to lose, and therefore the ultimate freedom to act.

The unemcumbered life is hard to pull off, in the modern world. We’re social creatures, we tend to nest, to put down roots and forge ties to people and places. Technology makes it increasingly possible to take these roots with us – the Cloud, portable hard drives, e-readers and iPods allow us to take our movies, music, libraries with us very easily.

Yes, that’s semantics: these are still things we have, however compact their form, and if we have them, we have them to lose. The question is how much it’ll cost us to lose them. You only have it to lose if its loss will matter.

Girls and boys

I recently spent an afternoon with my niece and 2 of her friends. Over supper, they were playing a game of a show of hands for likes and dislikes, and it occurred to me, listening in, that girls learn duplicity early on. I don’t know whether it’s innate, or if we teach them this, but even at age 7, they’re asking loaded questions, like “hands in the middle if you don’t like me” amid more innocuous ones about liking ice-cream and disliking tomatoes.

I don’t recall my brothers, my cousins or any of my male charges being this aware of the popularity stakes at that age. But I do remember being acutely aware, at that age, of who was popular and who was not within my own class – and that the girls in general were far more aware of social hierarchy than the boys.

It’s a worrying beginning of a lifelong trend – girls tend to be clique-y, tend to use gossip, trends and appearance as social litmus tests to assign each other into the relevant category and relate to them accordingly. Our social definitions of women – good girls, bad girls, tomboys, brainiacs, domestic goddesses – don’t allow for a lot of leeway, honesty or mercy. And girls learn early on that the best way for them to operate is to be ruthless and duplicitous and underhand. Unfortunately. 

What Little Girls Are Made Of

I saw an article in the Huffington Post about girls and our obsession with their appearance: the standard ice-breaker is a compliment on how pretty, how cute, how adorable.

The trouble is, however harmless a boost to their fragile little egos it may be to tell them they’re beautiful, the side-effect is that they grow up thinking their looks are what matters most.

Every year, the make-up threshold gets younger, eating disorders and cosmetic procedures go up while the age of patients goes down. Even the books marketed to little girls reinforce this: stories like Purplicious, which is about how girls’ clothing choices define their identities and social status. This may be the way our world works, but that doesn’t make it the way it should work.

When more young women aspire to win a reality show than a Nobel prize, and even academically and professionally successful women would prefer to be considered hot than intelligent, we have a problem.

When primary school girls openly aspire to be glamour models and exotic dancers in order to get boys more easily, we have a problem.

When the automatic opener to a conversation with a girl is to compliment her appearance, especially with a generic compliment, we have a problem. Sure, it’s a safe opener, but if you must go down that road, if you truly can’t think of anything else, surely it’s just as easy to pick a detail that reflects on her choices (where did that bracelet come from? What was it about those tribal earrings that took her fancy?) and might open new topics that respect her mind, her personality, not the accident of genetics that makes up her appearance.