Book Review: Just a Girl: Growing Up Female and Ambitious by Lucinda Jackson
It’s the culture, stupid; and that must change with all the other causal elements so women and men can live and work together in peace and harmony as whole persons. Lucinda Jackson, in authentic first person testimony, recounts the sexual attacks on her from bosses and other high ranking professionals—one after another after another after another, throughout her whole life going back into her 1950s childhood. It wasn’t fun, and it wasn’t pleasurable. It involved sex but it wasn’t about sex—it was about raw power, bullying from a conscious or unconscious need in the aggressor to dominate and intimidate.
The author pulls back the curtain on what women and men have kept conveniently tucked out of sight for decades. The public has gotten a glimpse of it in the confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh, as well as the #MeToo movement—but this book documents the pervasiveness of this deceptive toxin throughout all corners of society, and its psyche.
Humanity (with notable exceptions such as Bhutan) has had a paternalistic structure for millennia. Only until relatively recently, accounts of events from international to personal were mostly written by men. Even writings followed today for spiritual guidance, such as the Torah, New Testament, and Koran, predominantly contain narratives with a male perspective. It is reasonable to expect that all of these foundational sources of wisdom would be more beneficial by orders of magnitude were they to have an equal mix of female and male perspective—even more so in other aspects of our contemporary life.
The pace and nature of Evolution has been invoked as a reason why we humans are not going to change in our basic nature within our lifetime. But the empirical example of Bhutan demonstrates that it’s not our inherent nature that’s the problem. Spirituality and seeking spiritual development is not the problem. It’s our culture, and the hardness of our hearts that it imposes, that is the problem.
Economic security and physical safety cannot be ignored as critical elements in the recipe to make us whole. The culture of competition, and the abuse it inspires, feeds on the lack of this security and safety. The gnawing taunt that women are taking “my job” that men internally hear must be neutralized and buried if any progress is to be made. What is one’s identity? If it’s your profession alone, you have been robbed of your very self. The human in all of us must be affirmed, respected, and nurtured.
Everyone is soaked in the established culture, whether you admit it or not. Lucinda Jackson shows the way to wash ourselves of it, and dry out renewed in the clean fresh air of genuine uplifting human interaction.
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