And God Created Woman ll (ll Pt lll). A Self Portrait
The Letter Series :: Ascension Discourse on Love :: Post Post Script. Amera Ziganii Rao
Love Update. Amera Ziganii Rao
And just remember this, my sweet, as our new journeys begin. In life we carry a splinter. The splinter is in the face of The Patriarchal Agenda™ - the world that has dominated for only two to six thousand years. Your splinter is that you are essentially a 'Donald Woods'. This is the white South African journalist who supported and helped the anti apartheid Black South African Steve Biko. Of course he couldn’t help when Steve Biko was being beaten to death in a police cell by the foul south African monstrous police, but he was his friend and an influential one at that, to go with Steve Biko’s own phenomenal writings and speaking.
You are essentially the same kind of Divine woman FRIEND that Emmeline Pankhurst’s husband, and George Eliot’s partner were. You are essentially a good man. You are also ‘Agamemnon’ as we know well and truly now. It is that splinter that you work with now, to evolve your true soul being.
Mine for instance in this context is that I thought all human beings were humanitarian and I thought all women were feminist. Well, judgment aside, and as I have now been suitably humbled through living the visceral results of being both, for my whole life, to understand what it takes to be this unusual and this gifted in the strength of spirit and commitment to an egalitarian world, a commitment to MY egalitarian world, to bring the macro into the micro, the splinter was that I wanted to be loved.
The splinter before that was many things, from the ‘Morgana’ template – mis – vilified that she is – to the angry ‘Moses’ to many things, but this last one has been that one holds oneself back, out of fear of not being loved. Well, I don’t think any arena on earth is more painful or terrible than that of female. And of course, I have had to live the whole thing out.
No matter. The alchemy in me is to epic proportions and helps me easily on my way to the new world. For you however it is comforting and crucial and easy for me to remember that you are a Donald Woods, and not an Agamemnon. If you were he, I would never have come near you. I have turned many away before and after you. I know who I love. Your splinter is The Patriarchal Agenda™ and why wouldn’t it be?
In this new world of my own self sufficiency and the beginning of my revolution for anyone else who wants it, and the general revolution of Alchemy & Liberation & Humanity™, of taking ourselves as all human beings, from weakness to power, to inner power, I am now getting used to the episodes of pain and anger and leaving them behind easily. As you know too now, ‘the darkest hour before the dawn’ is a way of life. These are the real revelations of life. What therapy of any kind is for. Move through the agony, do whatever it takes to actually feel the truth of it, instead of escape it, or running through it, or just trying to ignore it and therefore working from the projection of it, and then let it go. As a regular and ascending way of life.
In other words, you are now advanced in this form and I know you are getting used to it. The Patriarchal Agenda™ world – useless for EVERYONE – teaches the opposite. Don’t feel, don’t think, other than ruthlessly and coldly and don’t do anything to disturb the agenda.
My lastest grief has now been about the ESOTERIC misogynists to match the rest of you. These great new teachers who I am researching, again, just leave me out or mention me but then just move on. The agony of not existing is only not existing in your world. The world you still serve. I am an Esoteric that does not serve The Patriarchal Agenda™. That makes me very rare and very feminist, to go with the real great masters that come before me. Let alone the Serpent High Female Priesthood™ that I have returned to, as is my human right. My right to even KNOW the Divinity I serve, even if no one else wants to.
Women have only had access to education for over a hundred years. The New Age belongs to us. The spiritual world that EVERYONE is trying to access in their personal and psychological lives belongs to us. The Natural BORN Mystics™. Female and also some male. But like the African American liberation movement before this, women were always on the sidelines, saying, ‘er, what about us?’. No one cared then and no one cares now. We care and that is our isolation in greatness and beauty. We live in the free world. We don’t have to have anyone that cares. That is the new world. The new world is ours.
As the polarization of my life increases and hones and tones and pierces with more and more acuteness, my soul is flying with its power. That is ending the splinters. I don’t need love from anyone. If you are able to love as I know and have been told you will, you will know finally who you love. And why.
Your splinter journey has just begun. You love women, but you serve The Patriarchal Agenda™. You would. Your journey is to now move through that and become either a Donald Woods or an Agamemnon in wholeness. I know where you will end up but you have to do it yourself – just as Clark Gable’s character did in Arthur Miller’s The Misfits. Of course.
My splinters are all over. I have no more and am flying with the heavyweight muscle of certainty and grief at the same time. I have never served The Patriarchal Agenda™, never have, never will and never want to. My life now however is the visceral proof of living that truth. I honour it and love it, as I love the Donald Woods in you. In other words, self responsibility and love of Spirit = spiritual existentialism = power. In other power on this earth is grief. Face the grief and you will attain power.
Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014
Quotes
If you want to love you must serve, if you want freedom you must die. Hegel
Education is the art of making man (woman) ethical. Hegel
“The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude.” ― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
The uprooting of the imagination of all dharmas is the non-discrimination of all dharmas. Buddhist Quotes
Plato is boring. Friedrich Nietzsche
Academics are foolish people who lack the social skills necessary to revolutionize students. Socrates
Dialogue is about discussion with the intent to understand – not debate with the intent to win. Jesse Lyn Stoler
You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me. - C.S. Lewis
"Entrepreneurship is the last refuge of the trouble making..." -Natalie Clifford Barney
The Mindless Middle Class Latte. HonestStarbucksNames
Whoopi Goldberg has a pot column now. Huffington Post
"The outer eyes cannot see themselves. The inner eye is its own reflection. This is Tao." ~ Deng Ming- Dao
Nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion. - Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
"I believe that every human mind feels pleasure in doing good to another."-Thomas Jefferson
Great men have formed purposes to satisfy themselves, not others. Hegel
History teaches us that people, and governments, have never learned anything from history. Hegel (not bloody surprising. AZR)
Love is a brilliant force of communal unity. Pablo Neruda
Love is free, love is open, love is sharing. Pablo Neruda
The capitalist definition of love is based on consumptive rituals. Pablo Neruda
Love is not something that you can reduce to a mere gift, to a mere exchange-based commodity. Pablo Neruda
Love is not about bizarre romantic obsessions, it is about growing a communal understanding of humanity. Pablo Neruda
Love is a metaphor for emotional resistance, for rebellion, for the systematic seizure of power. Pablo Neruda
Love is about opening yourself up, about sharing yourself, about opening your heart to the world around you. Pablo Neruda
Love liberates you from feelings of selfishness. Pablo Neruda
Love is humanity, it is the desire to help every single human being in the world, in whichever way you can. Pablo Neruda
Love is humanity, it is the birthing point of all genuine social revolutions. Pablo Neruda
Love is about wanting to live with others, to share your food with others, to grow with others. Pablo Neruda
Love is not the selfish desire to be loved. Pablo Neruda
Obituary. Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The Times
Nobel prizewinner Gabriel García Márquez dies at 87
Graham Keely. The Times
Gabriel García Márquez, the author and Nobel laureate for literature, has died at the age of 87. The master of magical realism died at his home in Mexico City with his wife Mercedes and two sons at his side.
Last night Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian writer, led the tributes to the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude, bringing to a peaceful end one of the longest running literary feuds.
Vargas Llosa, the essayist and fellow laureate who had famously argued with the Colombian writer for more than 30 years, told reporters in Peru: “A great writer has died whose works secured a great audience and prestige for our language. His novels will survive him and continue to win readers. I send my condolences to his family.”
The two writers had a feud in 1976 when Vargas Llosa punched García Márquez in the face outside a film premiere in Mexico. The pair never explained what caused the row and had not spoken since. It was rumoured that Vargas Llosa believed García Márquez had become involved with his wife Patricia while they were living in Barcelona.
In recent days García Márquez’s family had described his health as “very fragile”.
The cause of his death was not known, but he had spent a week in hospital earlier this month being treated for pneumonia. Two years ago his brother, Jaime, was quoted as saying that García Márquez had senile dementia and had stopped writing.
Tributes poured in from around the world after the author’s death was announced by President Santos of Colombia. “One hundred years of solitude and sadness for the death of the greatest Colombian of all time,” he tweeted.
President Obama expressed his sadness at the loss of one of the world’s “greatest visionary writers — and one of my favourites from the time I was young”. He added that he kept a “cherished” signed copy from the author after they met once in Mexico.
Bill Clinton paid tribute to a 20-year friendship. “From the time I read One Hundred Years of Solitude more than 40 years ago, I was always amazed by his unique gifts of imagination, clarity of thought, and emotional honesty,” he said in a statement. Ian McEwan, the British author, spoke via Skype on BBC’s Newsnight of García Márquez’s “almost Shakespearean quality” with a “translucent quality to the prose”.
He also addressed the writer’s well-known friendship with Fidel Castro, the Cuban leader, adding that García Márquez had “strictures” against the leader for the number of writers and thinkers in prison in the communist country.
García Márquez’s magical realism novels exposed tens of millions of readers to Latin America’s passion, superstition and violence.
Known to millions as “Gabo”, García Márquez was widely considered to be the most popular Spanish language writer since Miguel de Cervantes in the 17th century, and his novels ensured that he achieved literary celebrity beyond Latin America.
His flamboyant and melancholy works outsold everything published in Spanish except the Bible.
The 1967 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude sold more than 50 million copies in more than 25 languages. His style blended fantasy with reality, so that stories would combine tales of a boy born with a pig’s tail and a man trailed by a swarm of yellow butterflies.
He was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1982.
With writers including Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe, García Márquez was also an early practitioner of the literary non-fiction that would become known as new journalism.
Among the best known works in this genre was Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor, about a seaman lost on a life raft for ten days. In News of a Kidnapping he vividly portrayed how cocaine traffickers led by Pablo Escobar had shred the social and moral fabric of his native Colombia, kidnapping members of its elite.
The Times
Obituary. The Times. Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Nobel Prize-winning author who used the tales his grandmother told him as a child to weave truth and fiction into compelling stories of Colombian life and create the genre of magic realism
His works have outsold everything in the Spanish language except for The Bible. His literary flair has drawn comparisons with Mark Twain and Charles Dickens. Gabriel García Márquez — whose 1967 masterpiece Cien años de soledad made him the first Colombian (and the fourth Latin American) to win a Nobel Prize for Literature — will always be known affectionately as “Gabo” among his fellow Latinos.
His novels are at the heart of the genre of magic realism, in which the real and the surreal blend effortlessly, and fantastical events are presented in a straightforward, often matter-of-fact manner.
In his 1982 Nobel Prize lecture, he described how truth and fantasy were inextricable from Colombia’s history: “Our independence from Spanish domination did not put us beyond the reach of madness. General Antonio López de Santa Anna, three times dictator of Mexico, held a magnificent funeral for the right leg he had lost in the so-called Pastry War.
“General Gabriel García Márquez Moreno ruled Ecuador for 16 years as an absolute monarch; at his wake, the corpse was seated on the presidential chair, decked out in full dress uniform and a protective layer of medals.
“General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, the theosophical despot of El Salvador who had thirty thousand peasants slaughtered, invented a pendulum to detect poison in his food, and had street lamps draped in red paper to defeat an epidemic of scarlet fever.”
This troubled political history was an inspiration to García Márquez, as were the accomplishments and eccentricities of his own family, beginning with the figure of the colonel, his grandfather Nicolás Ricardo Márquez Mejía, who was a veteran of the Civil War at the beginning of the 20th century. The party hatreds he writes of in his masterpiece, Cien años de soledad (1967), One Hundred Years of Solitude (1970), are real and enduring enough.
Macondo, the little town that is the setting for One Hundred Years of Solitude (and much of the rest of his fiction) was based on the small coastal town of Aracataca in northern Colombia, where García Márquez was born in 1928, and which he described as “a hot, dusty, and violent town”.
“The weekends were a permanent fiesta when we virtually locked ourselves in the house. On Monday there were corpses and wounded people lying in the streets.”
He grew up in his grandmother’s wooden house, with its corrugated iron roof. It was a dwelling dominated by superstition, omens and portents, which flowed from the imagination of his grandmother, Doña Tranquilina Iguarán — a woman “who treated the extraordinary as perfectly normal”. It was haven to a constantly shifting population of family and visitors: “My grandfather had about 17 sons scattered all over the place, whom he had fathered in the Civil War, and they all kept coming home, riding mules and going to sleep in hammocks.”
This grandfather, regarded by Colombian liberals as a hero of the Thousand Days War of 1899-1902, was the source of a procession of stories which García Márquez was to describe as his “umbilical cord with history and reality”. To the young Gabo, he was “Papalelo”, and his stories would shape many of García Márquez’s political views.
His grandfather died when he was eight and he left Aracataca to move into his parents’ house. He soon gained a scholarship to a boarding school near Bogota, where he was known as a storyteller.
He went to the universities of Bogota and Cartagena and began publishing stories in newspapers in 1946, though his first novella, La hojarasca (Leaf Storm), was not published until 1955.
While a law student at Bogota he met his future wife, Mercedes Barcha Pardo, who agreed to marry him though she was still at school. They wed in 1958 and had two sons, Rodrigo, who became a television and film director, and Gonzalo, who became a graphic designer.
García Márquez abandoned law in 1950 to earn his living as a journalist, first in the Colombian sea port of Barranquilla, where he lived in a brothel. It was there, as part of a literary circle, that he began to read Hemingway, Joyce and Woolf.
He first came into conflict with the Colombian government when he exposed a tale of national heroism as a piece of propaganda. In 1955 the crew of a Colombian destroyer had been swept away in a storm and the sole survivor, who had clung to a life-raft for ten days, had been widely fêted. However, he revealed to García Márquez that the ship had been carrying a badly stowed cargo of contraband goods that had broken loose on deck. The story of the storm was entirely fictitious.
The real storm came when García Márquez published the truth, and the magazine for which he was working, El Espectador, then sent him to Europe. Soon afterwards he embarked on a tour of the Soviet Union.
However, he did not feel himself to be mentally at home there. His socialist views, his friendship with Fidel Castro and his practical support for human rights causes in Latin America kept him in exile from his native country for much of his career. But after the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude he moved with his family to Barcelona, where he lived during the last few years of the Franco regime in Spain.
After Franco’s death he moved to Mexico City.
García Márquez considered his literary ancestors to be Sophocles, Faulkner (“my master”), Kafka and his own grandfather. But like so many other Latin American novelists of his generation he owed a particular debt to the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, who was the first to unite the particular experience of being a Latin American to the central tradition of European literature.
His most momentous literary inspiration came from reading Borges’s translation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. “I didn’t know that anyone was allowed to write things like that,” he said. “That’s how my grandmother used to tell stories, the wildest things with a completely natural tone of voice.”
The early stories several of which are included in Innocent Erendira (1978) are macabre, surrealist pieces, chiefly concerned with mortality and physical decay. But the novella El coronel no tiene quien la escriba (1961), translated as No One Writes to the Colonel (1971), is an earthily realistic picture of a small town (already called Macondo), seen from the point of view of a long-retired veteran of the Civil War whose promised pension never arrives and whose son is shot for clandestine opposition to the government.
It was followed by La mala hora (1962), and In Evil Hour (1980), a longer and fuller account of the same town, in which the political element becomes central and the narrative is conducted through a number of characters instead of only one. Then, in 1965, he was struck with a sudden inspiration of how he might write the “big” novel he had been planning for years. He was said literally to have turned his car around, driven straight home and written relentlessly for 18 months.
Cien años de soledad was published in June 1967, with the first 8,000 copies selling in a week. Half a million sold in three years. None of his previous books had sold more than 700 copies. It was published in English as One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1970.
García Márquez claimed that the key to his success was telling the story, complete with its supernatural happenings, just as his grandmother would have done, with unblinking conviction and “a brick face”. However, in the novel he also developed his themes and expanded his technique so as to take in the whole history (and at times it seems almost the whole population) of Macondo, adding a surrealistic strain from his earliest work. Written with the irresistible energy and poetic exuberance of a born storyteller in the oral tradition, the novel is at once a compendium of Latin American folk tales and superstitions, the history of a South American state, a family saga and the portrait of a people.
A national epic and now a world classic it became one of the foundation stones of the Latin American fiction, alongside works by his friend Carlos Fuentes and his biographer Mario Vargas Llosa, but it is also perhaps the most famous example of the literary genre named magic realism.
As such it was an inspiration to a generation of authors who set out to expand the horizons of the English-language novel using García Márquez’s fictional technique — in essence fantastic, surreal and magical experience presented through the matter-of-fact eye and in the matter-of-fact prose of daily life. For all the dazzling delights of García Márquez’s technique, there is little place in his fiction for explanation, cause and effect, reflection or responsibility.
It is apparently a world without a moral intent, and yet one of the purposes of his writing was to expose the capricious cruelty of South America’s amoral regimes.
As Garcia Márquez said in his Nobel lecture: “The country that could be formed of all the exiles and forced emigrants of Latin America would have a population larger than that of Norway. I dare to think that it is this outsized reality, and not just its literary expression, that has deserved the attention of the Swedish Academy of Letters.
“Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable.”
El Otoño del Patriarca (1975), translated as The Autumn of the Patriarch (1977), took the theme of extravagance and destruction back to one of its prime causes, the quintessential Latin American military dictator in his capital city. In different lights the patriarch looks like Peron of Argentina, Duvalier of Haiti or Trujillo of Cuba, but in others he resembles a demented Roman emperor, as when at the annual banquet of his presidential guard he has their treacherous chief served up “on a silver tray stretched out full length on a garnish of cauliflower and laurel leaves, steeped with spices, oven brown . . . and when every plate held an equal portion of minister of defence stuffed with pine nuts and aromatic herbs, he gave the order to begin”.
But for all its grotesque brilliance, The Autumn of the Patriarch could not but be seen as a slighter book than One Hundred Years of Solitude. A more self-consciously Latin American novel, concentrating its critical fire on well defined targets, it lacked the earlier work’s variety of mood and tempo, specifically its charm and warmth, and its deep roots in solid local humanity.
García Márquez supported social, and socialist, and humanitarian causes throughout South America, and he helped to found the human rights group Habeas. Despite his old friendship with Castro, who is said to have helped to edit one of his books he also wrote a critical study of the Cuban regime. In 1981 he left Colombia, where the government was irritated by his political activities, but the following year he was welcomed back when he was awarded the Nobel Prize.
In that year appeared the English translation, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, of his novel Crónica de Una Muerte Anunciada, which had been published in 1981. With a plot that moved backwards from the revelation of the murder (and identification of the murderer) of a friend of the fictional narrator, it was a narrative that gradually unfolded details of motive, and explored the notion of murder as a punishment for the violation of honour. It was filmed, by the Italian director Francesco Rosi, in Italian as Cronica di Una Morte Annunciata, and later, in 1987, English.
García Márquez’s next, indisputably major, novel, El Amor en los Tiempos del Cólera, was published in 1984. It appeared in English as Love in the Time of Cholera in 1988. Based on the long courtship of the author’s parents, disguised in the novel as Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza, and asking questions about the delusional nature of unrequited love sustained over an apparently impossibly long period, it was hailed on publication as his best book since Solitude. It was filmed in 2008.
It was followed by slimmer volumes of stories and fictionalised reportage, particularly about some of the brutal regimes of the region: Clandestine in Chile (1986, English translation, 1987), The General in his Labyrinth (1989, English, 1990) and Of Love and Other Demons (1994, English, 1995).
In 1996 he was invited by a number of former hostages to tell the story of a kidnapping in Colombia, perpetrated by drug barons who were about to be extradited to the United States, which appeared in English as News of a Kidnapping (1997).
García Márquez lived variously in Venezuela, Cuba, the United States, Spain and Mexico. Latterly he had lived in Colombia, where in his early 1970s he bought a weekly news magazine, Cambio, and appointed himself editorial director.
He also became a reporter again, saying “My books couldn’t have been written if I weren’t a journalist because all the material was taken from reality.” In this capacity he reported, for instance, on the visit to Havana of the Colombian president Andrés Pastrana in 1999, his unsigned piece appearing under the headline “From Hate to Love”.
Shortly after this he was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer. Chemotherapy in a hospital in Los Angeles sent the illness into remission, but the experience prompted him to begin writing his memoirs. The first volume of what was intended as a trilogy, Vivir para contarla (2002) appeared in English as Living to Tell the Tale in the following year.
The short novel Memoria de mis putas tristes (2002), translated as Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2004), did not perhaps add to his reputation. The story of a sexual relationship between an ageing journalist and a working-class child, who sells her virginity to help her family, it left some of García Márquez’s admirers wondering whether their author was not perhaps treading the borders of middlebrow wish-fulfilling sensationalism.
An Iranian edition entitled Memories of My Melancholy Sweethearts (2007) sold out its 5,000 imprint within three weeks of publication in the country, after which it was banned, when the Ministry of Culture received complaints from conservatives who believed that the novel was promoting prostitution.
Thereafter García Márquez repeatedly declared that he was “finished with writing” although in October 2010 it was announced that he was completing a new novel En agosto nos vemos (We’ll Meet in August).
García Márquez had been suffering from Alzheimer’s disease since 2012. He is survived by his wife and two sons.
Gabriel García Márquez, author, was born on March 6, 1928. He died on April 17, 2014 aged 87
And God Created Woman ll Pt ll (ll)
The Times
Obituary. Rachel Pinter. The Times
The headteacher for 27 years of the Yesodey Hatorah Girls’ School, Stamford HIll, London, Rachel Pinter revolutionised girls’ education in the strictly orthodox Jewish community of Europe. In her years as head she took the school from a small inward-looking establishment, where academic achievement was not a high priority, to one of the highest achieving and most respected in the UK.
The daughter of Holocaust survivors, she was born in 1947 in Paris, where her parents were in transit following their liberation from the concentration camps. Both of them had lost their families before they married. Her father, Rabbi Moishe Yakov Beck, had been a rabbi in Czechoslovakia, while her mother, Miriam, was his niece. Moishe Beck had lost his wife and six children in the War and Miriam, her husband.
Rachel was the oldest of seven children of whom six were boys. The family left for the US when she was two and settled in Brooklyn: first in Crown Heights where her father established a steibl (a small Chassidic synagogue) and subsequently in Borough Park. She grew up in a poor immigrant home, where there was little in the way of luxury, but her parents went to great lengths so that she could acquire a decent education.
She began her career as a teacher in modern orthodox schools in New York, where she first developed her particular approach to education, believing that girls should receive a secular education of the highest standard. Ever the idealist, she spent her first paychecks on buying her parents much needed domestic appliances.
In 1971 she married Rabbi Avrohom Pinter, a son of Rabbi Shmelke Pinter, a leading figure in the Stamford Hill Chassidic community. They spent their first three years in Israel where she taught in a leading seminary. As a newcomer, she was designated classes which catered for immigrant children from low socio-economic background. Once her talents had been recognised, she was offered a position teaching girls from so called better families. However, she refused to abandon her original students, and only agreed to take on the more prestigious classes if she would be allowed to continue teaching the immigrants.
On their return to England in 1975, she and her husband took up positions at Yesodey Hatorah, where her father-in-law was the principal. At that time orthodox education was very conservative. Most of it was religious and it was deemed that a woman could be either religiously observant or educated, but not both. It was felt that secular education was not commensurate with the social and religious values of the community. Girls would take no more than two or three O levels and academic achievement was not a priority. Rachel believed that they could and should complement and enhance one another, and she revolutionised the culture of her community.
She was almost singlehandedly responsible for taking the small school from its modest beginnings to new heights of academic success, developing it into the largest strictly orthodox school in Europe. After working in numerous capacities at the school she became head of the senior girls’ school in 1986 when it had 200 students.
In an article in the Times Educational Supplement on faith schools she wrote that despite the plaudits for academic achievement the school received, her greatest satisfaction came from the fact that pupils of limited ability were able to reach their maximum potential. She would encourage every student to take as many GCSE as theycould, despite the fact that those with limited abilities were liable to pull town the school’s pass rate.
Academic achievement did not come at the expense of what the orthodox community considers to be its core values. She put great emphasis on moral ethics and commitment to authentic Judaism and Ofsted made special mention of the social, moral and spiritual development of her students.
Rachel Pinter was regarded with great affection by all who knew her, in particular her former pupils. To her, education was her sacred mission, rather than a career, and in the days when the school was privately funded she would often joke that many of her staff were receiving a better wage than she.
In 2006 a new school housing 320 pupils and costing £13 million was built with funding from the DES and opened by Tony Blair. Despite the demands and pressures of adapting to a new building, it was rated outstanding in all areas in its first year of operation in an Ofsted inspection; something virtually unprecedented.
In 2008, in recognition of her achievements, she was appointed OBE. She continued to go into work until a few days before she died.
She is survived by her husband and seven married children, four of whom are twins: Yisroel, who lives in New York is a business employee; his twin sister Brochah, who lives in London, is a teacher; Rivkeh,who lives in Israel is a journalist; Chaim, who lives in London, is a special needs teacher; Malka, who is a special needs teacher, lives in London; Esther, who lives in Israel is a wife and mother; and her twin sister Hadassah who lives in London, is a special needs teacher.
Rachel Pinter, OBE, teacher and headmistress, was born on January 23, 1947. She died of cancer on March 13, 2014, aged 67.
The Times
Anarchy is not about hedonistic pleasures, anarchy is not about consumptive lifestyles, anarchy is not about hyperindividualism. Anarchy is social revolution.
Mikhail Bakunin
And especially for Easter.....don't forget. Drones of The Roman Empire. AZR
The Greatest Lie Ever Told. WH Uffington
The one book you need that explains how Judaism, Christianity and Islam all came from Egypt. It shows how the monotheism of Akhenaten gave us the God we know today. It explains the Exodus, where the missing tribe of Israel went and who Moses is. We even see why the Druids and Celts became the enemies of Rome and friends of the Templars, Rosicrucians and Freemasons.
The book gives you the truth about religion, shows how history gets distorted and confirms that the only path to spiritual enlightenment is the one you're already on. The way out of the minefield of religion is in The Greatest Lie Ever Told.
Amazon
And the conclusion of four years work? Misogyny is CONSCIOUS. Education can only take evil so far. Separatism is therefore the real truth of 'letting go'. Turn it onto the perpetrators. Not you. Misogyny is conscious. That changes everything. 1 in 4 women suffer from depression as opposed to 1 in 10 men. I wonder why. Misogyny is conscious. The work is done. Modern misogyny is 'the male liberal'. Like race, the worst and most sinister group of all. Men who truly believe they know how to love women. The worst group of all. Misogyny is conscious. Separatism is the new world. The real work begins. Female Esoteric Priesthood™. The real ancient, new world.
Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014
Rewriting The His story of the world. Amera Ziganii Rao
Seshat
Egyptian goddess of writing. Creator of Hieroglyhics, Seshat rules the written word in all its forms. She invented measurements and calculations, and as such is the patroness of architects and accountants. Seshat is the guardian of books and the goddess of history. Scrolls, pens and scales are sacred to her.
Sgeg Mo Ma
Tibetan goddess of beauty. Sgeg Mo Ma rules the physical and spiritual aspects of feminine beauty. She is often depicted holding a magickal mirror, in which she can see the tangible force of beauty as well as the inner well of the soul.
Shakti
Ultimate goddess of India. Shakti is the primal force of female energy found within each goddess. She is the ancient force of power, the breath and the will that animates the divine Devi. Shakti liberates women from the trivial events of everyday life, and leads them to enlightenment. Her creative abilities and transcendent power are the core of every Hindu goddess. She is the force in yoga practices and in tantric rituals.
Priestess Brandi Auset
The Goddess Guide
Mothers and Husbands. And all the rest. Amera Ziganii Rao
Mothers and husbands. Who’d have them. And all the archetypal repetitions of all. Yuk. Give me The Temple. Give me myself. I knew the best. And now I never need to know anyone ever again. The rite of passage to the ‘coming of age’. And at least, I am going to tell the real story. This is not our problem. This is their problem. All the them that exist. The sickness of the world. Abject cruelty. Abject insanity. Thank you Great Mother, that it is all over. The freedom of not needing anyone whatsoever. Real Samurai. First it was her and then it was him. He healed me of her. And now SHE heals me of him. Such is the way. Such is the way of this toilet planet called earth. I can only be abjectly greatful, grateful actually, but hey, let’s go with GREATful, that I will never have to enter that stupid, useless and mindless dynamic again. Misogyny is conscious. And so is ‘maternal’ and ‘paternal’ abusive love. Co-dependency and madness and slavery, I leave to them and you. The ugly stepmothers, sisters, brothers, fathers, whatevers, and the ugly prince Charmings and everyone else in between. Thanks. But no thanks. I’m off to build the world of The Temple. No personal life allowed. I don’t need one. I am done. Inner freedom indeed. Inner power indeed. I live with HER now. The world can go fuck itself. I don’t want it. Everyone has to be left. Starting with the family and ending with the partner. Everyone has to be left. It is the only way. The way of truth. The way of Spirit. And the way of the new world. Not for the fainthearted. Serpent female esoteric priesthood has to lead the way. We are the strongest. We live with HER. We don’t need anyone else.
Thanks for the memories. And a happy Easter. With the banal that is family and cruelty life. My work is done. Now, it begins.
Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014
NATURAL BORN MYSTIC::THE FEMALE HOLOCAUST™
The Pursuit Of Freedom + 'Hell is other people' (Jean Paul Sartre) + The 'Love' Story. Extreme (Male/Family/Group) Cruelty, Enforced (Female) Martyrdom and (Male/Family/Group) Madness. True Love. How To Live Without It. Leaving The World Of Slavery. The Amera Ziganii Rao Force Of Individuation. A True Life And What It Costs. Everything. The Female Experience Is To Overturn All Slavery. And To Reject Love. It Does Not Exist. On Earth. We Do And That Is It.
The rest is Divinity and The Universe. And that belongs to us. That is ours. Heaven on earth. Us.
NATURAL BORN MYSTIC::THE FEMALE HOLOCAUST™. How to feel good about yourself. How to know that there truly is a madness on this planet. And it most certainly is not us.
Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014
.....We shall have to be philosophers, Mary.....Pride and Prejudice. Jane Austen (The TV Script)
The Times
Confessions of a fortysomething singleton
Sophie Penruddock never had any trouble finding men to have sex with until she became part of a new demographic – female, unattached and over 40
Last night, I had sex for the first time in seven months. This is the first truly satisfying sexual experience I’ve had in five years of being single.
I had met John, a landscape gardener, at a party six hours earlier. He was lanky with green stoner eyes, suggestively messy bed hair and an air of quiet confidence. I don’t remember what we spoke about, other than we barely talked at all. It was not until the postcoital cigarette that alarm bells started ringing. John didn’t seem to recognise the Depeche Mode song I was playing. And when I started to regale him with an anecdote about meeting Adam Ant in my youth, there was even less recognition on his face.
I could almost see the dreaded question bubble up from his stomach, flicker across his face and, after a nervous cough, eventually reach his lips: “Er. How old are you?”
It turned out that John was 23, and I, at 42, was the same age as his mother. This was rather a shock to him. Any more sex – for John, at least – was out of the question.
This sense of anticlimax (only marginally better than no climax at all) has become a familiar, sinking feeling in my sex life. Having sex in your forties is hard enough; having great sex is an elusive nirvana. My erotic life has become a chain of misadventures. As a result, I’m as sexually frustrated as a teenage boy.
According to the Office for National Statistics, the number of women who have never married has doubled in the past ten years. Meanwhile, of those who do marry, the average age to get divorced is 41. I’m part of a new demographic – single, fortysomething and in search of sex. A night out with my equally unsatiated single friends – fortysomething businesswomen, writers, directors and artists – often descends, not into a moan about lack of future husbands (that by now is a given), but into a lengthy brainstorm, involving the hair-splitting minutiae of text strategy, on how on earth we are going to get laid in the meantime. To look at us from afar, we are a group of beautiful, successful women who could pull anyone, any time we wanted. But we can’t. We really can’t. As one ex-model friend sums it up: “These days, I can’t even give it away.”
Last month news reports following up a survey of 2,000 single respondents called women like me “invisible”. Despite being confident, experienced and at our sexual peak, we can’t find a partner. It is both humiliating and wildly confusing. From an early age, I, like other girls, was trained to play a strong, defensive game: to safeguard closely my body, and more specifically the Holy Grail between my legs, from the sea of monomaniacal predators who made up the randy male population. They thought about “it” every seven seconds, I was told. They would do anything to get “it”. They would do “it” with anyone. Being desirable and constantly desired was a given. At 12, I was ranked No. 2 in a male poll of the Most Wanted Chicks in my year.
I spent the next 20 years rebuffing advances from all quarters, and when I didn’t reject them, it constituted a kind of giving in.Maybe it’s sexual karma that the power balance has shifted. Twenty years later, the spurned teenage boys of my youth have served up their revenge stone-cold. In my late thirties, they suddenly stopped chasing. Overnight, I was dropped like a hot rock. My sexual power was inexplicably draining out of me. In a panic, I checked for signs of ageing in the mirror, wasted £200 on cream and serums and threw out the Topshop items in my wardrobe. (Had I started to look vaguely ridiculous?) But after a lot of field research, during which I was consistently aged at between 29 and 32, I concluded that I looked pretty much the same.
What had changed was the several sherpa-loads of projected psychic baggage that I was unwittingly carrying. Single and turning 40 read “desperate” on several counts. I was suddenly part of the blanket sexual no-fly zone that men impose on women on the edges of their childbearing years; bracketed among the conception-crazed she-devils who lure men to their lairs to procure a fresh spermatozoa sample. (This really is a male fantasy – we would simply use a donor.)
I have seen the whites of men’s eyes, like the wild, frightened glare of a stallion backed into a stable corner, when they learn you are over 35. They still can’t compute that a woman would sleep with them without a strong ulterior motive: commitment, marriage, babies. Men have no idea what to do with a woman who maybe just wants to have sex. It freaks them out on the job, throws them completely off their sexual stride. They can’t block out the voice in their head: “She. Wants. A. Baby.”
There was a time when I did want to get married and have children with my partner. We had been together for five years when, at 38, I found out that he had been sleeping with one of his pupils (he’s a lecturer), who was 20 years my junior. I came across an explicit selfie from her on his phone. The noxious cocktail of sexual rejection, ultimate betrayal and the annihilation of my future in those 60 seconds was an atomic bomb that left me reeling for the next few years. It also left me with an irrational hatred of selfies. When the mushroom cloud finally cleared, I hoped that I would fall in love again. But I simply never met anyone else.
The dating scene in my age-appropriate bracket was a war zone, filled with the walking wounded: bachelors turned toxic over two decades’ worth of one-night stands, eternal kidults, casualties of divorce, emotional cripples, married men after a cheap thrill to pep up their failing sex lives, the desperate, the impotent. Being single was like being trapped in a dark, lonely basement with only a bunch of freaks for company and no way-out sign. I gave up pretty soon after. In the meantime, I wanted to have sex, lots of sex. It made me feel free again, alive, young, desirable. It was a vital defence against the defunct, spinster label hovering over me.
I had always loved sex, but, like most women, it had taken me decades to chip away at the Catholic guilt, to stop merely play acting the object of men’s fantasies and peel back social expectation and finally stare my own sexuality in the face.
I lost my virginity at 15, to the only boy I thought worth giving in to at school. He was 17, played rugby, had sandy hair and a body like the statue of David. We snuck to my bedroom at lunchtimes to have quickies in our school uniform. I wore suspenders for him under my grey A-line skirt, and reminded him about them during the Lord’s Prayer in assembly.
In my twenties, I learnt that I liked being talked to in bed. My new boyfriend had it down to a fine art. After we split, I spent years trying to get other boyfriends to mimic the erotic free-styling, but it always ended badly: a cheesy Seventies porno soundtrack at one extreme, an embarrassing Barry White ballad at the other.
Then in my thirties, I met the one who changed me. We had sex, all the time, every which way and everywhere: in lifts, in planes, at our work places, at parties, in a hospital bed once after his surgery, at the side of the motorway in full view of commuters. I loved him because he made me feel so free, but it was inevitable that the sex would eat us up, destroy us. I suspect that without it, I wouldn’t have liked him quite so much.
I spent years after we split up trying to regain those sexual highs with someone else. It never worked. All I was left with was the faded erotic images in my memory bank. Although I had loved the lecturer for his mind, sex with him was staid. He wanted sex at the same time in the same way every evening. I lay awake sexually frustrated every morning, as he pottered off to the bathroom to put in his contact lenses. I tried hard to pick up the pace, but he seemed several classes behind me in sexual liberation. So I dumbed myself down for him in bed for five years, and eventually lost enthusiasm. No wonder he went for an 18-year-old girl who didn’t know much better.
So I was stranded, on the brink of my forties, down a sexual cul-de-sac. I was at my physical peak, with a high sex drive and a sophisticated knowledge of what I liked in bed, but with several social stigmas on board and a dearth of decent single men to have sex with.
I need to qualify here. As a woman, I may want to have as much sex or, in my experience, more sex than a man, but I still don’t think exactly like one. My libido is more complicated, although not entirely unshackled from our primal urges, as per Darwin’s theory of natural selection. I don’t need a potential father, a promise of commitment, or emotional attachment from a partner, but I still want a little ritual, at least some pretence of a chase.
It made sense at first to select my partner from the available dating pool, but this meant mining all those creepy specimens in the basement. Naturally, I gravitated towards the (narcissistic) creative types. I can attest that these are even worse in the sack than on a date. There was Sean, who cried during sex – not so bad – but then wet himself at 4am every night. I tried to be understanding, but my poor cleaner couldn’t take it any more.
Next was Rick, who insisted on using not one, not two, but three condoms. It was like having sex with a phallus-shaped inflatable castle.
James was no better. Handsome, if a little beaten around the edges. All I had to do was endure a mind-numbing evening of his chat. Subjects were confined to his many past sexual conquests, his days as a model and lengthy verbatim extracts from Star Wars.
He was 44. Against my better judgment I took him home. Let’s just say he was not as confident with his clothes off. I faked an orgasm, partly to get him to stop, partly because I felt sorry for him.
The other men my age, of course, are all married. This is a no-go zone for me, but apparently not for them. I’m sorry to say that there is a whole legion of married men out there who like to get their rocks off with a single woman, especially when their wives have just given birth.
I am a much happier person when I have regular sex. I consulted a male friend in despair. “Where are all the good men? Why aren’t they chasing me? I thought it was a man’s dream to find a woman who loved sex.” He explained the crux of the matter particularly ungently: “Most men want women who are a little virginal, uncorrupted, unattainable.” Having slept with 30 men in my lifetime (although that’s only an average of 1.1 a year), and no longer able to keep up the pretence of my coy adolescent frigidity, it appeared I was more proverbially screwed than I was ever likely to be literally.
After that, it seemed older was the way to go. Maybe I would be considered relatively chaste. My first dalliance should have been a warning. I dated a 52-year-old, and when we finally went to bed our love-making session turned from surprisingly protracted into an eight-hour nightmare. I can only assume he’d overdosed on Viagra. It put me off sex for a while. The following year, I was in a six-month relationship with another older man. He had a penchant for what he termed “light S&M”.
I found it boring but tried to be open-minded. He begged me to don thigh-high leather boots and be tied up on a chair, otherwise naked. When, at the critical moment, he couldn’t get it up I told him it didn’t matter (but just for the record, it always does). He confessed that he had fallen in love with me, making it impossible for him to have sex with me.
With so much goddamn baggage in the bedroom, it was inevitable that I would resort to younger men. No one wants to be labelled a cougar, but sometimes you have to fight fire with fire. Really, it makes sense: younger men are at their sexual peak and, in our late thirties and early forties, so are we. The problem is they often don’t have a clue in bed and require some form of intensive training.
The first one, 28-year-old Steve, was such a polite mummy’s boy – he neatly folded and hung up my clothes as he undressed me – that I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Another, Ian, had got to the age of 29 without ever having heard of, let alone touched, a clitoris. I really wasn’t prepared to take a biology class at two in the morning. Jacob mostly just wanted me to play Grand Theft Auto with him.
At this point I started to feel jaded. My gay friends suggested I try Tinder (they had their pick on Grindr; one slept with more men in one weekend than I had in 25 years), but the thought made me queasy. I wasn’t sure I could take quadruple the rate of awkward fumbles.
The harsh truth was that the possibility of having carefree sex seemed to have died off in my thirties. I just had to mourn it and accept that it was now just a puerile fantasy. But I felt I faced a depressing future of chain-dating divorced fiftysomething chartered accountants (no offence intended). I guess that’s what I’d been trying so hard to avoid all along. Now, I no longer know which path is worse.
In truth, I do want to meet someone, fall in love and, yes, maybe even have a child with him, but I’m just too frightened to admit it to myself, too petrified that I might feel trapped or – worse – that it might never happen. Selecting dates with sexual attraction at the forefront of my mind is severely clouding my judgment. It means that I rarely wait past the third date to sleep with someone either, which, of course, in the relationship world is a strategic disaster.
If only I could separate the two, compartmentalise the sex so it doesn’t govern my choices. My friend has a man in Stockholm whom she’s been sleeping with for 15 years. She swears by him. He’s always happy to oblige.
She lives too far away and stays too briefly for commitment, marriage or babies to be an issue. This circumvents all that interfering psychic projection in the bedroom. Whenever she needs him, she just hits her emergency speed-dial and calls a cab to Heathrow. She says the airfare is worth it every time. It means she never needs to have sex with the men she’s dating. This, of course, makes her utterly desirable. At 44, she always has three or four men chasing her, panting like teenage boys.
The far-off ami de chambre is a perfect erotic solution, but for one snag: finding one. (Is there an app for that?) For now, the answer might be simpler. If I could just stop making instinctive decisions based purely on pheromones – and let’s face it, my radar has been radically off so far – maybe I would allow myself to meet a funny, interesting, non-judgmental grown-up (a kind of third man, somewhere between a diving instructor and a chartered accountant), who is also surprisingly filthy in bed. Maybe. The thing is: I just don’t buy it.
All names have been changed
Sophie Penruddock
The Times
And God Created Woman ll (ll Pt lll). A Self Portrait
The Times
Rachel Kelly: my battle with depression. Louise Carpenter
She was educated at St Paul’s and Oxford, is married to a wealthy banker, moves in the same circles as David Cameron and Boris Johnson, has five healthy children – and was so severely depressed she didn’t want to live
Rachel Kelly remembers the exact moment she knew that her lifelong fight against deep, soul-destroying depression was lost for a second time. It was December 2003 and she was in the middle of giving a lavish Christmas party in her vast and beautiful house in West London, every corner wreathed in mistletoe and ivy. Waiters flitted around, delivering drinks to some of the most influential people in the country: David Cameron and Boris Johnson, who had both been in that Bullingdon Club photograph with Kelly’s husband, Sebastian Grigg; he had travelled through Eton and Oxford with the pair and was now an immensely successful banker. There were policy-makers (George Osborne), thinkers, opinion-formers and writers (Sebastian Faulks is a friend).
And Kelly was in the middle of it all, the expert society hostess, as she says, “Twirling strangers together as if I were choreographing a complicated dance.” Except it was all a front. In reality, she was emotionally drowning. Pausing for breath down in the kitchen, among the crates and the trays, she knew she couldn’t go on. She let herself out and walked barefoot round the corner to her childhood home, curled up on her bed and sobbed. When she finally staggered back, she was so dishevelled, the waiters asked her if she’d been invited. It summed up her life: “Here was my true self, no longer adorned with the gaiety I did not feel.”
“Yes, I have a privileged life,” Rachel Kelly tells me quietly today. “There’s no point pretending otherwise. But I don’t have privileged health.
“What I came to understand is that the real privilege in my life is my marriage and my mother. There have been so many wasted years, and I wouldn’t wish that on anybody.”
Kelly looks the picture of good health. She is vigilant these days in an attempt to keep another bout at bay. There is no alcohol, lots of sleep, lots of exercise, a Mediterranean diet, fewer social commitments, therapy and the occasional use, still, during “close shaves”, of antidepressants. “I look after myself as if I were looking after a nervous pet.”
She is petite and girlishly pretty, and at first glance looks much younger than 48. Her life – on the outside – is still beyond the realms of most people’s fantasies. The home where we are talking today is the same beautiful white villa in the smartest part of West London where she gave that ill-fated Christmas party in 2003. It is an example of tasteful interior design and the calm, clean polish that comes with a lot of domestic help. She has 5 children, now between the ages of 10 and 19, but there is no sign of the rough and tumble of their lives in her immaculate palace. Where are the muddy trainers, book bags, lunch boxes and bits of coloured paper sticking to the floor? “All cleared away for your benefit,” she says wryly. A friendly Filipino maid waves from the stairs.
But if there is a moral to Kelly’s story, which she tells in her book, Black Rainbow, it is that ultimately material privilege and the accoutrements of success count for nothing. They certainly didn’t bring her happiness.
She says she understood this intellectually but, in reality, surrounded by a circle of high achievers, she placed value on status and felt that giving up her job and devoting herself to her children, which part of her craved, robbed her of her identity. She learnt the hard way over a period of almost 17 years.
Depression first hit Kelly back in 1997, out of the blue. It started between 6pm and 7pm one Sunday evening in May, when she was on maternity leave from her job as a reporter and columnist for The Times. It struck just as she was taking her two small sons, a six-month-old baby and a toddler, upstairs for bathtime. As she lay them on their towels, kissing their tummies, her heart started racing. She felt utterly disembodied. By the middle of the night, gripped by insomnia and her heart beating wildly, she thought she was having a heart attack. As she lay in bed unable to sleep, the worries went round and round, the anxiety about how she was managing her life deepening. She would soon be going back to work; would she be able to cope? How could she bear to leave the children with their nanny from dawn to dusk? Could she still be a good mother working long hours? But could she contemplate giving up a job she loved?
Kelly grew up in a scholarly home, a stone’s throw from where she lives now. It was an immensely happy home, she remembers, “not at all the sort that would suggest depression”. Her mother instilled in her an early love of poetry and is still an 18th-century scholar and biographer. Her older sister is a writer; her younger brother a lawyer. Educated at St Paul’s Girls’ School, then Oxford (reading history, like her father), Kelly had been raised, like her peers, with an expectation that she could change the world. She came from what she calls “the pioneer generation of women” who believed they could go out to work and still have it all. Now, at 32, with her ambition unexpectedly softened by motherhood, suppose she wasn’t capable of doing her job? Suppose she jacked it in? She’d turn into a “nobody”, surrounded by contemporaries with stellar careers, some of whom were headed for high office: “It was the professional context we were in,” she says. “These were the people we grew up with. Sebastian was an aspiring Tory politician. These were his contemporaries.”
As it was to quickly emerge, this was not “just” a panic attack or a bout of extreme anxiety – to which she was prone. It was the first of two major depressive episodes that have shaped her life right up to today. The two episodes – from May to September 1997, and then a much more severe, long-lasting bout from November 2003 to 2005 – are what she calls “wasted years”, when, for all her worrying about her roles, in the end she was unable to be mother, journalist or wife.
In fact, she couldn’t do anything but lie in bed and scream. Her husband hid her medication for fear she would kill herself. She could not bear to be near her children, who, by the second attack, numbered five, the last two of whom were newborn twins.
There are many terrifying aspects of Rachel Kelly’s story. The first is that her descent into depression is a cautionary tale to us all – men and women, but especially women – who are trying to juggle the multiple demands of work, family, ageing parents, in a culture that rates status, material privilege and career success over emotional wellbeing and stay-at-home mothering. Kelly’s message is clear. We all have our limits. If we continually push ourselves, ignoring the warning signs of it all becoming too much, sooner or later our bodies and our minds will give up. Research shows depression affects one in four women in their lifetime and one in ten men, but there remains a taboo, says Kelly. People do not talk about it, let alone admit it in the workplace. “I’m amazed how much ill-health women I know put up with to keep going, whether it’s insomnia, anxiety, panic attacks. Once I started being honest, people would say, ‘Actually, I’m not finding it that easy either.’ One friend said, ‘I could never own up to that because I’d lose my job.’ In my case, looking back, I’m amazed I lasted as long as I did.”
It took just three days and three nights from that moment in the bathroom for her to become completely bedridden, screaming and thrashing about in physical and mental agony. She was obsessed that she was “crashing”, that she was going to die. A doctor had to be called and her mother and husband held her down so she could be sedated. By the end of the week, she had lost a stone in weight.
But, she says, the “crashing” felt real: “It was like being in an emergency situation. People don’t think of depression as physical, but it isn’t that you are lying flat and gloomy and collapsed. It is a physical pain; this acute sense of falling. You are hurtling at high speed. I was just beyond terrified, shouting, ‘I’m falling, I’m falling. I’ve got to hold on.’” Dr John Horder, a former president of the Royal College of General Practitioners, has likened the physical effects of depression to coronary pain, adding that if he had to choose between suffering from renal colic, a heart attack and an episode of severe depression, he would avoid depression.
First time around, Kelly now recognises, depression was lying in wait for her. She felt acute societal pressure to be good at everything. The pain of leaving her children for the office would often make her physically sick. (Back in 1997, nobody was talking about “good enough” mothering.)
This dovetailed with her disposition towards anxiety: there had been two births in quick succession while she was at The Times; her oversensitive personality (as a child, she went to bed for three days after watching Tarka the Otter); the toxic mix of both her insecurity and her fierce ambition to keep up with her peers, fuelled by the competitiveness and never-good-enough feeling of having been at St Paul’s; her desire to be the perfect mother, wife, daughter, employee, hostess, friend, to please everybody, do everything, throw parties and suppers to help her husband’s career; her tendency to worry over an innocent unanswered e-mail; the endless worry over having said the wrong thing. Plus, there was her husband’s demanding job.
Throughout all the years of heartache and ill-health, she has remained married to her childhood sweetheart, Sebastian Grigg, a highly successful Credit Suisse banker, formerly at Goldman Sachs, and the son of an Irish baron. They had met in Ireland when she was 17 and were at Oxford together. In 1997, just before her first breakdown, he had stood – only just unsuccessfully – as a Conservative candidate in Manchester in the election that saw Tony Blair made Prime Minister. The election came two months after her second birth, and they had campaigned while he continued to hold down his job at Goldman’s. She now sees that she turned inwards her resentment and anger at what this process had demanded of her. “Yet we thought we were out of the woods,” she tells me. “The election was over; Georgie was sleeping…”
She shows me a happy photograph of her cuddling her toddler (now at university), a picture her husband handed the psychiatrist as evidence of what she looked like before mental illness struck. “Look at me there,” Kelly says, astonished. “We had no idea what was about to happen to us… just no idea at all.”
Her eyes fill with tears when she talks about the toll her illness took on Grigg, who, thankfully, is “blessed with very good emotional health”. During the first episode, when Kelly was screaming and talking about wanting to die, Grigg truly thought he’d lost her for ever. “I longed for a stream of warm red blood from my wrists, which would quietly lead to blissful oblivion,” she writes.
She was admitted to a psychiatric hospital but Grigg took her home, at her request. “You were unable to sit up or stand up,” he told her. “You couldn’t make sense. It seemed as though you had lost your mind. I felt astonished that it was happening to me. It seemed rather extreme that I would be left with two small children to look after if I lost you.”
“I just love him. I love him,” she tells me, trying to control her emotions. “I don’t know what I would have done without him.” During her two depressive episodes, he coped with her illness, the children and his own career. He has also, one senses, sacrificed his political ambitions, or at least put them on hold long-term. Only recently, a close friend sat Kelly down and said to her, “You do realise that man was an absolute saint, don’t you?”
Only the two elder children remember her ill, during the second episode in 2003, following the birth of her twins (more of which later). Her two nannies got a raw deal, too. She only knows this after extensive interviewing of her family. “Sebastian was very bracing,” Kelly recalls. “He said I was often completely unreasonable. People ask me if writing this book has been therapeutic, but it’s been painful hearing how I was. I was quite shocked. I didn’t listen to anybody else. It was all about me, and I think that is the truth of being very ill.”
Their first nanny eventually left and the second – a wonderful cheery Aussie – who ran the house during the second episode, had to take to her bed for three days with exhaustion when she returned to Australia. Ultimately, though, it was Grigg, she says, together with her mother and poetry – odd as it sounds – that saved her. This, combined with medication, psychiatric help and psychotherapy over the years: “I would be the last person to say, ‘Read a bit of George Herbert and you’ll be better,’ but it’s been helpful to me.”
There are enduring scars. At one dark moment during the first episode, she remembers standing at an upstairs window, watching her small baby being wheeled down the street in his buggy and loaded into the back of the car to be looked after far away from her. Struggling to cope, Grigg had decided their baby must go and stay with his parents. Even in the depths of this first depressive period, she remembers how truly unbearable this sight was. She has tortured herself for years since. “The decision to remove George was understandable and well meant,” she writes, “but some elemental connection between us had been broken.
Something whole had been ruptured. I felt a continuous ache of missing. I would think of him last thing at night and first thing on waking. My only compensation was relief that despite being utterly incapable of being a parent, I could still feel as any mother would about her child.”
Two years after first falling ill, in June 1999, Rachel Kelly left The Times for good. She was pregnant with her third child. She had gone back to work in September 1997, four months after her depression, ostensibly “recovered”, but in denial that it would ever happen again. But the wrench of leaving her two sons was too much. By December 1999, she had a little girl, Katherine, and was a stay-at-home mother. As she remembers, life was good, but still the ticker tape in her head ran in different directions, wanting to be at home but also resenting it: “My life was a rejection of every edict of the individualistic, adventure-hungry, intellectually curious society in which I had grown up and to which my friends belonged.”
Kelly is articulate on how depression carries with it a misplaced stigma that those who suffer from it are somehow to blame. However, she does not let herself off the hook when it comes to the reckless decisions she took in her life that allowed it to take hold a second time.
The biggest and most shocking of these was the way she “tricked” Grigg into having a fourth child (she’s Catholic, so it was relatively easy), which, almost as an act of hubris in the face of the gods, turned out to be twins. They had not even discussed a fourth child when she called Grigg from the hospital to tell him she was having babies number four and five. When he got home from work, he had to lie down to recover from the shock. What was she thinking of? How could she do that to him after everything they’d been through?
“I am embarrassed about that,” she says. “Very embarrassed. I kept saying to Sebastian when I was writing the book, ‘I must have told you I wanted a baby?’ And he said, ‘No, you absolutely did not.’ I cut it out of the first version of the book, because I was so embarrassed. But I wanted to be honest.”
The desire for another baby was, she says, a real longing, strengthened by her history of having missed a considerable amount of her second child’s babyhood and her good experience with her third child. It was hardly as if they had money worries, and she no longer had the anxiety of working at The Times. “It had an almost physical presence, like an itch that couldn’t be soothed.
“At the time, I knew everybody would have said, ‘You are bonkers,’ but I never thought I was going to get ill again. I just thought, ‘I’d been ill when I was working; now I’m at home, I’m going to be fine.’ ”
She wasn’t fine. Far from it. The twins – a boy and a girl – were born in October 2003. By November, the signs were there. “It wasn’t about being good enough,” she writes. “It was about being the best. I desired to meet every child’s need and be the best mother they could have… The problem was that we now had five children.”
It took the Christmas party to confirm what she knew already. It was back. That she even gave the party in the first place is revealing about her character. “I wanted to please Sebastian. It was one of the roles I had set myself: to be a good hostess. And I still believed that if I only kept to our familiar patterns and continued as if all were normal, then I wouldn’t be ill. I was like a man who carries on walking as he falls over a cliff.”
This depression was even worse, and incapacitated her for a full year. She was back on medication. “I handed over my normal roles once again, like a prisoner giving up their home-washed clothes and wristwatch in a neat pile to the warder in exchange for their prison outfit… Farewell to being a mother. Goodbye to being a wife, a cook, a gardener, a journalist, a friend, a daughter, a daughter-in-law, a sister, a godparent… Here, take them all, all that was strong, fertile, loving about me.”
Between 2005 and 2006, she began a long period of self-examination, helped by medication, but it was only in 2009 that Kelly found a therapist who properly aided her recovery and taught her how to look after herself, a process that continued until the summer of 2012. “I now have a new voice in my head,” she explains. She had to readjust what she thought was important in life: “I had to rethink what I value and how I value myself and other people.”
She tells me that she has thought long and hard about whether or not both depressive episodes were postnatal, but doctors have concluded that there were many more factors at work. (She did not get ill after her first child in 1995, or her third child in 1999.) As Sebastian has pointed out to her, “Maybe it was the children, but maybe not; maybe it was nothing to do with the children. Maybe the stress of it all, what you call the stressed sex, but you then moved from being a working mother to a non-working mother and bang – you got sick as a non-working mother.”
Parking what happened to her as “postnatal” also suggests that once breeding is finished, women are no longer at risk, whereas Kelly understands only too well that depression could strike again, and that when it does, it is likely to be worse each time.
In some respects, the “two” Rachel Kellys are still there: the party-giving hostess introducing people in her gilded home (although the Christmas parties have been scaled down) versus the insecure, sleep-deprived worrier. But Kelly says that now there is a kind of integrity about her, that the different aspects of her life – the outward versus the inward – are far more closely aligned. “I think the two have come together much more. People whose inner and outer lives dovetail are the most relaxed, because they are truly themselves. I don’t want to give the impression that I’ve got it all worked out. It is so much a work in progress. I have terrible days, like the next person, and I still get things terribly wrong… But we all do, if that makes any sense. But these days, I’m not so hard on myself or others.”
The old fears of failure or inadequacy in the face of high achievement and tangible power still surface. Now though, she turns to George Eliot’s Middlemarch for consolation: “For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who have faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs.”
“I would quote it to any mother who feels daunted about stepping off the career ladder,” she says, “or anyone afflicted with a tendency to perfectionism or suffering from depression. If my book helps just one person, it will have been worth it.”
Extract from Rachel Kelly’s book about recovering from depression
August to September 1997
As the number of good days increased, my mother set about reclaiming her own life and Sebastian had returned to working intensely hard. When I was alone with [the nanny] Julie and the children I often had a sense I wasn’t welcome in my own kitchen.
Our previous relationship had relied on me leaving: to go to work, to take the children out, to see friends. She was the nanny, and her role was to take care of the children when I was absent, her long hours on duty matching mine at the office. Now we were spending our days together, one of us keen to reassert her role as mother, the other struggling with a new dynamic. The previous delicate balance of household power had been achieved by the fact that I wasn’t there. Now I was, and Julie was finding it hard.
I felt her actions become brusquer and brusquer. Her slap of the dishcloth on the kitchen counter or the shove of the closing dishwasher could slice through me, though to others she appeared as calm and composed as ever. Sometimes, when I was feeling well enough to emerge from my room, I would be met by wafts of delicious fried chicken emanating from the kitchen. I would creep back, unable to find the courage to descend.
I was, after all, officially a sick person. I should stay in my box. Once, I waited till the chatter and scraping of plates had died away, then sneaked downstairs and fished the still warm leftovers out of the bin. Taking part in communal meals was not part of my job description. My role was to get better and get back to work, or to stay upstairs, eating off a tray. There was no room for convalescence, certainly not by Julie’s side. As she told me one morning, she had not applied for a job that involved looking after a grown-up.
One afternoon the atmosphere became particularly tense, perhaps because of the heat or because we had been tripping over each other in our kitchen as I attempted to cook with Edward. The battle for space culminated in me knocking over her cup of tea. Julie’s pristine indifference and professional silence evaporated.
As she put down a bowl of rice pudding on the table, she turned to me. “I don’t believe in depression,” she said, before turning her back on me and walking the few yards to the dishwasher. “Some people have nothing to be depressed about,” she continued, managing with her voice to convey inverted commas around the word “depressed”. “It’s all just made up.”
At this point she turned to face me with a look that dared me to disagree, continuing her speech, which had clearly been prepared.
“It’s obvious – if you lie in bed all day then you’ll be depressed. I don’t understand why people don’t get it. I mean, if I lay in bed all day” – she looked at me with particular intensity – “I’d feel depressed, too. Only I can’t be depressed because some of us have got a job to do. And by the way, can I ask when you are going back to work?”
Julie’s “some people” made my heart thud and my stomach lurch; I found myself wondering if she was right. Her comments inflamed my own uncertainties, especially as there was no denying that I was feeling better. Yes, I had been very ill, but it was true that now, if I were honest, my own behaviour could affect my mood. Some days I did just lie in bed when I could have roused myself if I had really tried.
This was frightening. At the time I shied away from examining my own role in what had been happening. It was far easier to blame outward circumstances than to look inwards, far easier to shirk my own responsibility for recovery and to look to pills, doctors and other experts to sort out this alien force that seemed to have come out of nowhere and could safely be blamed on chemical imbalance, as if I might have eaten a very bad oyster.
So it was easier to move on and agree with Julie. I was all back to normal now, I told her, though I avoided talking about my work plans, which I hadn’t properly considered. I didn’t really believe in depression either, I continued. (I felt ambivalent saying this, even if I did allow myself the “really”.) Perhaps I said it because I knew I didn’t have the strength to argue with her. Perhaps it reflected the complexity of the reality. Anyway, I wanted to please her, at least partly as I still needed her help with the children, to whom she was devoted.
We never resolved the upset nor referred to it again; we just continued to tiptoe around one another. Her outburst had frightened me and I didn’t want to risk any further confrontation that might derail my baby steps to recovery. Arguing would imply an emotional intimacy that we had never enjoyed when I was well. Not arguing meant a return to normal, and normal was what I craved.
Sebastian agreed. If I wished to discuss what depression involved, I could talk to him, or to my mother or my doctor. I should respect the fact that Julie was a professional fulfilling a job, which was critical to our way of life, and doing so well despite much uncertainty and confusion. He reminded me of the pressure she had been under and how hard she had worked while the household had been in crisis. He would have been unable to continue working if he hadn’t felt able to rely on Julie. This wasn’t just about me, he said, with apologies if that sounded bracing; but it was true.
© Rachel Kelly 2014. Extracted from Black Rainbow: How Words Healed Me – My Journey Through Depression, published by Yellow Kite on April 24 (black-rainbow.co.uk). Available from the Times Bookshop for £13.99 (RRP £16.99), free p&p, on 0845 2712134; timesbooks.co.uk
The Times
All about my brothers. Caitlin Moran (Author of How To Be A Woman and Times Columnist)
‘My brothers made me not scared of men: when necessary, I punched them, like I punched my brothers’
There is a particular luck a woman has if she has brothers. It’s not the kind of luck that sees you breaking the casino or finding pearls in your oysters at lunch.
Instead, it’s the kind of warm, steady luck that means you never have to wait more than three minutes for a bus, or that your shoes fit particularly well.
I have three brothers, all younger – two tall, one short. The tall ones spend half their time teasing the short one for being short. The other half of their time is taken up with concussing themselves on low doorframes, and/or lying, jack-knifed, zigzagged, in too small beds.
The short one is generally winning – he’s the only one with a car. There was a summer where he drove us all around Brighton, wearing shades, window down, pumping the Prodigy on the stereo, while the tall two brothers sat folded up on the back seats, knees rammed around their ears.
The short one chain-smoked roll-ups as he drove, which made the tall ones cough. In retaliation, the tallest brother started smoking a pipe. The short one pointed out that, while using a pipe, he looked like Gandalf.
“Well, that would make you… Bilbo,” the tallest one replied, puffing on his pipe. “Drive on, hobbit chauffeur. Hobbit chauffeur… bitch.”
I tried to stop the argument by pointing out Gandalf was being a massive knob. We ended up pulling over on Hove seafront and chasing each other around the public lawn with sticks, almost unable to stand with laughter.
The luck of a woman with brothers is that she gets to be around boys, without being a girl. Girls are not girls to their brothers. And brothers are not men to their sisters. Instead – all brought up in the same puppy basket, all fighting to put our milky snouts in the same bowl, all falling asleep on top of each other in a tangle – when you’re together, you’re just “the guys”: family, with the surname more important than the “Master” or “Miss”. You are all “Moran”.
With these first boys you know, there is no censoring of your speech – saying only things that girls are supposed to say to boys. No fear, deference or flirting. You do not dress differently for them; you do not act differently around them. You wouldn’t know how – you do not know boys are different from girls. How different could they be? You have seen them laughing at ’Allo ’Allo!, and glassy-eyed with fever, and weeping when the dog was put down – just like you. You’ve fallen out of trees together. When you climbed up on the shed roof, they followed you, and when they climbed over the fence of the empty house, you followed them, without question.
You trust boys, and they trust you. You feel just as at ease bossing around a brother as a sister. Do you talk to them differently? No. Indeed, as you get older, the more they beg you not to discuss tampons and cramps and bras, the more you do. The more you use the most revolting and horrifying terminology you can muster. You convince yourself you’re doing their future girlfriends a favour. You are.
I turned my brothers into uncles very early – when my first daughter was born, Eddie was 20, Jimmy was 11, Jo was 9; they were 2 years older for the second. They were amazing babysitters: there’s something moving about very young men looking after tiny girls – carrying tiny pink lunchboxes to nursery, with a small, hysterically laughing ballerina on their shoulders.
They insisted on calling my daughters “Bernard” and “Dave”: “If anyone ever makes you cry, Dave, we will come and end them,” they would tell the tiny, round-faced, cross-eyed child on their knee.
The same promise they had made to me, ten years earlier – even though we all knew the only retaliation they could ever wreak would be stealing our dad’s air rifle, ringing the enemy’s doorbell, then shooting through the letterbox at their genitals. Because what else can a nine-year-old boy offer to do to help his weeping teenage sister, who’s come back from her bad boyfriend’s with burn marks on her arm? You get the small gun and make brave plans.
My brothers have made me permanently, quietly not scared of men: not scared on my first day at work, in an office full of lairy men – when necessary, I punched them, just like I punched my brothers. On the street, hoodies don’t scare me – I just see Eddie, when he used to hang around in hoodies, on street corners, and I smile.
And when they smile back – surprised, confused – you realise how
rarely teenage boys get smiled at. For while there is bulls*** teenage girls must go through, there is bulls*** for teenage boys, too.
And so it is a particular kind of luck for a woman to have a brother – for it means a man has a sister, too. It means we remember we are all, essentially, just “Moran”.
caitlin.moran@thetimes.co.uk
The Times
The alpha woman is bending our brains for the beta
The rise of successful women is not just changing the rules of marriage. Scientists believe it might affect intelligence
Michael Hanlon
The emancipation and empowerment of women over the past 100 years is one of the triumphs of western civilisation. In less than a century, thousands of years of ingrained injustice and wasted talent have been ended, at least in theory, almost at a stroke. If “women’s lib” now seems a laughably outdated term, it is because its tenets have become so obvious as to be almost not worth stating. This is the great revolution of our times.
As women have been freed, economically, sexually, legally and politically, a new class of person has emerged — the alpha female. Highly educated, driven and financially successful, these are often very feminine women who may possess what many psychologists label “male” brains. Alexandra Shulman, editor of British Vogue, sums up the skills required: “An alpha female would never get lost on the North Circular [Road, in London], and would look good in a miniskirt.”
However, the rise of the alpha female, although overwhelmingly a positive phenomenon, has the potential to change human society and even human biology in ways that are completely unanticipated.
It is well understood that clever and ambitious women are starting to dominate some professions and many branches of academia in Britain. More females than males are enrolling at university and the proportion of women studying — and teaching — traditionally masculine subjects such as the sciences and engineering is increasing all the time.
As recently as 40 years ago, a “lady doctor” was something to be remarked upon and a female surgeon extremely rare. Today, significantly more British women than men are studying medicine and qualifying as doctors. In another 20 years’ time, male dominance at senior consultant level will inevitably disappear under the weight of female numbers.
What is true in Britain is true throughout the developed world. The alpha female is making her mark. One, Angela Merkel, is running Germany; another, the Frenchwoman Christine Lagarde, leads the International Monetary Fund. Of course, since the time of Boadicea there have been female leaders, warriors, doctors and teachers, but it is only in the past century that intelligent, ambitious women have been able to take charge in so many fields.
This phenomenon is beginning to alter the social landscape of Britain and elsewhere. In China, women are well represented in a new class of wealth creators; of the world’s top 28 female self-made dollar billionaires, 18 are Chinese — and this in a country where per capita income is still one ninth of that in a typical European nation. It is the success of China’s women, probably more than the country’s one-child policy, that has cut population growth there to almost zero — it is a demographic rule that as the status of women improves, birth rates decline. Women have fewer children and, importantly, they have them later.
Similarly in Spain, Italy and Japan, nations in which until quite recently women mostly played traditional roles and had second-class status, the legal emancipation of females has led to a boom in female entrepreneurship and excellence (in Italy one of the most popular degree subjects for women is engineering), and, in the case of Japan, something of a demographic crisis as birth rates fall well below replacement rates.
What about here in the UK? Last weekend David Willetts, the science and universities minister, said that as highly educated women now outnumbered equally qualified men in Britain, “the rules of marriage are changing”, adding that there was a significant trend for female high-flyers either not to marry or to “marry down” with a man who was not her educational or economic equal.
But — and this is where the law of unexpected consequences kicks in — could the rise of the alpha female be having far more profound effects, even altering, in a small way, the brains of the next generation? One bizarre side-effect of female emancipation may even be linked to the rise in autism, a change in the distribution of intelligence, and changes to society’s ethnic mix.
To understand how this could be true we need to understand what has changed. After all, there have always been capable and ambitious women. Alpha females, in that sense, are nothing new. What is new is their status in society and the opportunities, social and professional, that are now open to them.
A century ago, a British alpha female had few choices in life. Until the age of sex equality (and of course reliable contraception), women who married were expected to step down from their careers, in the assumption that they would be devoting the rest of their lives to their children. Now, successful females can have a career, a marriage and children as well.
Then there is the attitude of the alpha male. Again, 100 years ago rich, clever and successful men often chose women on looks and family connections. If you look at the wives of the most powerful men in the 19th and early 20th centuries, few had established careers in their own right. Now, increasingly, just as high-achieving women want to marry an equal (if they can find one), so do successful men. Male surgeons used to marry nurses; now they marry other physicians. Pilots used to pair off with stewardesses, now they might marry another pilot.
These are big generalisations, of course, and plenty of businessmen and politicians still marry their secretaries. But it is probably true to say that someone like Bill Clinton would not have chosen someone like Hillary (the first spouse of a US president to reach high political office in her own right) in the 1920s. Jacqueline Kennedy was not dumb by any means, but she was never going to be secretary of state.
The era of the demure, supportive female spouse of a male leader is over. The wives of the past three British prime ministers have been a successful businesswoman, a PR consultant and a barrister. Contrast Samantha Cameron, Sarah Brown and Cherie Blair with the spouses of Harold Macmillan, Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee.
Along with female emancipation, most western societies have become much more socially mobile in the past 30 years. And the way we meet potential partners has changed dramatically — in a way that reflects the increased desirability of successful women.
The workplace is the number one place outside internet dating sites for people to meet — the biggest change in the last 20 years “Men and women these days tend to meet at work,” says Tracey Brown, a social policy researcher and head of the London-based think tank Sense About Science. “The workplace is the number one place outside internet dating sites for people to meet — this is the biggest change in the last 20 years.
And people are getting together later, and for different reasons — they are marrying people with similar interests to them.”
All this might be having a surprising effect. The sort of mind that makes a great surgeon, engineer or share dealer is often characterised by “masculine” tendencies — mathematical talent, good special awareness. High-flyers are adept at putting the world into categories, a skill called systemising.
And because high-flying men are increasingly marrying high-flying women, this “male brain” tendency could be becoming more concentrated in the overall gene pool.
Simon Baron-Cohen, a psychologist at Cambridge University, is investigating whether “assortative mating”, where people choose to pair with those similar to themselves, may be one of the causes of the still unexplained autism epidemic that has struck many wealthy countries in the past few decades.
Autism, he explains, can be thought of as a form of “extreme male brain”, one end of a spectrum along which we find those brilliant systemisers, engineers and mathematicians, and, further along, the obsessive personalities of those with Asperger’s. The ultimate cause of this phenomenon could be exposure to high levels of testosterone in the womb.
One of the places where autism rates have shot through the roof is Silicon Valley in California. Some of this, as in Britain, is undoubtedly the result of changes in the way the autism spectrum is diagnosed, but this cannot be solely to blame for the doubling, then tripling, of rates seen in the past 20 years.
The epidemic in Silicon Valley of what has been dubbed “geek syndrome” has been attributed to the area’s largest industry, which employs thousands of ultra-systemisers of both sexes to write software. Inevitably, many of these people pair off with each other and the result could be a concentration of systemising in the brains of the offspring that are at the autism end of the spectrum.
Not everybody is convinced. Some “neuroscience sceptics”, such as Cordelia Fine, an Australian psychologist, believe that differences between “male” and “female” brains have probably been exaggerated. “The relationships between prenatal testosterone measures and later behaviour are often messy, inconsistent or contrary to what the hypothesis predicts,” she says.
Yet other scientists are investigating whether the rise of the alpha female may even be having a subtle effect on the IQ profile of the societies in which they live. A substantial proportion of intelligence is inherited. There is no single “gene for cleverness” but rather dozens or hundreds of genes, all subtly interacting with each other and other parts of the genome, and influenced hugely by their environment, from the hormonal soup they are exposed to in the womb to diet and, of course, education later in life.
Again, 100 years ago a lot of intellectual inequality was cancelled out by the fact that educational attainment was not high on the list of desirable attributes of either sex. As a sweeping generalisation, women wanted a husband wealthy enough to take care of them and their children (this wealth could be inherited; the man himself could be as dim as cheese).
Successful men traditionally looked for a pretty wife with a respectable background. Now people feel free to marry whomever they like and this means the alphas are now pairing off, so this intellectual dilution is diminished.
What does this imply? Over time we may see a slight flattening of the IQ bell curve — the symmetrical line-graph showing the distribution of measured intelligence in any population, which peaks at an average of 100 and tapers off to the dunces at one end and the geniuses at the other.
Assortative mating will tweak this curve: “More at the top, and more at the bottom,” says Professor James Flynn of Otago University in New Zealand, the author of several books on human intelligence. More geniuses, more dunces and slightly fewer Joe and Joanna Averages, as a percentage of the overall population.
Although assortative mating will have no overall impact on intelligence, one (ironic) future side-effect of increased sexual equality may be increasing intellectual and economic inequality in a world where wealth is becoming ever more polarised and where alphas of both sexes dominate like never before.
An effect of greater female choice is already having profound racial and ethnic impacts, particularly in America but increasingly in Britain as well.
Ralph Richard Banks, a professor at Stanford Law School and author of Is Marriage for White People?, points out that American black women are more than twice as likely to have a university degree as black men — and that 70% of them are refusing to marry.
Successful black British women are, increasingly, either choosing not to marry at all or marrying someone from outside their ethnic group “Some women will begin to marry less accomplished men,” he predicts. “Others will decide that the available men don’t bring enough to the relationship to justify marriage.” In Britain, Afro-Caribbean girls outperform black boys (and, often, white girls) at school and are more likely to go to university and get high-flying jobs than black males. All the evidence here, too, is that successful black British women are, increasingly, either choosing not to marry at all or marrying someone from outside their ethnic group. The inevitable consequence will be an erosion of ethnic identity — which may be good or bad, depending on your point of view.
“In the UK, black women are more likely to marry across group lines than are African-American women,” Banks says.
“For blacks in both countries, the socioeconomic gap seems increasingly to run along gender lines, with women more likely to be the haves, and men more likely to be the have-nots.” This has obvious social consequences.
The rise of the alpha female is a phenomenon largely confined to western and industrialised societies. Many countries still discriminate socially, economically and legally against women, often on religious grounds. In places where rape is used as a form of punishment and women have acid thrown in their faces by male relatives for “honour crimes”, or are not allowed to drive cars and need the permission of their male relatives to get on a plane, the concept of alpha females striding across the economic landscape leaving the beta males floundering in their wake is almost laughable.
Women still earn less than men and face discrimination in even the most enlightened states. But in places where female talent has been allowed to flourish women are making up for lost time, and the alphas are making their mark on all of us.
Michael Hanlon
The Times
And God Created Woman ll (Pt ll). A Self Portrait
The Telegraph
Alpha females: you’re chasing the wrong guy - look for a Beta man
(crap and better still of course, forget the lot. AZR)
Too many successful women are making themselves unhappy by trying to marry men as driven as themselves, according to a new book by Dr Sonya Rhodes
Has there ever been a better time to be an Alpha female? From Beyoncé to Hillary Clinton, Sheryl Sandberg to Dame Sally Davis, public life is full of strong, independent women making their mark on the worlds of entertainment, politics, business and health. We’re learning how to smash the glass ceiling, find our inner tiger mother and balance high-powered careers with a happy home. Like men have done for decades, 21st-century women are finally embracing the “Alpha” within – knowing exactly what they want and stopping at nothing to get it.
There’s only one problem. The Alpha female struggles to find a perfect partner. With her reputation for ambition, determination and success, she can be seen by men as intriguing but intimidating; attractive yet aloof. Some of the world’s most inspiring Alphas (Oprah Winfrey, Condoleezza Rice) have yet to settle down; while many of their predecessors (Coco Chanel, Jane Austen) never did.
As the singer Alanis Morissette puts it: “Alpha men are very turned on by the Alpha woman – really high chemistry, really fun to work with, probably really fun to have affairs with. But there can only be one person in the driver’s seat.”
All hope is not lost, however: a new book raising eyebrows in the US offers a controversial solution. Dr Sonya Rhodes, author of The Alpha Woman Meets Her Match, due out in Britain next month, says Alpha women are so unlucky in love because they’re looking in the wrong place. Instead of seeking out a testosterone-driven Alpha man to share their life, she argues, they should try pairing up with his responsible, supportive opposite: Mr Beta.
Dr Rhodes, a New York-based psychotherapist, was inspired to write the guide based on her experience of clients looking for love. “I kept seeing strong, confident women who were concerned that they had missed the boat, that marriage had eluded them because they had wasted their thirties developing their careers,” she explains. “They were worried that they would have to settle for someone. But they were worried for no reason. In the US, women between 30 and 45 are getting married at a higher rate than women in any other age group. They’re now leaving it until they are more mature, until their career has developed and they’re in a better place to choose their partners.” There is a caveat. “They just need to start looking past the competitive, domineering Alpha male.”
Designed to appeal to the generation exhorted to “lean in” by Facebook’s chief operating officer Sandberg, the book promises to “dispel the myth that being a successful professional woman dooms your chances of a relationship and family”. Opening with a quiz to determine whether you are Alpha or Beta (and, the author insists, most people are a combination), it challenges perceptions about these two personality types, provides guides on dating outside your comfort zone and offers advice on working through relationship problems and affairs.
The pairing of two Alphas, Dr Rhodes suggests, can result in a power struggle. Here, Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin, who announced their “conscious uncoupling” last month, may serve as a lesson in the long-term incompatibility of two high-powered, career-driven partners. “Alpha women may believe the Alpha male is their natural partner; a breadwinner, similar to her – but although they might make an exciting relationship, they don’t make a good relationship,” she adds. “One will always want to assert their authority.”
“Alpha” and “Beta” are well-worn terms in relationship speak – but, when you cut through the psychobabble, what do they mean? Alpha males, the Don Drapers and Gordon Gekkos, are a centuries-old phenomenon; whereas the Alpha female – who, crucially, embraces her Alpha status – is a relatively new breed, typified by intelligent, self-assured women at the top of their profession: think Angelina Jolie, Anna Wintour and Angela Merkel. The “Beta” personality type describes a more laid-back, communicative mindset – or, as Dr Rhodes puts it, “a man who is just as comfortable changing nappies as making a presentation at work”.
The problem with such labels is that they are often stereotyped. Alpha females are seen as bitches; Alpha males as Lamborghini-driving James Bonds, while their Beta counterparts are weak, lily-livered wimps. No more, says Dr Rhodes. Alpha women don’t have to be career women (“You might be the head of the PTA, a genius at connecting people or the organiser of a group for new mums”); nor are Beta men the type you have to settle for. Rather, she warns of another group of “Omega” men – dreamers, allergic to work, needy – whom empowered women should avoid at all cost.
“None of you should have to be your boyfriend’s caretaker,” insists Dr Rhodes.
Her thesis is appealing – but not without critics. Indeed, it goes against a recent study of American census data by the National Bureau of Economic Research, which found a marked rise in “like marrying like”, with 48 per cent of graduates wedding graduates in 2005, up from 25 per cent in 1960.
Isn’t she just encouraging high-achieving women to marry beneath them? “I’m saying that you don’t have to put yourself in a gender box,” says Dr Rhodes. “It’s about expanding your horizons – finding a match who is supportive, respectful, who isn’t threatened by who you are or what you do.”
Of course, successful Alpha/Beta pairings have known this for years. Helena Morrissey, chief executive of a £50 billion investment fund, founder of the Thirty Percent Club which campaigns for women in boardrooms, and mother-of-nine, attributes her success to her husband giving up work to look after their children. Richard, a former journalist, is a Buddhist and artist who works from home.
Denis Thatcher was arguably another Beta – though a successful businessman, he was happy to spend much of his life in Margaret’s shadow. Other celebrity couples who make the dynamic work are Meryl Streep and Don Gummer (a sculptor), Julia Roberts and Danny Moder (a cameraman) and Cilla Black and her late husband-cum-manager Bobby Willis.
Though the strongest advocates of the Alpha female approach hail from across the Atlantic, Dr Rhodes claims her advice isn’t tied to ballsy Americans. “Maybe British women are a little shyer,” she admits, “but I’ve met lots who are very confident and assertive. There’s no reason they shouldn’t feel comfortable embracing their Alpha and getting together with a Beta man.” Indeed, she insists the model can inform all aspects of a thriving relationship: from making the first move to paying the bill on a date.
Ultimately, her thesis is heartening: Mr Good doesn’t have to be Mr Good Enough. Brilliant, brainy women shouldn’t feel confined to one socio-economic group of partners; they may even find themselves happier and more fulfilled with someone from a very different sphere of life.
But why should we take her advice? “I’ve been married for 50 years this summer,” reveals Dr Rhodes, “and I have a great Beta husband; an architect called Robert. He’s supportive, he makes me laugh, he’s not threatened by me and he pushes back when I get bossy. We have a wonderful marriage and we make each other happy every day.” So she must know a thing or two about getting it right.
'The Alpha Woman Meets Her Match’ by Sonya Rhodes with Susan Schneider (HarperCollins 360, £12.99), is published on May 22
The Times (And here, the story I grew up with. My worst nightmare and the truth of clearly, 99 percent of marriage - urgh. Glad it's all over. AZR)
Cut! The killing of Grace Kelly’s career
Grace Kelly, the subject of a new Nicole Kidman film, was heartbroken when her movie comeback was thwarted — not by her royal husband but by the people of Monaco (yeah, right. AZR)
Jeffrey Robinson
From where Grace sat at her desk in her office on the top floor of the palace tower she had a view looking at the yacht-laden harbour below and the tiny hill behind it that is Monte Carlo. She had decorated the room in pale greens and yellows. There were silver-framed photographs of her family scattered around and on the walls she had hung paintings and drawings, her favourite being a large oil of New York City.
Staring down at the blank piece of paper, the woman who had given up Hollywood fame as Grace Kelly to become Princess Grace of Monaco took her fountain pen and in her neat handwriting put “June 18th, 1962” at the top. Then she wrote, “Dear Hitch ...”
Grace ranked high on the list of the most written about, most photographed people in the world. This, however, was a private moment. Under public pressure and with deep reluctance she was signing away the chance to return to the screen.
It is the key moment in her life as a princess that Nicole Kidman highlights in the new film Grace of Monaco, which will open the Cannes film festival next month. She was, she would confess, heartbroken.
RUPERT ALLAN, a Hollywood journalist, first met Grace Kelly in London in the spring of 1952, four years before she became a princess. Introduced to her in a lift at the Savoy hotel, he couldn’t understand how this pretty but unobtrusive young blonde in a beige sweater and flat shoes — with no make-up on — could be the newcomer who had created such a stir in her first big film, High Noon.
Grace was becoming a household name, the role model for half a generation of young American girls. They dressed like her and wore their hair like her and tried to speak like her.
If you were a young girl growing up in America in those days and you were beautiful, what you wanted to hear most was someone saying, “You’re as pretty as Grace Kelly.”
Allan bumped into her again at a party given by Ava Gardner and a close friendship developed. He was on hand at the turning point in her life.
They were both at the Cannes film festival in 1955 when Grace reluctantly agreed to let Paris Match take her to Monte Carlo to be photographed with Prince Rainier, its ruler, for a cover story. Grace had hardly heard of him. She talked to Allan about wriggling out of it but then decided it would be rude not to go.
In the middle of the night before the photo session, a French labour union called a strike and turned off electricity supplies to Cannes. In the morning Grace got up at the Carlton hotel, washed her hair and plugged in her portable dryer. Nothing worked — and the Paris Match people were waiting downstairs.
Summoned to her room, Allan found her with soaking wet hair and struggling to find something to wear. With no electricity she couldn’t iron her clothes.
The only thing that wasn’t wrinkled was a black silk dress with large pink and green print flowers. It was beautiful but not suitable for pictures and she didn’t want to wear it. Allan convinced her she didn’t have a lot of choice.
Grace put it on, parted her wet hair in the middle and put some flowers in it, hoping it would dry on the 90-minute journey to Monte Carlo. As they left the room she cried: “This is terrible.”
Things went from bad to worse. En route the car carrying the photographers rammed the back of Grace’s limousine. By the time she got to Monaco she was starving, so she stopped for a ham sandwich. She arrived late at the palace — to find Rainier was not there.
For about 10 years, since the end of the Second World War, Prince Rainier III of Monaco had been considered the world’s most eligible bachelor. He was handsome. He owned a country. The woman he married would become a princess.
Although he worked during the week at his palace in the tiny principality he spent most weekends at his small villa in St Jean-Cap-Ferrat, across the border in France.
He shared it for six years with an actress, Gisèle Pascal, whom he had known since university. But by 1955 their “love affair ... had come to its own end”, he said many years later. Now 32, he was six years older than Grace.
She had to wait nearly an hour to see the prince. She fretted nervously. How old was he? Did he speak English?
Suddenly he walked into the room wearing a dark blue suit. He offered his hand. She gave a little curtsy and in perfect English he apologised for being late.
They walked together through the gardens to his private zoo, followed by the entourage from Paris Match and a flock of palace officials. He introduced her to his two young lions, a bunch of monkeys and a baby tiger, which he stroked through the cage as the photographers snapped away.
Back in Cannes that evening, Grace told Allan that the prince had been “charming”.
THAT winter Allan heard from a friend who had interviewed Rainier that the prince was planning a visit to America when he hoped to see “that young actress I met in Monaco ... Grace Kelly”.
Rainier’s comment came as a total surprise to Allan because Grace told him she had never heard from the prince after their photo session at the palace. She insisted there was “no romance” despite rumours in the European press.
Allan was all the more surprised, a few months later, when he heard on his car radio that Prince Rainier of Monaco had just announced his engagement to Grace Kelly: “I couldn’t believe it. I kept saying, that can’t be. I kept saying, they don’t even know each other.”
Except they did. The official version of their love story — that Grace and Rainier had no contact whatsoever between their first meeting in the spring of 1955 and his trip to the United States that December — is not the way it really happened. The true story of how they fell in love had never been revealed until Rainier spoke about it for my book about Grace.
Acknowledging that their first meeting had been less than private, he said that once they started to walk together in the garden with the entourage far enough behind them that they could relax a bit and talk, they started to realise they had some things in common.
They had both been lonely children. They were both shy. She told him she was only just learning what it was like to be a public figure, to be deprived of her privacy by the press. He told her he had suffered that all his life. She shared his love of animals and couldn’t get over the way he put his arms through the bars of the tiger’s cage and played with the animal as if it were nothing more than a house pet.
Rainier couldn’t recall exactly what he expected when he was told that Grace Kelly was coming to visit. He knew who she was but the idea of posing for publicity photos with a film star didn’t particularly excite him. When she confessed to him that she hadn’t wanted to do the photo session either, he realised they had that in common as well.
Afterwards, they wrote to each other regularly. The prince said it was easy that way. They could give each other time. Slowly they revealed more and more with each letter. She said later that she fell in love with who he was — “the man” — not what he was.
THE moment their engagement was announced, one of the first questions put to Rainier was: will Grace Kelly still make films? His answer was no. “Grace and I have agreed that she must give up her career. She could not possibly combine her royal duties with those of an acting career.”
It was a touchy subject because, at least in the beginning, Grace missed everything she had given up back in the States, including her career. She said it was over, but she occasionally confessed that she was saying this because she wanted to avoid any confrontation with her husband.
Not that there was much likelihood of resuming her career any time soon as, within a week of her marriage, Grace was pregnant. Caroline was born on a rainy morning in January 1957. Within five months Grace was pregnant again and Albert was delivered in March 1958. Seven years later Stéphanie came along to join her siblings. Grace told people she was too busy raising a family to make any more movies.
Alfred Hitchcock had other ideas, however. The British-born Hollywood director was turning 60. He was bald, shaped like an egg, had a very distinctive voice and was right at the top of the A-list of film makers.
Early in Grace’s career, Hitchcock had seen her first screen test and decided she was “a snow-covered volcano”. Casting her in a series of films he had turned her into a film star.
She had stayed in touch with the director ever since she had left Hollywood and she never hesitated to credit him with making her a star. “Hitch taught me everything about the cinema,” she would say. “It’s thanks to him that I understood that murder scenes should be shot like love scenes and love scenes like murder scenes.”
Towards the end of 1961, while working on a picture called Marnie, Hitchcock decided Grace would be perfect for the title role. Hitch liked her for what he called her “sexual elegance” and wanted her to make a comeback as a sexually frustrated kleptomaniac who is raped by her controlling husband.
When Hitchcock sent her the screenplay — saying he would cast her opposite Sean Connery, who had just broken all the box office records playing James Bond in Dr No — she liked the script and wanted to say yes.
She sensed that after seven years of marriage Rainier was starting to mellow about her career, becoming less dogmatic about her retirement.
They discussed it. He had some doubts and, frankly, so did she. But contrary to many stories that have come out about this since Grace’s death, Rainier maintained later that he was not against the idea.
“She was very anxious to get back into the swing of things. By that point I didn’t see anything wrong with it. So I suggested we combine her work on the film with a family vacation. They were supposed to shoot somewhere in New England over the summer. I proposed that we rent a house nearby and go with the children. She said, ‘If that’s your idea of a vacation, fine, except working on a film is not what I’d call vacation.’”
Both talked to Hitchcock. “The appeal of Marnie was Hitchcock,” Rainier said. “He was, I think, very fond of both of us and we both trusted him. Grace would never have considered a film with just anybody. But this was Hitchcock. He was totally in charge and I can’t imagine that he would have ever done anything or allowed anything to happen that might have in any way belittled the principality or Grace’s position as princess.”
ONCE Grace had convinced herself it would be right, and once Rainier had agreed, she told Hitch yes. He announced that Grace Kelly would be returning to acting; and that’s when the furore began.
First, MGM, her old studio, claimed she was still under contract and Hitchcock would have to buy her out. That was only the beginning.
While her lawyers decided that MGM was blowing smoke, rumours spread in Europe that Grace was only returning to films because the family was broke and needed the money. In response, Grace announced that her entire fee would be put into a trust to help needy children.
After that the French newspapers accused her of concocting the whole thing just to annoy President Charles de Gaulle. The French leader had been complaining for some time that French companies were basing themselves in Monaco to avoid paying French taxes.
Rainier always maintained Monaco’s sovereignty from France, which had been written into official treaties. But this time de Gaulle was determined to do something about it and was threatening Rainier with a clampdown.
The French press was suggesting that Grace was returning to films simply to emphasise to de Gaulle that Monaco would do whatever it pleased. Grace could see up close the pressure her husband was under.
That was followed by a letter from Pope John XXIII personally asking Grace, as a Catholic princess, not to make the film.
The people of Monaco had their own views too. The 26-year-old who had arrived as film star Grace Kelly was now a 32-year-old mother of two and first lady of the principality. Hollywood actresses made movies, Monaco’s princess did not. The Monégasques banded together and petitioned their prince to put an end to this.
Nadia Lacoste, who was Grace’s press secretary, remembered: “The prince couldn’t see why there was such a public reaction against Grace making the film. I told him that to be an actress was a trade, a profession, and that maybe being Princess of Monaco was also a profession but a completely different kind of profession.
“The prince looked at me and said, ‘You’re so old-fashioned.’ He pointed out that King Albert of Belgium used to climb mountains. I said, ‘But climbing mountains is a sport, making movies is a business.’”
Public opinion won out and Grace decided she would not do the film.
AT her desk in the palace tower, the princess continued her letter to Hitchcock: “It was heartbreaking for me to have to leave the picture” — the first time she’d confessed this to anyone other than her husband — “I was so excited about doing it and particularly about working with you again.
“When we meet I would like to explain to you myself all of the reasons, which is difficult to do by letter or through a third party — it is unfortunate that it had to happen this way and I am deeply sorry.
“Thank you, dear Hitch, for being so understanding and helpful — I hate disappointing you. I also hate the fact that there are probably many other ‘cattle’ [Hitchcock’s term for actors] who could play the part equally as well — despite that I hope to remain one of your ‘sacred cows’.”
She signed off “with deep affection”, underlining “deep”. With that, her career as Grace Kelly was undeniably over.
“I must say,” Rainier said years later, “that she made her decision without any influence from me. I thought it would be great fun for all of us, especially the kids. And I knew she wanted to make more films. It would also mean working again with Hitchcock, whom she adored.”
He said she accepted defeat reluctantly: “Yes, she missed performing. Very much so. But mostly she missed the stage, not the movies.”
He pointed out that in the mid-1970s she began to give poetry readings — notably at arts festivals in Britain and America. “She could do it without attracting much criticism,” Rainier said. “Although people are sometimes such idiots that they even criticised her for reading poetry in public. With some people you can never do anything right.”
Her need to perform did not diminish. Over dinner in early September 1982, Grace told her old friend Mary Wells Lawrence that now her children were grown, “I can finally do so many of the things I really want to do ... Now is my time.”
Lawrence recalled: “She said she wanted to perform more. She said she wanted to paint more. She said she had all sorts of things set up in different places. They were personal, creative projects that she was going to do, as opposed to being a mother and supporting the children and being an image for Monaco.”
A week later, driving down from the family farmhouse in the mountains above Monaco, Grace went off the road on a difficult bend. Stéphanie, her passenger, was badly hurt. Grace, who had suffered two severe strokes, was placed on a life-support machine. The following evening, after her family had said goodbye, it was turned off.
© Jeffrey Robinson 2013
Extracted from Grace of Monaco by Jeffrey Robinson, with a foreword by Nicole Kidman, to be published on Thursday at £8.99 by Weinstein Books. Copies can be ordered for £8.54, including postage, from The Sunday Times Bookshop on 0845 271 2135
The Times
Britain is world’s worst for sexism, UN inspector says
Ruth Gledhill
Sexism is more pervasive and “in your face” in Britain than in any other country, according to the United Nations’ investigator into violence against women.
Rashida Manjoo, a law professor from Cape Town, called for the national curriculum to teach children that sexism was wrong. She also accused a controversial immigration detention centre, where there have been reports of sexual misconduct, of denying her access to detainees.
Professor Manjoo, who had just completed a 16-day tour of the country, said it was clear that a “boys’ club” culture existed in Britain and that it was worse than in other countries.
She added: “Have I seen this level of sexist culture in other countries? It hasn’t been so ‘in your face’ in other countries. I haven’t seen that so pervasively in other countries. I’m sure it exists, but it wasn’t so much and so pervasive.”
Since 2009, Professor Manjoo, as UN special rapporteur, has reported on countries such as the United States, Jordan, Somalia, Croatia, Bosnia, Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands.
Publishing her interim report, she said: “I’m not sure what gives rise to a more visible presence of sexist portrayals of women and girls in this country in particular. What is clear is that there is a boys’ club sexist culture that exists and it does lead to perceptions about women and girls.”
She referred to “the easy availability of porn, the use of social media including influencing young children around images” and “harassment on the Tube”.
She added: “When you’re sitting on public transport and it’s OK to harass someone, to inappropriately touch them, it’s sexist culture. If I was walking down the street and there were whistles, which won’t happen at this stage in my life, that’s sexist culture.”
In describing the high levels of sexism tolerated in British society, she was responding to a question about the controversial Facebook group Women Who Eat on Tubes, with photographs of women eating bananas, baguettes and other foods on the London underground. It was described by its founder Tony Burke as an “observational study” but by critics as “voyeuristic” and “bullying”. It recently changed from an open to a closed group after criticism.
Professor Manjoo also met officials from the Department for Education to discuss including material in the national curriculum to address “stereotyping and devaluing of women”.
She insisted that it was the responsibility of the State to fight sexism and suggested that the subject should be in the national curriculum so that schools had no choice but to cover it. “The State has a responsibility to protect, to prevent, to punish, to provide effective remedies,” she said. “These are part of the State’s responsibility.”
She added that it was a matter of regret that, despite repeated requests, she had been denied access to Yarl’s Wood, the privately run immigration detention centre in Bedfordshire. She wanted to visit the centre after receiving reports of violations and wanted to verify allegations of abuse. “If there was nothing to hide, I should have been given access,” she said.
A spokeswoman for the Home Office said: “Violence against women and girls in any form is unacceptable and the government has shown its commitment to ending it. A tour of Yarl’s Wood was never agreed as part of this fact-finding mission.”
In February, a report by Raquel Rolnik, the UN rapporteur on housing, which called for the suspension of the withdrawal of housing benefit from council tenants with a spare room, was dismissed by the government as partisan and a “misleading Marxist diatribe”.
Ruth Gledhill
The Times
Letters to the Editor
The UK is dubbed sexism capital of the world
A UN special rapporteur has denounced the shocking levels of sexism in Britain
Sir, The UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women, Rashida Manjoo, has been reported as saying “Britain is world’s worst for sexism” (Apr 16). As a charity which works to eradicate violence against women in nearly 40 countries, ActionAid is shocked that this is the case, but from our experience the inequality Ms Manjoo is describing is, sadly, the norm for most women globally.
Ms Manjoo makes an important link between austerity measures, poverty and sexism. It is no surprise that in Africa, according to a recent UN study, nearly one in two women experience sexual violence, a proportion closely followed by south-east Asia.
Sexism and the violence that accompanies it need serious global attention and action, considering the 96 per cent of women who have undergone female genital mutilation in Egypt, or the systematic use of rape in the Congo. Or even how in Pakistan and India girls have a 30 to 50 per cent higher chance of dying before they turn 5 than boys. It’s important to focus on empowering women and girls globally, and building the political will, legal and government capacity to prevent and respond to violence against women and girls wherever it happens.
Janet Convery
ActionAid
The Times
The Sunday Times
Everyday Sexism by Laura Bates
The shocking posts in this book provide powerful evidence that sexism is on the increase in society
Laura Bates began her anti-sexism crusade in March 2012: “It was just another week of little pinpricks: the man who appeared as I sat outside a cafe, seized my hand and refused to let go; the guy who followed me off the bus and lewdly propositioned me all the way to my front door; the man who made a sexual gesture…as I walked wearily home.”
Bates began to tot up these incidents. Then she began to wonder if other women were also fed up with living their lives in a cesspit of innuendo, sexual baiting, groping and worse.
The answer from her friends was a resounding yes, so she set up Everyday Sexism, a website where women could post their experiences. In seven weeks, there were more than 1,000 posts. By the end of 2013, that had risen to 50,000 and her Twitter address @EverydaySexism and the site were a global phenomenon, spearheading a resurgent sense of feminism among young women.
This book is her account of that wild ride, but most compelling are the posts she reproduces, which range from catalogues of lecherous remarks, in offices, on buses, in schools etc, to horrendous tales of sexual assault including rape.
This is a passionate tome. Bates, a young journalist before all this began, writes a decent sentence and the posts are so forceful that they tell the story for her (each chapter is prefaced with drearily familiar statistics charting female “progress” such as that only 20% of FTSE directors and 5% of scientists in the Royal Society are women).
Her thesis is that small acts of sexism matter because they groom women for the bad stuff. When, she argues, we put up with the hand on the bum, the cat-calling builder, or the bosoms on Page Three, society is saying that it is allowable to objectify, humiliate and silence women. When women are taught not to complain when they are discomfited or shamed by this kind of chat, that also primes them not to complain when they are touched or abused.
To begin with I wasn’t sure about that. But the book — and posts such as this — are cumulatively powerful. “A boy hit on me... I said I didn’t want to go but he pulled me into the woods and lay me down in a ditch. He started to put his hands down my knickers and I told him no… He whispered me to shhh, like I was a child. I was a child. I think I let him do that because I didn’t really know what was right and wrong. I didn’t know how to act.”
It is easy for the older generation to shrug at some of this, sigh that we had to deal with frisky chaps in taxis and it didn’t kill us, so young women should just get on with it. But what most adults don’t realise is that rather than sexism decreasing in our “equal” society, when it comes to misogyny the teen world is a dark, dark place and we are going backwards. A new generation of boys is being introduced to sex through violent and degrading internet porn.
“My younger brother’s 13. He had his friends round… [They were] discussing girls in their class in three categories, ‘frigid’, ‘sluts’ and ‘would like to rape’,” posts one 16-year-old. Just imagine how terrifying pornographic images of women being subjugated, humiliated, hurt and punished are to an innocent girl. “I am 13… The boys at school keep sending us these videos of sex…and it looks so horrible and like it hurts…everyone at school keeps acting like it’s normal…boys keep asking me have I done it and can I do it with them and showing me the horrible pictures and things.”
It is not only teens. The chapter on university life is just as chilling. The posts describe a culture where every fancy-dress event involves women dressing as “slags” or “hoes” and “lads” banter about rape and revel in humiliating their conquests. Female students are encouraged by boys, porn and magazines to look “hot” (90% say they want to be thin more than anything else) and are then harassed by men who want to do unspeakable things to them. So much for sexual equality in 2014.
Are the posts made up? I doubt it. The website ascertains that they come from individual computers by checking Internet Protocol addresses, and the themes are so recurrent that Everyday Sexism feels like truth. Men who have stumbled upon the site are convinced, too. “I had no idea these things happened to women… I am shocked,” posted one.
Bates implores her readers to step in if they see a woman being catcalled, touched up on the Tube, or assaulted, and not to stand by and let it be the woman’s problem. The book ends with a call to action. I’d settle for society just taking on board what we are collectively doing to our young women
Simon & Schuster £14.99/ebook £7.99 pp384
Buy for £11.99 (including p&p) from the ST Bookshop
Ebook £7.99
http://features.thesundaytimes.co.uk/public/books/pdf-reader/reader/web/?file=1404091731_laura-bates_everyday-sexism.pdf
My New World. Amera Ziganii Rao
I am a Londoner. Today I reclaim and re-love that role and position in life. I am a true Londoner.
I am also a single, lone, vocational, busy human being, despite the walking stick and all that that means, internally and externally.
I am also a single, lone, vocational, busy WOMAN.
I have arrived. And I still love who I love. Fascism can heal by itself at last. My work and my interest is over. Come or don't come. It's not my problem anymore. My Temple work comes first and last. My Temple work/Professional creative life is me. My man is finally outside of me. My Chattel life even as a Scheherazade healer, is over. I am proud of what I have done. And even prouder of surviving the pain and hardship of letting it go.
I need no one and I want no one. Romance and partnership and male family finally come second. The rest I let go of a long time ago. I need no one and want no one. The true state of existence. The privilege of having no responsibilities other than looking after myself. A privilege for a woman indeed.
And as I see the looks and fear today, the non London Easter crowd who look at you as if you were one of the sights to see - I am in Covent Garden today - and of course the male judgment, will to punish and hatred - I smile in my new fears of going professional.
I have been built into a warrior, over 17 years. So many healers, people and unseen beings have built this woman, this High Priestess out of nothing. Inner power indeed. And for a purpose, much bigger than myself.
I am to launch in the middle of the mire, in the middle of the mob and even in the middle of domestic 'Orkship' with my man's 'second cousin' trying to sabotage from above. This is the story. How to become despite everyone. How to break through the human obstacles of life. How to shine despite everyone. How to break through all the shit.
The internal stage is just stage one. The personal alchemy to become. Then comes the second journey. To alchemise away from everyone else. So that, right in the middle of the mob, you shine. Not as a beloved son or daughter, as is the fascist archetype in a fascist and spiritless world. But as a true human being. A true HUMAN being. A High Priestess. A true creative. A true being.
Alone.
I'm a Londoner. And I have now begun. I am arrived. And now I get to tell the story. How I became and how anyone else can do it too. Become who you were born to be. You'll love it. I'll be speaking soon. My Shoebox Enterprise begins.
I am my message. My message is me.
NATURAL BORN MYSTIC::THE FEMALE HOLOCAUST™ and the female priest holocaust too. Anyone can overcome. Anyone can be free.
Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014
The Times
It’s your money, sister. Make it work
Women are increasingly the breadwinner yet remain financially disadvantaged. Heather McGregor, aka Mrs Moneypenny, explains how they can secure their future
Heather McGregor
Official figures suggest we should all be feeling much jollier about our finances, as real wages rise faster than the cost of living for the first time since 2008, although it will be a while before real wages are back to the level they were before the financial crisis. Apparently, once tax cuts are taken into account, all but the top 10% of us are already better off.
After six years of scrimping and saving it looks as if there might finally be something left over to invest as we plan for our future. If you have spent the past few years worrying about money, now might be the time to invest the same amount of time planning to take control of your finances. Especially if you are a woman. In the 21st century, sisters, we can — and we need to — do it for ourselves.
Before we proceed, let me put my cards on the table. I am not a financial adviser. What I am is a working mother with three children who are all, at the time of writing, financially dependent on me, which is why I refer to them as Cost Centres #1, #2 and #3. I have a mortgage at the age of 52 which, by rights, should have been paid off long ago and I have a chronically underfunded pension.
I still enjoy the challenge of money. It is inextricably linked to bigger, sexier issues: confidence, family, fun, freedom. But women have always taken a back seat when it comes to finances.
Women influence all the major spending decisions — which car, which house, which holiday and so on — but once the decision has been made it is often the man who arranges the mortgage, works out where the car finance will come from or writes the cheque for the holiday.
There are compelling reasons why women need to make sure they take control of their own financial future. For a start, they live longer. While the longevity gap is closing in the developed world, women still outlast men. Until it was made illegal under European Union laws, life insurance companies priced this differential into their products and women were at a disadvantage. But even with equal access to financial products, women still have to think more about how they are going to pay for what may be a long retirement.
Astonishingly, I am still married to my husband after 25 years. But the odds are against us: government figures for England and Wales in 2011 showed that 40% of women were on their own, many of whom had not planned to be. When you get married or move in with someone you hope to stay together. You certainly hope your partner will not die before you. But this does happen.
Even if you are not on your own the relationship may not be a source of financial security. If your partner is still married to someone else or has financial obligations to a previous family, that will severely affect your financial position.
Women usually earn less and the prospect of “pensioner poverty” is a serious concern for them as they approach retirement. Women are more likely than men to work part-time and therefore will have contributed less to their pensions.
Even the new system of auto-enrolment — whereby employers are required to provide employees with access to a workplace pension scheme and also to contribute to it — will exclude a disproportionately larger percentage of women than men. This is because the employer’s duty to auto-enrol staff is restricted to employees with a specified minimum income.
At the time of writing, 69% of women aged between 65 and 69 are receiving less than the full basic state pension, compared with only 15% of men. For the younger generation it is increasingly the case that the main breadwinner in the household may be the woman. More than 2.2m mothers are breadwinners, a number that has almost doubled in the past 15 years, which means that almost one in three of all working mothers with dependent children is now the primary breadwinner for her family.
This brings a whole new set of financial challenges. If you are the one with the 14-hour day and the tedious commute, it is tempting to hand over everything administrative at home, including the family finances, to the person who has more time. But should you do that in blind faith? This is your money, which you have worked hard for. You should know how it is being used and be able to express a view on all the key financial decisions.
Ten of the things you should do to take control of your financial future:
- Invest an hour a week in your own finances. Whether it is doing one of the ideas listed below, or simply reading some relevant articles, everyone should invest time in learning more about the money in their life — or lack of it.
- Make sure your credit rating is the highest it can be. Find out what your rating is and whether there are inaccuracies that you should correct. You can get free access to your credit report at experian. co.uk. Frequently people are not on the electoral roll or have paid off arrears that still show on the report and are then penalised when seeking a mortgage or a credit card.
- Know everything about your mortgage. How much do you still owe, what interest rate are you paying, is there a penalty clause, what year will it be paid off? Could you get a cheaper rate and, if so, pay it off earlier? (Tip: call the Which? helpline to ask for advice.)
- Reduce the cost of your credit cards. What cards do you have? What interest rates do they charge? Do you have any balances on any of them? If so, could you repay these more cheaply by getting a different card?
- Do you know what all your direct debits are? Get your bank statements and credit card statements out and analyse what you spend every month. As well as educating yourself, this will be useful if you apply for a new mortgage. Under rules that came into force this month, mortgage lenders will want a lot more information about your spending habits.
- Save money. Even if you think you can’t afford it, open an Isa and set up a direct debit to go out the day after you get paid. Even £10 a month is better than nothing.
- If you have one or more cash Isas from previous years, are you getting the best interest rates? Have a look at a money comparison website and see if you would be better off elsewhere. Then swap. It will take time. It is worth it.
- Check that you are getting the cheapest insurance. I ask everyone I know if they shopped around when their renewal came up and most say they just renewed with their existing provider. Apathy is the enemy of frugality.
- Review your pension arrangements. Do you have a pension, either in the workplace or elsewhere, and do you know which funds it is invested in? Get out your most recent pension statement and read it through. If you want to change the investments, or don’t understand the statement, call the customer service line of your pension provider and ask them to talk you through it.
- Make or update your will and also your “letter of wish” to the trustees of any company life insurance scheme. A shocking 60% of people in the UK have not made a will. Have you? If not, then make one. If yes, is it up to date? If not, get it up to date (if you have had a child or got married or divorced since you made the will, it is not up to date). Does your employer pay death-in-service benefits? If so, do the trustees have your wishes in writing and is that up to date?
Heather McGregor is a columnist for the Financial Times. Her book, Mrs Moneypenny’s Financial Advice for Independent Women, is published by Penguin on Thursday
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky
..my book Madame Blavatsky: The Mother of Modern Spirituality, due to be published by Penguin Books in October 2012. In it, I pose a question that runs throughout the book: why is it that, although she was enormously influential, both in the esoteric worlds and in mainstream culture, to the wider public Madame Blavatsky still remains relatively unknown? One answer is that even within the spiritual and esoteric community, she is not really well-known, by which I mean ‘accurately’ known. If anything, what most people know of her is the ‘Blavatsky legend’, a collection of myths and misconceptions that she herself contributed to greatly. Others, such as her relatives, and many journalists, biographers, critics and devotees, have also made their contribution to it. While researching my book, this is what I came across time and again. It took some effort to get past this, but as I say in the book, it was well worth it, because underneath the stories and stereotypes, what I discovered was a remarkable, vital and powerful figures, who deserves to stand beside the other titans of the nineteenth century. Perhaps this small taste conveys that sense and will interest readers in finding out more.
Of all the names associated with modern spirituality, that of Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky – or HPB, as she preferred to be called – is surely one of the most controversial. Although she died more than a century ago, Blavatsky’s name still turns up in serious discussions about ‘ancient wisdom’, ‘secret teachings’ and ‘inner knowledge’, and it is generally agreed that her Theosophical Society, which she founded in New York in 1875, with her colleagues Henry Steel Olcott and William Quan Judge, was more or less the official starting point of the modern spiritual revival. By ‘modern spiritual revival’, I mean our contemporary widespread interest in a direct, immediate knowledge and experience of spiritual reality, and in a more profound relationship to the cosmos than traditional religions and mainstream science can provide. Represented by a heterogenous collection of different occult, esoteric, or spiritual pursuits, today this revival is popularly, if often mistakenly, associated with the ‘new age’. This grassroots hunger for a sense of meaning and purpose that the official organs can no longer supply can be traced to the nineteenth century and can be said, I believe, to have been inspired by Blavatsky. In fact, as early as 1970, in an article for McCall’s magazine, the novelist Kurt Vonnegut dubbed Blavatsky ‘ the founding Mother of the Occult in America’......
Gary Lachman
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, continued
....To press my point: No one who meditates, or considers himself a Buddhist, or is interested in reincarnation, or has thought about karma, or pursues ‘higher consciousness’, or has wondered about Atlantis, or thinks the ancients mighty have known a few things that we don’t, or reads about esotericism, or who frequents an ‘alternative’ health centre or food shop, would be aware of it if modern spirituality somehow became ‘HPB free’. And this, of course, would include quite a few people who have never heard of Blavatsky, or who have only the vaguest idea of what Theosophy is or of its place in the history of western consciousness. Which is to say most people. If nothing else, our endless fascination with the ‘wisdom of the East’ would not have arrived, or would have taken much longer to get here, if it were not for her efforts and those of her early followers. It’s been said that all of modern Russian literature emerged from Nikolai Gogol’s short story, ‘The Overcoat’. It can equally be said that practically all modern occultism and esotericism emerged from the ample bosom of his younger countrywoman and contemporary, HPB.
Yet, although she was one of the most remarkable women of the nineteenth century, to the general public, Blavatsky is virtually unknown......
Gary Lachman
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, continued
....When I’ve mentioned her in recent times more often than not the response was a shaking head and a baffled look, although a few acquaintances mustered some questions like ‘Wasn’t she a psychic?’ or a ‘fraud’? or a ‘charlatan’? Yet, those who are aware of her, and of her contribution to western thought, have a different view. Like the historian of esotericism Christopher Bamford, they wonder why she is not, as Bamford believes she should be, counted with Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud as one of the ‘creators of the twentieth century’?....
(yeah, I wonder why. AZR)
Gary Lachman
Sadler's Wells. Havana Rakatan
Ooh, that leaves a bitter taste. Saw the advert on my night travels around the late cafes - I'm a Londoner - Nice to remember that male fascism at least tolerates and supports female directors, professionally, if not personally. Maybe next century it will extend to the women you love. But oh, how bitter. And anyone who hasn't seen it, check it out. Havana Rakatan. The real thing.
Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014
And God Created Woman ll Pt lll (ll). A Self Portrait
AMERA ZIGANII RAO: A PROFILE
FEMINIST AND HUMAN RIGHTS, METAPHYSICAL PHILOSOPHER. WRITER. MENTALIST AND ARTIST
AMERA ZIGANII RAO ALCHEMY & LIBERATION & HUMANITY™
The Macho Intellectual Consciousness Passion of the Visceral Soul.
Amera Ziganii Rao © 2011
Consciousness. The politics of the 21st century. The Lost Knowledge. Forget trying to change the world. Change yourself. It changes your own world that changes THE world.
Amera Ziganii Rao © 2011
Sexuality, non religious 'Wizard' and 'Witch' spirituality (the Gnostic intelligence of esoteric and consciousness exploration, ie wisdom and love) and human rights are the least fashionable things and the most uncomfortable things on the planet. And the things human beings have been damning and condemning for 8000 years. And the things that most people are absolutely fascinated by. What a shame. How bourgeois. How ordinary. How ego.
Amera Ziganii Rao © 2011
The Sacred Whore High Priestess Society™
The Super Sacred Brother Lover™
The Return To The Source. Ascension.
The Sacred Whore High Priestess Society™. When we were giants. All of us. When you did more than rape me.
Amera Ziganii Rao © 2013
Neo Feminist™, Post Tribe Social Reformer™ and Sacred Sexualist™. Human Rights Healer. Metaphysical Philosopher, Writer, Spiritual Intelligence Teacher, Hierophant (Interpreter of The Universe) and Mentalist Self Actualiser.
I can help you grow power, from nothing.
Alchemy & Liberation & Humanity™.
Amera Ziganii Rao © 2013
The Sacred Whore High Priestess Hierophant™ and Sacred Pimp Warrior Protector, Brother Lover™ Society. The kings and queens of old. Angels and Sorcerers together in each of themselves and in the other. The Wizard life. Forever. Living and loving from The Source. Sourcery, Carlos Castaneda first said. I'll say it again. Sourcerers together. Living a life worth living. At last.
Amera Ziganii Rao © 2013
Witches are healers. Witches are the Love Healers and SOURCErers of The Lost World, when we were the giant warriors. We were good and so were were you. 'The World of Men'. The Tribe of Misogyny and Bourgeois™.
Gives us all a bad name. And poisons all hearts.
Amera Ziganii Rao © 2013
Feminist Lolita Intellectuals™. You lucky man. A place at the table, a place at the Executive Table. That's all. The rest is easy.
Amera Ziganii Rao © 2013
THE EVOLUTION OF HUMAN RIGHTS: APPLIED CONSCIOUSNESS™, NEO FEMINISM™, METAPHYSICAL PHILOSOPHY & SACRED SEXUALISM™. POST TRIBE SOCIAL REFORM™. POWER IS THE NEW LOVE. FREEDOM + HOPELESSNESS + SEX. NIHILISM FOR A SUCCESSFUL LIFE™ THE LOST KNOWLEDGE™ THE WIZARDRY OF BEING™ POLITICAL SPIRITUALITY™ TRUE NEW LOVE. BEYOND THE REVOLUTION™
SOCIAL REFORM. THE FIGHT FOR FREEDOM AND LOVE. SHAMANISM. PHILOSOPHY. TRUE (UNIVERSAL) LOVE. NEO FEMINISM™. ANTI MISOGYNY. THE ARTIST'S WAY. WIZARDRY. TRUE INTELLECTUALISM™. WISDOM. GONZO SPIRITUALITY. NIHILISM. SEX. SOUL. GOD, THE MOTHER, THE UNIVERSE™. SPIRITUAL EXISTENTIALISM™. THE VOID OF CREATION™. ALCHEMY & LIBERATION & HUMANITY™. HELL. SUFFERING. GROWTH. ASCENSION. LOVE. LIFE. DEATH. WARLORDS OF LIGHT™ TRUE LOVE & TRUE SEX. THE POST TRIBE SOCIETY™
The Company.
Writer, Speaker and Enlightener, Amera Ziganii Rao, is now putting together a comprehensive and unique programme of Alchemy & Liberation & Humanity™. A programme of learning that is specifically about one particular kind of woman. And one particular kind of man. The Sacred Whore High Priestess™ and the Sacred Whore High Priest™, and the true society that they come from and the one they, in particular, she can and has to return to and that anyone can join her and him in. This is about Paradise on Earth.
This is about The Sacred Whore High Priestess™ and the Sacred Whore High Priest™, and the Alchemy and Liberation and Humanity that is for all as a result of their healing and in particular, hers. This is about the kind of woman who is at the bottom of the pile in a Patriarchal Toilet Tribe from Hell Society™, the norm, the conventional world and the world of the Tribe. This is about the kind of man who is next in line from the bottom. The sensitive man and the female chattel. The High Priestess and High Priest of a profane society, that has long forgotten who they are.
This is about being at the bottom of the pile, for the forgotten and strangled shamans, and for her, the story of escape. Abused by her family, her friends, her men, her whole society, by the very nature of who she is and who they are and what has happened on this Earth. It is about women of love, of Spirit and of sex. It is about men of love, of Spirit and of sex. It is about the Cinderellas of this world. It is about the The Sacred Whore High Priestess™. Who she is and how, loving her is the secret to Paradise on Earth and how we have been living a lie for 8000+ years. A lie of male (non High Priest) religion with a male ‘God’ and with Patriarchs and Patriarchal types and Matriarchs and Matriarchal types ruling over us and making our lives hell, all in the name of family, the tribe and the way things are and should remain. Hate, fascism and profanity. A sick society that vilifies, more than anyone else, the The Sacred Whore High Priestess™, just because it was told to. A sick society that calls her Eve. A sick society that has forgotten who we all are, let alone the The Sacred Whore High Priestess™ and the Sacred Whore High Priest™. This is about us remembering and knowing who WE are.
This is a programme of healing for the The Sacred Whore High Priestess™, and the Sacred Whore High Priest™, to take them and particularly, her, from monstrous levels of low self esteem and lack of self knowledge, back to herself and it is a programme for all those who truly want to love her, and indeed, him. This is a programme for the greatest carers on Earth, who are vilified, destroyed, ridiculed, ignored, abused, used, misused and hated for being everything that those who would steal from us are not. This is a programme to turn Cinderellas into The Sacred Whore High Priestesses and for anyone who wants to love her or live by the values of the The Sacred Whore High Priestess Society™. And this is a programme to turn sensitive men into Sacred Whore High Priests™ and for anyone who wants to love him and live by the values of the The Sacred Whore High Priestess™ and High Priest Society. Love, humanity, Spirit and sex. This is a programme to reverse 8000+ years of witch burning, women hating and healer ridicule. This is about the The Sacred Whore High Priestess™ and all those who would love her and live by her values.
This is about the chance for Paradise on Earth. This is a programme for the most beautiful, kind hearted, wounded women and men on this planet. A programme of how to implement a system of how to beat life, how to survive life and how to resurrect from the grief that is a true life. Alchemy and Liberation and Humanity of the lower mind into the higher mind, the soul and the inner heart and therefore one's true, confident, ‘happy’, successful, creative, sexual, sensual, individual, intelligent, emotionally healed, capable of loving and being loved self. How to turn grief into creation and survive and thrive, despite all the shit, all the pain and all the hurt. How to live in a world of madness, hollowness and cruelty and how to be a winner. How to stand up for oneself and to take back the power that has been stolen from anyone with heart, Spirit and sex. The art and science of Alchemy.
This is a programme, based on my scholarly and non scholarly work over 15 years (so far), if not for my whole life, and my extensive and intense, visceral experiences of self transformation from resignation, cynicism and despair to a state of relative bliss, and above all, the right to be. The programme and the courses and my speaking and indeed my forthcoming book, will cover the method of change. The psychological, sociological, spiritual, cultural, political, emotional and physical and even anthropological methods of change. Why we are here. Who the Sacred Whore High Priestess™ is and why she is here. And who the Sacred Whore High Priest™ is. Why we are here. Who we are and what we are and why we are. The beauty and glory of the truth. The meaning of life, no less. This will be on offer in the future.
My first book of consciousness, my first book of the spiritual politics of humanity, of authentic power and of self love and strength. A comprehensive series of online courses, live events and audio and visual material. Books, live events, CDs and DVDs. And one on one personal empowerment consultations. The Amera Ziganii Rao Method of Change™. The right to be and the way to have the right to be. And indeed, how to maintain the will to live without love. How to BE unconditional, self sufficient, self caring, self love. The right to be and the will to be and the unparalleled success that comes with that. The Lost Knowledge™. HOW to live. And how to heal others, the profane and the sick and the soulless. The others. My Business and that of any Sacred Whore High Priestess™ and Sacred Whore High Priest™, is Human Rights, The Right to a Sexual Society, Self Actualisation and Freedom.
My Business is To Overthrow Fascism, in the Home and in the Country. My business is also mastering destiny. Overthrowing the ultimate 'fascism'. Our journey on Earth and The Return To The Source. Our healing, our ascension and our redemption. Fate. The daily crucifixions of a true life, the challenges and the fury of being healers and people of love on a planet like Earth.
Submitting to the journey to liberate and evolve oneself, through following one's heart, however much heartbreak and devastation it leads to on the long long long journey to freedom and then the longer journey to happiness. 'Long Road to Freedom', as Nelson Mandela says. My business is always taking risks, never giving up and making the endless sacrifices it takes to become whole. Enlightenment, Nirvana and then Parinirvana and beyond. My business is pain. My business is bliss.
My business is seeing the truly glory of Spirit on Earth. The Sacred Whore High Priestess Society™ and all that it is. Spirit, humanity, sex and love again at last. And the end of our legacy as either servants or witches or unpaid carers or indeed, ignored mistresses, other women, other men even, and the weirdos that are at the bottom of society. This is our world and it is time to take it back and I can show you how. And that makes my life, truly, worth living.
I want you to feel the way I do. Alive, with the right to be and the belligerence to exist in this profane and male ‘God’ led world of male supremacy, female supremacy, domestic, casual fascism, tribe rules from hell, with beautiful and kind, love intelligence laden, female and male Cinderella warriors at the bottom, caring for everyone else and getting nothing but hatred, ridicule and isolation for it. The meek are already inheriting the Earth and I can show you how.
Amera Ziganii Rao © 2012
I am THE High Priestess Monarch of the ancient past and I forgive you for becoming enslaved and taken over by the machines of the alien reptile force that invaded and took over Earth 8000 years ago. They taught you to hate me and my kind and you believed them. They told you I and my kind were dictators and that you were slaves, when all we had done was love you, honour you as companions and above all, we had let you just live.
We were the holy communers, the ones who gave birth to human beings, the leaders of society, the creators of society, the vehicles of Divinity on Earth and the channels of wisdom. The ones who looked after everything and the ones who built everything and ran everything, because we could. And because we loved it. We are and were the force of creation. And you loved us and you lived.
But they told you that you ‘deserved’ power too and that we were the ones standing in your way. And you believed them. The oldest ‘divide and rule’ strategy of hate in history and it worked. They used it and you bought it, hook, line and sinker. You had to give up sex, love, magic and your own spiritual gifts and you burnt, destroyed and violated me for 8000 years.
The world calls that male supremacy. And indeed, family supremacy, Matriarchal supremacy and supremacy of the material world and all who believe in it. Men and women like you. When all that you are are slaves to a reptile force to generate hate energy for them to live and thrive and vampire the human race. The puppets of a hate force, that chose to destroy women and men like me, for hate to grow, so they could live. You bought it and it worked. The greatest fraud in the history of the world.
I am THE High Priestess Monarch of the ancient past and I forgive you for becoming enslaved and taken over by the machines of the alien reptile force that invaded and took over Earth 8000 years ago. They taught you to hate me and my kind and you believed them. They taught you that my mind was evil. My mind, my sex, my body and my ways of life.
The humanity, the glory of sexuality and the glory of creation and creativity and the glory of Divinity in each and every one of us. Our souls. They taught you that human beings are separate from Divinity, that sex was wrong and that women who have minds of their own are uppity slaves. They vilified us but much much worse than that, they destroyed your relationship with all that is unseen, all that we honour and love.
They taught you to hate what is really God. By teaching you to hate us, you hated all that is good in yourselves. They taught you to hate the light. They taught you to kill us. The daughters of The Universe. The High Priestesses of God. The Spiritual Mothers. The Sacred Whore High Priestess Avatars of The Universe™. The Sacred Army of Love on Earth.
The Shamans, the Mystics and the Communers. The Hierophants.
They called me Eve and blamed me for the downfall of the human race and created the awesome profanity that is religion. Of men, by men and from men. Of reptiles, by reptiles and from reptiles. Christianity, Islam and Judaism and every other philosophy around the world was poisoned. There are no female spiritual leaders left. It is all profanity. They chose you to represent them because they wanted to divide us and they did. They told you to hate me. And you believed them. Now I am back and I forgive you.
I forgive you because I can. Because I came here to save your soul. And because I finally know who I am. I am THE High Priestess Monarch of the ancient past. I came here to return your soul to The Source. God, The Mother, The Universe. To return you to what is really God. Because I love you. And because She loves you and your kind, whatever you have done.
Whatever you have done to me and whatever you have done to Her. And most of all, whatever you have done to yourself. We forgive you. This is your redemption. Your freedom and your ascension. We are here to save your soul.
Amera Ziganii Rao © 2012
You bought the Sacred Whore like a piece of meat and you called that a wife. Your trophy wives. Your dancing girls. Your chattel and serving girls. Your piece of beauty. You bought us like you would cattle. Then you called it wives. Now you call it prostitution. The High Priestesses of the real God. You bought us to buy God, The Mother, The Universe and you caged us, separated us from our Divine gifts and skills in the Temple and drove us mad and then lost interest in us, because we had no gifts left, no excitement, no hunter in ourselves and no hope or joy left. Then you just called us mad and discarded us. You called us evil and you call love obedience, even though it had already killed us. You moved into our Temples and you played with the divination tools and thought you communed. The destruction of Atlantis was your gift.
You stole us from God, The Mother, The Universe and you tried to usurp us. You vilified us, enslaved us and you still envy us today. You call it intuition. You might want to think about this when you hate us out of your jealousy. The mystic gene means physical tortuous pain and taking on the empathy of the human race. All their pains, evils and dark thoughts. We see and feel everything. We make crucial sacrifices to be near Spirit and the unseen and we go without for years. To be shaman is not glamour. I make it glamour. To be shaman is a specific Samurai existence, ascetic and harsh. We commune to be guides. And you take that and you shame yourselves because you just want the meat. You didn’t just want the meat. You wanted our beauty of spirit, our personalities and our love and kindness. And you destroyed them, because you caged us and called us wife.
Amera Ziganii Rao © 2012
The High Priestess Sacred Whores, the High Priests and the true protectors. Those who do not have the gift like either the High Priests or especially like the highest of all, the High Priestess Sacred Whores but who honour, protect and facilitate them to the world. Who honour the Shaman Sacred Whores of this world most of all, and who know who they are and who they are not. Who know the difference, who do not envy and who protect and love the representatives of Spirit, GOD, THE MOTHER, THE UNIVERSE, on Earth. Who honour their wisdom and who honour the latent Shaman in themselves too and who honour the communing ability of the High Priestess Sacred Whores. The non violators. Our only friends. The New Society exists. It is called Enlightenment. It is called Love. It is The Holy Grail.
Amera Ziganii Rao © 2012
The master race. It's all a lie. You are brought up to be a despot king and it is only your sister who ever tells you that you have become a pratt. The master race is all a lie. There are no kings in an equal world. Your father was misinformed. What he brought you up to be was a killer. Pure and simple. A misogynist. A modern misogynist. A polite killer.
Amera Ziganii Rao © 2011
I enter the magical hours of pure feeling, pure thought, pure imagination and I think and I write and I 'mysticise' the Universe. I escape at will, the truth of my humanless, Samurai solitude, and I pursue the truth of love in myself and in everyone else. I am philosopher. I am shaman. I am alone. I frontier the Soul to be spirit on Earth.
Amera Ziganii Rao © 2011
To trust your soul is to have courage. The courage to ‘get out of the way’. It takes a commitment to courage, a changing of the very matter of one’s access to courage, one’s relationship with courage and becoming the total renegade of an individual you have to, to become soul. It is that rare. ‘Getting out of the way’ takes a commitment to love and loving and being of love, no matter what. And frankly, that means redefining what love is, EVERY STEP OF THE WAY. Finding out what love really is and getting rid of the bullshit we think it is. Love. Soul. Power. It takes courage to be soul. Courage, courage and courage. The rest is easy. Soul is soul. Finally it is an absolute relief to get out of the way. The life of soul may be hair raising, treacherous and mind numbingly arduous. But it is a life of no regrets. Courage. The key to soul. Just give it a go. Wear that hat, say what’s on your mind, dream your dreams again, dream your dreams at all and just smile through the hate. Including one’s doubt. Courage. ‘Kill’ when you have to, especially yourself, and smile the rest of the time and cry when you need to. Always cry. Earth is a battlefield and crying is the way to win. Soul is a way of life. The natural way. Courage is ‘all’ it takes. We learnt the rules, only so we could break them. The rest is the art of life. Creation. Creating oneself again and again and again. Soul. The only way of life worth anything. Otherwise, we are just waiting to die. We don’t need to. We can live. It’s called soul.
Amera Ziganii Rao © 2013
Self esteem. True, authentic, self knowing, self esteem. The one that includes the sex, the primal, the primitive, the animal, the real. The one that includes humanity and a state of unconditional love. Non needing, non greedy, non controlling, non afraid, non negative and non inhumane and non angry. Self esteem. What ego really is, in its true essence. The physical vehicle of self esteem. The physical vehicle of action, reaction, mastery, ‘misstery’, love and war, tenderness and sexuality. Humanity and human. The beautiful, crafted, styled, educated, aware, sincere, active, visceral, sexual, super sexual, heart led, sensitive, humane, courageous and ethical, hopeful ego. The instinct. The intuition. The magic. The primal. The whole. The whole Soul.
Amera Ziganii Rao © 2013
I can feel your sexuality. I love it. My beautiful, filthy, dominating, obsessed, possessed, hedonistic, nihilistic, Sacred beast of a man. Because those of us who are the most sexual, what do we think, in the truth context of the The Sacred Whore High Priestess™, and The Sacred Whore High Priestess (Priest) Society™, that means? We are the most spiritual. The most sexual are in fact the most spiritual. Spirituality being the communing between Mortal and The High Priestess (Priest) to reach ecstasy. Orgasm. Bliss. The most active, dirty minded, passionate, non reproductive, hedonistic, glorious, worthwhile, point of life, meditation or prayer or communing on Earth. THE way to reach God, The Mother, The Universe™. THE way to happiness. Humanity. Joy. Hope. Love. Sex. Sex. Our sex. Sex.
Amera Ziganii Rao © 2011
Love takes courage. Love takes being ready. Love takes love.
Amera Ziganii Rao © 2011
Amera Ziganii Rao is a former hard news journalist who is now turning professional with her art forms and indeed, her healing forms, after a long journey of inner searching, self teaching and exploring many layers and areas of both craft and wisdom. She is now working on her first book of philosophy and esoteric thought, and social, cultural and spiritual commentary. She is also showing her first photography collections. And last but most definitely not least, she is building a business to share her Sacred Whore High Priestess Society consciousness and empowering explorations to reach as many people as possible across the world. She is in her forties and lives in London.
Amera Ziganii Rao © 2011
In the meantime, please enjoy this website. I have included many of the subjects I am covering, areas of experience and insight that I will be exploring to the fullest in my book, the courses and all the other work that is to come as a dramatist, novelist and essayist. I also of course, include many of the wise people on this planet, who have come long before me; authors, screen dramatists, playwrights, film makers, artists, and other enlighteners and grand carriers of the wisdom I have found the most helpful on my journey, to find peace and become enlightened. The seemingly impossible journey, in the face of oneself and one’s circumstances. People who have contributed massively to my healing on this mad journey called life, in this insane existence called The Universe. People who have helped to make me as good a carrier of wisdom as I in turn, can be. Thank you.
Amera Ziganii Rao © 2011
Copyright and intellectual property rights are serious issues. And legally protected. Please do not reproduce my work anywhere without due credit and obviously, never for financial gain. 'Big Sister' is watching you! Other than that, please continue to enjoy my original work and the work of (credited) others, for free, while I work on using my material in further professional formats. Thank you for your interest and support.
Amera Ziganii Rao © 2012
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