The World Turned Upside Down
Help is Round the Corner
No More Keeping My Feet On the Ground
1.36
High Speed
Such A Rush
Careful Where You Stand
Easy To Please
Only Superstition
This is my shopping list of sorts. See, I’m a huge Coldplay fan and I’ve been scouring their singles for their B-sides. Actually a lot of my favorite songs by Coldplay are the ones unreleased as singles and a few not even on their albums. They’re a great band for a number of reasons, but it must be the combination of sympathy in the lyrics and the timbre of Chris Martin’s voice which makes them my number one band.
Speaking of songs, there is a song which I like by Chaka Khan called ‘Through the Fire’. Many people may recognize it by it’s (sped-up) inclusion on Kanye West’s ‘Through the Wire’. It goes “Though the fire, to the limit, to the wall/For a chance to be with you I’d gladly risk it all…Right down to the wire, even through the fire.” I can’t get over songs like this, where the woman is singing about reaching a breaking point to be with a guy. More than that, she is (and here it comes) submitting herself to the man she loves. It’s a touching submission and it makes me remember the girls I have seen or known who lose all reference to reality for the sake of their heart. It sounds silly, but I’m actually a little jealous of it.
I don’t really believe in equality between the sexes because I don’t really believe we’re equal. I believe that we are fundamentally imbalanced in various ways, strength, emotion, intuition, aggression, and more. This is the natural order of things. I can’t fight or deny that men are stronger than women. In the thousands of years that humans have roamed the Earth I think somehow this imbalance of power must have been counterbalanced in a skill or virtue posessed by women. Men have known for a long time that women were smarter than them. They had their suspicious at least. Why else would they always blame them for doing the devil’s work and punish them as such? Why would they subjugate them and refuse them education if not because they feared the result? We aren’t even near to being equal, but we counter each other’s imbalance in the strangest of ways – like puzzle pieces coming together. Anyway, I just like the reminder that sure women do submit to the man they love. Society today is so full of manly women who are trying to be one of the boys or posess the masculine traits of aggression and crudeness. When I see a girl in an outward display of strength I really cringe. It’s just not attractive (to me anyway). When I see a couple together with the woman playing the aggressive man’s role, I have to turn my head.
Luckily I happen to be in a country which hasn’t really caught on to the western idea of equal rights. I have great confidence that they won’t either. Eastern philosophy underpins the structure of society here. If you can think of a yin-yang circle, you may understand it a little. It’s a cirle made up of two teardrops, one black one white. Inside the black there is a circle of white and vice versa. The black represents the male and the white the female, and already it is clear that we each have a part of the other in us. We are joined together to form a circle, but we should keep a distinct line between what is female and what is male. As long as we keep this distinction and form, the circle is balanced and harmonious.
One may point out the fact that women here seem submissive to everyone and this is prevents them expressing themselves. I used to think this myself when I first came here. Then I was advised that women are actually in control in Korea. The man works hard for the money, but the mother takes all the money and distributes it. The men may always get to speak first and the woman may have to be polite, but within that framework there is more power than you may think by looking.
It’s a complicated subject and altogether too complicated for this blog. I just came here to write down the names of some songs I was after.
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