Rosana Agudo_Contribution NGO-CSW Beijing + 15

8/9/2019 Rosana Agudo_Contribution NGO-CSW Beijing + 15

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CONTRIBUTION PROCEEDING FROM OUR PARTICIPATION IN THE

GLOBAL NGO FORUM FOR WOMEN BEIJING + 15

27 Y 28 de Febrero de 2010

NGO/CSW/NY

By Rosana Agudo

Founder of the NGOs Lur Gozoa and Mirra.

Document directed to the Bureau of the Commision on the Status of Women (Session 54)

Yesterday was a sad day, a grey day, a day of desperation, an absurd day, a day to witness with

clarity the chaos and the chains that bind us human beings, a day than made it enormously

painful to remain seated and alert.

Present were women from a diversity cultures, of many nationalities, with many problems, and

many ways of understanding them, each one of us searching for a solution, demanding a

formula to relieve our suffering, caused by something outside of ourselves. It was a day to

express our dissatisfaction or our pain. Above all, it was a day to make demands.

Long lines of women behind the microphones spoke of their unhappiness, their lack of trust,

their pain, and their problems. But, above all, what could be seen was the need, the

enormous need, to identify a guilty party, and to access a channel by which to transmit our

dissatisfaction and our suffering.

As an example, for some women the guilty party was religion. If there were no religions, or, at

least, if these were separated from the state, our problems would almost be solved. For

others, it was the imposition of other cultures, supposedly the Western Culture, which believes

it holds a monopoly on the meaning of progress, and that democracy is the panacea for solving

the worlds problems. For others, the subject goes deeper, having to do with being respected

as women, even among women; one demanded her right to be there and to be taken into

account, refusing to allow her wheelchair to pose a handicap to her presence as a woman.

Association for Conscious Citizens Association for Womans Leadership
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/es/


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But for all present and without a doubt, the patriarchy was the guilty party. The word sounded

constantly in the auditorium, incarnating the powerful figure responsible for all our troubles.

We dont know our jailer and this gives him power. Men dont know him either. They are just

as trapped as we are, or more so, if that were possible, because some of them really believe

that they are the patriarchs and act accordingly, they are the best instruments through whomthe authentic patriarch works; these men make his most faithful servants. He flatters them

and they become his marionettes, giving or withholding grace, and believing themselves to be

the owners of the world. Other men believe they are his friend and that they are entitled to do

what they will as long as the benefits, whatever form they take, increase the power of the one

who is really in charge. Others fear the patriarch, and dont dare to look him in the eye or to

question his power. They prefer not to anger him. Some men rebel, but only a few; but the

patriarch speaks to them and assures them that they are the chosen ones, the dominate

gender of the dominate species.

But who is this patriarch? What is the patriarchy? Has anybody seen him o it? To whom or

to what are we placing our demands, presenting our petitions, asking for justice? When we

women elaborate our final document for this meeting, incorporating our petitions, our

demands or our solutions for a more just world for ourselves and our children, to whom are

we going present it? Who do we want to listen to us, who do we want to plead our case in our

campaign for justice and balance? The patriarch? The patriarchy? Its representatives? Its

employees? Its servants?

But I insist. We dont know our jailer and this gives him power. He is hidden behind each one

of us, and each of us has given him a name and a gender. He is hidden behind each culture

and each has given him an identity. He is hidden in every stage of human history and every

epoch has given him a name. He is hidden and takes on different forms depending on who is

looking and when. He is the guilty one and this frees us from our own guilt, but, at the same

time, he ties us to guilt because we generate guilty parties, we need guilty parties.

Yesterday, among women, the guilty one was the patriarch, whatever that meant for each

woman present in the auditorium, and surely, for each of us the patriarch had a different

meaning, name, color, and even nationality. Curiously, however, the patriarch spoke through

each of us; we spoke his language, the language that he taught us to speak.

We are asking solutions from the same character that creates our problems in the first place,and the solutions he gives are solutions that perpetuate the problems. Sometimes we are

captured by the fantasy that the patriarch is actually going to solve something, but this is

precisely his strategy: he lives on by providing solutions for the very problems he creates and

this allows him to continuously refine his machinery. He has us trapped in his game; he plays

with us, increasing his power at a pace commensurate with the growing complexity of his

machinery. And by his action, he saps our joy, passion, brilliance, color. Please, we cannot

allow him to speak for us or to speak through us.


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We must learn to recognize his game, and to detect his presence in our language that reveals

what we are thinking, the content of our thoughts, our mental model, and the emotions that

we receive and emit.

The one we have named the patriarch or the patriarchy is none other than our mental

model, our mind set. It is made up of beliefs and suppositions, about what is and what should

be. It generates emotions according to whether or not the specified expectations have been

satisfied, and according to whether or not our immediate needs are being attended to. In this

way we adopt a behavior, in the form of laws, decrees, treaties etc. that seal once again the

mental model, adding new ideas to the same mechanism. This is how the mental model

evolves in refinement and complexity, becoming evermore clever.

Powerful men (men are almost always the powerful ones), and the ones through which the

patriarch works most visibly, know well the options at their disposal for flattering in some

cases and for terrifying in others entire societies with the aim of tricking them or convincing

them in order to protect the interests of the most powerful. Unwittingly, these men are being

utilized directly by the patriarch, even though, as we have seen, they are convinced that they

are the patriarchs. These men are the most enslaved of all. Their mental model is so closed by

unquestioned laws, by inflexible structures and ways of doing things, and by addictions of

every kind, that they dedicate their life to serving the mental model that gives them exactly

what it needs to perpetuate itself.

In the planet, a species is evolving by way of the mind, that is, the human species. Men and

women are evolving by way of the evermore-refined machinery of our minds that creates

networks of evermore-complex thoughts that create, in turn, more and more complex

realities. In the end, the subtle and refined strategy of what we call the patriarchy is that, far

from offering solutions in accordance with its capacity to create complex networks of

problems, it takes away our ability to find solutions because it has determined, to complicate

things even more, and taking into consideration that we are emotional creatures, to gives us

the tool of guilt that we can pass around among ourselves such that he can enjoy himself at

our expense.

Therefore, as always, our expectations as to how our petitions should be attended depend

directly on whether or not they coincide with the necessities of the mental model, of the

patriarch. Our expectations as to how our petitions should be attended depend on whether or

not the satisfaction of our demands is going to satisfy the patriarchs own objectives.

We can no longer depend on him.


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Empowerment doesnt mean just acknowledging ones own power, or reclaiming the right to

exercise it. Empowerment also means putting this acknowledgment into action. When a

woman is empowered, when a woman exercises her rights, in accordance with the

circumstances of the moment, not as a demand but as the manifestation of her entitlement,

when a woman becomes aware of her abilities as well as her limitations, she frees herself from

conventional thought, the stomping ground where the patriarch roams freely without being

seen or recognized, then she is free to act in a different way and to begin to elaborate her own

strategy.

For things to change, for the emergence of our own new strategy, we must change our mental

model so that it doesnt complicate life at a greater velocity than our ability not just to find the

solutions but even to detect the problems.

But before we can change something, we must first get to know it, to learn how it works. We

cant change what we dont understand. Our future depends on our getting to know our

mental model, how it creates our reality and our way of seeing the world. Our future depends

on how we react to this new knowledge. It seems that we women are the ones who are best

prepared to undertake this work. Having detected the glass ceiling, we can now convert this

once invisible obstacle into a catapult towards freedom. But we must free ourselves and at

the same time offers freedom. It is our destiny. We cannot free only ourselves, they, men

must come with us as well. To liberate is the privilege of the liberated.

Can we stop petitioning the patriarch and continue our third liberation with the strength of

our empowerment and of our capacity for compassion and empathy? This third revolution or

liberation will be a giant leap not just for women or for society, but for all of us as a species,

with consequences we cant yet imagine.

This liberation from the oppressive mental model with its rigid dual reality, offers us a global

awareness that, at present, we can only envision through our aspirations, which heretofore

have only been expressed in the form of pleas for liberation from injustice.

Let us dare to create our future and that of the generations to come from our vision, and from

our maturity as human beings. Let us create networks from which we can unite and join forces

towards our common aspiration. Let us also dare to overcome our common enemy, ourselves.


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Let us not defend ourselves against each other. We have the power to generate the next way

of relating to each other as human beings, and as human beings to the Planet Earth and to all

the life it shelters; we have the power to bequeath this new form of relationship to the

generations of men and women that will inhabit the world we are helping to create.

Rosana Agudo

Lur Gozoa Association for Conscious Citizens

[email protected] http://tti-transformacion.blogspot.com

Lur Gozoa. Asociacin para una Ciudadana Consciente.

http://[email protected]

Mirra. Asociacin para el Liderazgo de la Mujer.

http://[email protected]

En Bilbao, Pas VascoEspaa
mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]://tti-transformacion.blogspot.com/http://tti-transformacion.blogspot.com/http://www.lurgozoa.blogspot.com/http://www.lurgozoa.blogspot.com/http://www.asociacionmirra.blogspot.com/http://www.asociacionmirra.blogspot.com/http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/es/http://www.asociacionmirra.blogspot.com/http://www.lurgozoa.blogspot.com/http://tti-transformacion.blogspot.com/mailto:[email protected]

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Rosana Agudo_Contribution NGO-CSW Beijing + 15