#zenquest

Hello girlies. So I am creating a lunar based calender ( which is tithi based iykyk). And I need your help on the UI decisions. I will be creating a polls. Stay tuned. Let's go on this journey today. I very much welcome your feedback. #1.

#2.

Also what do you think of this traditional naming ? Is it okay or need some changes? comment below.

Are women actually submissive by default?

It’s a fascinating time to dive into this topic because the "traditional" narrative that women are biologically hardwired for submissiveness is being dismantled by both modern science and a more critical look at history.

​The prevailing take among experts today is that behavior is more of a mirror of our environment than a map of our DNA.

​1. The Science: Biological Myths Debunked

​For a long time, testosterone was framed as the "aggression hormone" and estrogen as the "nurturing hormone." Modern research says it's much more complex.

​"Testosterone Rex" by Cordelia Fine: This is a must-read. Fine won the Royal Society Science Book Prize for proving that there are no "male" or "female" brains. She argues that the idea of a biologically determined submissive female is "scientific sexism" disguised as data.

​"Bitch: On the Female of the Species" by Lucy Cooke: Cooke, a zoologist, looks at the animal kingdom to show that female animals (from meerkats to albatrosses) are often the dominant, aggressive, and "promiscuous" leaders of their groups. It completely upends the idea that "nature" intended females to be passive.

​2. The History: Reclaiming the Narrative

​If women aren't naturally submissive, why did it look that way for so long? These authors argue that it was a survival strategy under patriarchy, not an innate trait.

​"The Create of Patriarchy" by Gerda Lerner: Lerner argues that male dominance is a historical development (only about 5,000 years old), not a biological constant. She shows how laws and social structures were built specifically to enforce submission because it didn't come naturally.

​"The Second Sex" by Simone de Beauvoir: The classic take. Her famous line, "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman," hits the nail on the head. She argues that "femininity" (including submissiveness) is a social construct imposed on women by a society that needs them to play a certain role.

​3. The Psychological Take: The "Adaptation" Argument

​Modern psychologists often view submissiveness not as a personality trait, but as a response to power dynamics.

​When one group holds all the economic and physical power, the marginalized group adopts "submissive" traits (compliance, peacekeeping, hyper-vigilance to others' needs) to avoid conflict and survive.

Women Who Run with the Wolves – Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Core Idea

Estés argues that women have a “Wild Woman” archetype: instinctual, intuitive, creative, fierce, sexually alive, boundary-setting.

She focused on the ideas such as:

Women are not inherently passive.

Civilization tames and domesticates female instinct.

Suppression of that instinct leads to depression, self-abandonment, people-pleasing.

She doesn’t frame women as submissive creatures but as powerful beings who were culturally trained to shrink.

This book summarise that

Healthy femininity includes leaving when disrespected.

Healthy femininity includes rage.

Healthy femininity includes sexuality on her terms.

(The "Golden Cage" of Success – the curse of the creative people)

I watched a video today about how creative success actually ruins people. We are always told that being famous or successful is the goal for the creative people but it usually leads to burnout which is really depressive to watch.

The Pressure of Commerce

When you start making money from your art, it stops being for you. You start worrying about what your audience or your boss wants. This creates a conflict where you have to choose between your artistic integrity and your survival. The video uses Michelangelo as an example. Even though he is one of the most famous artists in history, he spent much of his life being frustrated because he was forced to work on projects he hated instead of what he actually cared about. Thomas Kinkade was another artist who became a massive commercial success but he ended up trapped by his own brand.

We try to turn every hobby into a "side hustle" now. But once we have to sell your creativity to pay rent, it is not a passion anymore. It becomes a product that you have to reproduce over and over again to keep others happy.

The Weight of Emotional Exposure

When an artist is vulnerable, the audience often consumes that pain as entertainment rather than connecting with the human behind it. There is a massive gap between the intent of the artist and the experience of the audience. When Thom Yorke wrote "Creep," it was a raw, self-deprecating confession about feeling inadequate and alienated. But once a song becomes a global anthem, it stops belonging to the person who wrote it. For the artist, standing on a stage and watching a crowd celebrate a song that came from a place of deep self-loathing is a surreal and jarring experience. It makes the original emotion feel cheapened or misunderstood.

​This leads to what is often called the "Performer’s Paradox." The more successful you are at expressing your loneliness, the more people flock to you, but they are flocking to the version of you they hear in the music, not the actual human being. You are surrounded by thousands of people who think they know you because they’ve memorized your lyrics, yet none of them actually see your current reality. You become a symbol for their emotions instead of a person with your own. This is why many artists, including Radiohead, eventually grow to resent their biggest hits. That song becomes a cage that forces them to revisit a painful version of their past self every single night just to satisfy a crowd that is looking for a good time.

The Cycle of Destruction

The most intense part of the video is how creative ambition often requires destroying something. To create a new style or a new "you," you often have to tear down what came before. In movies like Black Swan or Whiplash, we see characters who think they have to suffer and destroy their bodies or their relationships to be "great." This culture of obsession tells us that if you aren't willing to lose everything for your goal, you don't want it enough.

(The Science of "Open Doors" – from Dan Ariely’s "Predictably Irrational")

Today I listened to the audiobook that talks about Dan Ariely’s work on why we make "predictably irrational" choices. I found that it was about our obsession with keeping options open. We (as human beings in general) have this deep-seated fear of losing out, even on the things we don’t like. Ariely(The author) calls it an irrational fear of "closing doors".

He shares this fascinating experiment where he had students play a computer game with three doors on the screen. Each door led to different amounts of money, so the smart move was to find the door that paid the most and stay there. But he added a twist where if a student didn't click on a door for a while, it would start to shrink and eventually disappear. Even when those students knew they were losing money by leaving a high-paying room to "save" a disappearing door, they couldn't help themselves. To keep them from disappearing, they rushed back and forth to click on doors that paid even less than the others. In order to maintain their options, they were actually losing money.

Reading this today made me realize that it is exactly how we stay in lukewarm connections or hold onto old versions of ourselves just in case we need them later. We think we are being smart by staying flexible, but in reality, we are just living in a state of choice paralysis. It is that exact feeling of scrolling through Netflix for an hour and watching nothing, as there are endless options available and our cute little brain thinks, 'Oh wait!' what if the other one is better? We waste so much emotion and time to keep these dead-end doors that we never actually walk through the one that would make us happy.