Today’s Navigate the Chaos question is “How often do you work towards being radical in order to provide hope?”
People who navigate the chaos know that they may be perceived as radical. There is little they can do to change how people perceive them.
But those that navigate the chaos can certainly focus their radicalism on hope rather than despair. American author Nancy Colbert Friday wrote on the topics of female sexuality and liberation and in a radical 1973 publication entitled My Secret Garden she placed herself among the feminist erotic pioneers.
Her writings argue that women have often been reared under an ideal of womanhood, which was outdated and restrictive, and largely unrepresentative of many women’s true inner lives, and that openness about women’s hidden lives could help free women to truly feel able to enjoy being themselves.
She asserts that this is not due to deliberate malice, but due to social expectation, and that for women’s and men’s benefit alike it is healthier that both be able to be equally open, participatory and free to be accepted for who and what they are.
Friday has explained how “in the late 1960s I chose to write about women’s sexual fantasies because the subject was unbroken ground, a missing piece of the puzzle at a time in history when the world was suddenly curious about sex and women’s sexuality.” The backdrop was a widespread belief that “women do not have sexual fantasies are by and large destitute of sexual fantasy.”
Friday considered that “more than any other emotion, guilt determined the story lines of the fantasies in My Secret Garden . . . women inventing ploys to get past their fear that wanting to reach orgasm made them Bad Girls.”
Welsh academic, novelist, and critic Raymond Henry Williams wrote “To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing”
When it came to discussing women’s sexuality, Friday made hope possible.
How often do you work towards being radical in order to provide hope?