Positioning in marketing refers to where you place your product within a particular target market. Because positioning is important as to how the product is perceived. For example, you sell purses. Do you want them to be seen as haute couture or simply pret a porter, luxury or off the rack, used or vintage?

Position directs perception. To affront competition, Burger King needed to position itself differently than McDonald’s. So, it came out with this ad: “Why eat with the clown when you can dine with a King?” implying that Burger King is a higher-class dining experience as opposed to eating with a McDonald’s clown.

The way you’re positioned is the way you’re perceived. And the results of the recent U.S. election make it evident that many women perceive themselves as inferior to men. And why wouldn’t they? In this patriarchal society that’s been forced upon us, men have brainwashed us, and themselves, into believing that they are superior. They are not.

Repositioning, instead, involves changing how something is perceived with the intent of making it more marketable. For example:

Apple was just a computer brand. Wanting to expand its market, Apple repositioned itself with iPod, a lifestyle brand.

Dove, in 2004, launched the Real Beauty campaign positioning itself with women celebrating diversity. But noting that men were increasing interested in beauty care, to expand its market Dove launched a new line of male personal-care products.

Shomari Figures (D) fought against gerrymandered districts in Mobile, Alabama and won. Then he ran for Congress and won again. He believes he won his election by taking his campaign away from national positioning and, instead, focusing on local issues.

In the 1940s, psychologist Mamie Phipps Clark and her husband conducted a series of experiments known as the “doll tests”. The intent was to see the psychological effects of segregation on Black children.

from The White Doll

Black children (ages 3-7) were presented with a white doll and a black doll then asked which doll was beautiful, which doll was good, which doll was ugly, and which doll was bad. Most of the children indicated the white doll as good and beautiful whereas the black doll as bad and ugly. The psychologists concluded that discrimination and segregation had caused these children to feel inferior thus mutilating the perception they had of themselves.

Segregation subjected Blacks to a collective solitary confinement. Deprived interaction with the mainstream world, Black children grew up feeling isolated and inadequate. They considered themselves losers even before the game got started.

The results were so concrete and devastating that they were used in the case of Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 landmark Supreme Court case in which the justices ruled unanimously that racial segregation of children in public schools was unconstitutional.

from The Bluest Eye

In Toni Morrison’s THE BLUEST EYE, Pecola, a little Black girl is forced to live with a foster family because her home was burned down by her depraved and alcoholic father. Pecola considers herself to be ugly because of her dark skin. So she prays to God for blue eyes thinking that they will make her beautiful. For two years she prays but, despite all her prayers, her eyes remain brown. And for Pecola, those brown eyes are proof that God doesn’t exist.

Morrison dramatically illustrates how racism can lead towards self-hatred. And how self-hatred can lead towards insanity. Similarly, misogyny can cause women to have low self-esteem. And that’s where we ladies need to do some work. We need to reposition ourselves so we can perceive ourselves in a better way.

Because the perception we have of ourselves determines how others perceive us, the first question we need to answer is how do we perceive our own selves.

The summer of 2008, I read The Great Cosmic Mother while on Paros. The premise of the book, based on extensive research, was that the Goddess religion was humanity’s original religion. It was a religion based on a spiritual understanding of the world. It was a religion celebrating Earth’s fertility, the phases of the moon, the seasons. And the woman’s reproductive cycle. “In the world’s oldest creation myths, the female god creates the world out of her own body.”

History has been, for the most part, written by men for men. But The Great Cosmic Mother is the story of women’s history written by women.

Did you know that:

The oldest known tools were the digging sticks used by women to forage food.

The first calendars were bones with slashes on them indicating moon phases similar to women’s menstrual cycle. Thus, the first calendar was invented by women.

Women were also instrumental in the development of language. Men were silent, a habit acquired when tracking animals. “Meanwhile, the women worked collectively in or near the camp, surrounded by children, talking and singing. Language must have developed in the first intimate relations between mother and child, and between women working together for the kin-group’s daily sustenance.”

Women also had the job of making pots for food storage. They often decorated the pots with symbols. These symbols eventually led to the written word.

“The cave, as the womb of the Earth Goddess, was considered by the ancients to be the repository of mystic influences.” And, although men have always been given credit for the cave paintings, we know now that women, and not men, created them.

This book gave me a totally different outlook of myself as a woman. It made me feel full of love and self-esteem. It repositioned me. It helped me to perceive myself as a woman differently. And now that there is a war on women, I will be rereading it again soon.

The religion of the Goddess says, “I am part of the world, and the world is a part of me.”

They’re coming to get us.

-30-

Related:

The White Doll + The Bluest Eye +

Shomari Figures wins bid to represent Alabama district embroiled in Supreme Court case +

Ancient Women Artists May Be Responsible for Most Cave Art +

Elon Musk suggests support for replacing democracy with government of ‘high-status males’

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