Can’t get enough of the teen stuff because they are the future! Although I am 60 now, I feel I have enough curiosity to match that of an average teenager. Never forget the words from another teen movie Dazed & Confused, in which the character played by Mathew Mcconaughey claimed “I love the freshman: You get older, they stay the same!”
This movie called Moxie — one of the top tens on Netflix this week — is interesting as it is on girls fighting sexism in a high school, which is one of the under-covered topics in our society.
It is best to simply cite this website, which did a good job summarizing the ideas behind the movie: “(I)t’s certainly a project that worked hard to authentically deliver a crucial story about the harassment that teenage girls continue to face in school while calling out the constant “look the other way” approach to toxic male behaviors.”
The Need For Fighting Never Dies
The more I see and think, the more I feel that we humans must all fight our ways through, because change hardly ever comes by itself. Sometimes your life improved not through your own fighting but others, like getting a free-ride. Other times changes in some field or people can overspill to other nearby or related fields or individuals. Fighting for black lives for example may help protect other minority groups.
But to reach specific goals or causes that you really desire, it is the best to launch intentional and self-directed fights. Bearing in mind that a fight does not guarantee a particular result, because others are fighting for their causes just when you are for yours. The movie had a happy ending but in real life it may not. One thing is for sure though: Persistent fighting strictly improves your chance in life — at least in the long run. On the other hand, in the worst scenario, when everyone else is fighting for their causes except you, you stand to lose more than others.
It is interesting that Confucianism taught us that at the beginning of our lives all humans have good nature. If that were true, there is no need to fight. This partly explains why Confucianism emphasizes peace, harmony, self-criticism and modesty. But even Confucianism cannot exclude fighting because we might be innocent at the beginning, but we can learn the bad stuff later in life.
The real issue is not whether we humans are good or bad in nature. The real problem is that we possess (or develop) different preferences and desires. In other words, the need to fight is not necessarily generated by the need to defeat the bad guys (sometimes it does), but rather by the need of competing to advance our preferences, goals or causes.
Fighting IS The Best Way Of Learning
The other thing I have learned from Moxie is that when you have found a cause of your own, it powers you up tremendously. Vivian was just an average high schooler at the age of 16, but look at her after she found her cause of fighting sexism and harassments — especially after she acted on that cause by making flyers and distributing them in school (first in girls’ bathroom and later to boys’ bathroom as well), she becomes someone else! The movie did a good job showing her eyes staring at one hand of someone to another hand of someone else, just to see if anyone got the flyers she secretly made and placed in school bathrooms.
This is so real! When you have done something or made some changes, you suddenly care about something that you never thought you would. Your life becomes different! The changes or causes I am talking about could be anything, from fighting sexism to playing soccer, anything that turns you on, anything that makes your life fuller and more exciting. The magic thing is, before you can change the world with your cause, the cause will first change you! The proof: Later in the movie, Vivian, an introverted girl by nature, initiated a kiss to the boy who took her to visit a funeral home, what a beautiful move!
The movie showed several girls meeting in a room during a party and talking about the Moxie flyers. Imagine how exciting and how happy Vivian must feel when one girl guessed that the flyer was made by someone in her 20s and knew the school well! She must have the fun of her life early on at 16, and not everyone can claim to have that experience (I know I did not).
The current schooling system is an old legacy that simulates factory assembly lines. It is fortunate that the US has essays and projects from elementary schools on (?), while China has none! To make the learning full of fun, doing projects is the best way to go! It is open-ended, requires cognitive and emotional perseverance, requires proactivity and often needs teamwork. Lectures can never match these qualities.
Sometimes all a student needs is for someone to ask a question and they will be on their own. In the movie Vivian was trying to fill out a Berkeley application, which requires an essay of stating what cause you have been working on (or something like that). That was the thing that pushed Vivian to ask her mom what she was thinking when she was 16. Turned out that her mom was a rebellion who only thought about anything against patriotism. Vivian turned that into an exciting project that helps change the world — starting from her high school.
Fighting With Teams
The last thing I learned from the movie is that it is better and more efficient and powerful to have a team of likeminded individuals. The high school is lucky enough to have a group of teens who all chose to stand up against the boy harassments and against the school administrators who are willing to tolerate the harassments.
Just like the game of democracy, it is all about having the right number of people!
Finally, I now understand why guys like Andrew Cuomo, governor of New York, has acted the way he did: Perhaps in his high school he never got the discipline that Mitch Wilson did in the movie!