The 50th Law (with 50 Cent)

Understand: You might like to imagine that much has changed
when it comes to gender roles, that the world of Caterina Sforza is too
distant from our own to be relevant. But in thinking so you would be
greatly mistaken. The specific details of gender roles might fluctuate
according to culture and time period, but the pattern is essentially the
same and is as follows: We are all born as complete beings, with many
sides to us. We have qualities of the opposite sex, both genetically and
from the influence of the parent of the other gender. Our character has
natural depths and dimensions to it. When it comes to boys, studies
have shown that an early age they are actually more emotionally
reactive than girls. They have high degrees of empathy and sensitivity.
Girls have an adventurous and exploratory spirit that is natural to
them. They have powerful wills, which they like to exert in
transforming their environment.
As we get older, however, we have to present to the world a
consistent identity. We have to play certain roles and live up to certain
expectations. We have to trim and lop off natural qualities. Boys lose
their rich range of emotions and, in the struggle to get ahead, repress
their natural empathy. Girls have to sacrifice their assertive sides. They
are supposed to be nice, smiling, deferential, always considering other
people’s feelings before their own. A woman can be a boss, but she
must be tender and pliant, never too aggressive.
In this process, we become less and less dimensional; we conform
to the expected roles of our culture and time period. We lose valuable
and rich parts to our character. Sometimes we can realize this only
when we encounter those who are less repressed and we feel
fascination with them. Certainly Caterina Sforza had such an effect.
There are also many male counterparts to this in history—the

---

nineteenth-century British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, Duke
Ellington, John F. Kennedy, David Bowie, all men who displayed an
unmistakable feminine undertone and intrigued people all the more
for this.
Your task is to let go of the rigidity that takes hold of you as you
overidentify with the expected gender role. Power lies in exploring that
middle range between the masculine and the feminine, in playing
against people’s expectations. Return to the harder or softer sides of
your character that you have lost or repressed. In relating to people,
expand your repertoire by developing greater empathy, or by learning
to be less deferential. When confronting a problem or resistance from
others, train yourself to respond in different ways—attacking when you
normally defend, or vice versa. In your thinking, learn to blend the
analytical with the intuitive in order to become more creative (see the
final section of this chapter for more on this).
Do not be afraid to bring out the more sensitive or ambitious sides
to your character. These repressed parts of you are yearning to be let
out. In the theater of life, expand the roles that you play. Don’t worry
about people’s reactions to any changes in you they sense. You are not
so easy to categorize, which will fascinate them and give you the power
to play with their perceptions of you, altering them at will.
It is the terrible deception of love that it begins by engaging us in play not
with a woman of the external world but with a doll fashioned in our brain—
the only woman moreover that we have always at our disposal, the only one
we shall ever possess.
—Marcel Proust