"Prêt-à-penser" / "Ready-to-wear thinking" by Erik Pevernagie, oil on canvas,100 x 80cm  xx

Ready-to-wear thinking and ‘Prêt-à-Penser’ mottoes have repeatedly damaged women’s reputations.

Prejudices, simplistic verdicts, and half-truths are rampant and often level women down to an identical, uniform, homogeneous entity: a ready-to-wear species, a Prêt-à-Porter class.

Condensing women to a toy, a nanny, or simply a mother and shrink-wrapping them into a vehicle that can be maneuvered into the background is a habit that we can still witness daily.

Since many men remain spoiled boys who have never grown up, women are ready to raise them with much patience, both as a condescending contribution to patronizing compassion and a proof of their sense of worth.

Prefabricated thoughts result from sloth and laziness. Ready-to-wear thinking means the absence of critical awareness and ground-breaking judgment. Rubber-stamping, packaged thinking, and blindly taking over what other people claim to be the truth are clearly signs of laziness.

Let us not store preconceived ideas in our minds. A freewheeling imagination can only function and reach its full potential if it is liberated from canning” old thinking” and adopting imposed “packaged mental trips.”

If we are ready for thinking, not traditional, conventional, rehashed thinking but exploratory and adventurous thinking, we can move forward and discover the astounding appeal of new mind-blowing visions.

Recognizing a problem may help us to understand and solve a problem. Rather than lying down and selling our sound judgment short, let us appeal to the opulent granary of our memory and explore the green pastures lingering in our minds.

Our preferences or opinions cannot always be explained or rationalized. There is no accounting for taste. But we can adjust things to our own liking and learn to regard and accept the differing choices of others.

Let us not become victims of a crippling reasoning pattern. If we want to improve our decision-making and critical thinking, we must recognize our mental biases and be willing to overcome them. We must avoid creating arguments to confirm pre-existing beliefs at all costs and invest in a ‘sunk cost fallacy.’ It is better to alight from a car out of control than drive it off the cliff.

Let us not be trapped by faint discrimination or intolerance preventing us from creating open perspectives. If we rise above the imprisonment of fixed ideas, we make an essential step toward personal growth and self-esteem.

Engaging in "nuances" takes a lot of time, too much time for many people. That's why they often prefer fixed, blocky, prefabricated, granite-cast, immutable ideas. This ensures them time-saving peace of mind and a worry-free but shallow existence.

Phenomenon: Ready-to-wear thinking

Factual starting point: Female figure