Collection

How much fun is a good debunking? Particularly one that goes after those clickbait farms that so adore spreading BS which, unfortunately, people seem to lap up like creature-milk. Please enjoy ... the true history of gruesome Victorian photography of the dead! Not. Heh. (The click beyond: tear catchers and the phrase "each of us can choose our own belief." Maybe meant to be funny; but YET another symptom in the hardening American resistance to *facts*. And now sigh.)

Ummmmmmm(ami) - women's emansoupation - here is a tale of tasty seasoning, which I now feel the need to go buy so I can put it in my new spice rack.

Dominick Tao, an American veteran, is a great writer ... with a meaningful story.

Do you remember Powers of Ten? Here's another great animation, graphically representing just how far humanity has gone into the Earth.

And finally, the old two-space. I trained myself out of this habit over the space of a few days just in the past four years or so. My resistance to change (apart from being a Virginian) was seething irritation at the single-spacers' screaming insistence that ye olde River of White was apparently horrifying to them, and that has always struck me as a ludicrous stance. My feeling is, what is so damn gorgeous about a giant, unbroken wall of text? Ahh, but: count on the Arrant Pedant to produce a detailed, and MUCH more cogent discussion on the subject. (Also: yay, he is back!)

Reckoning.

(T)heir guy isn’t well known enough, that the stories are now so plentiful that offenders must meet a certain bar of notoriety, or power, or villainy, before they’re considered newsworthy.

I told you it's not just powerful, rich men. Here's a reporter to tell us that those're the only guys who'll get any ink.

Here is the thing about this lengthy piece, about what we "all" have to reckon for: I've reckoned before. When I worked at The Federal Reserve, and a contractor who knew I worked till 5:30 p.m.  himself stayed late one dark evening, and held out to me on a napkin a cherry stem, tied in a little knot, and said only "No hands" ... I was revolted. The next morning, first thing, I spoke with a manager - not mine, and a woman at that. And she essentially dismissed me as a hysteric. I chose to put the issue to bed, moving forward, concerning myself only with my future and my feelings.

Much later, when I saw from a strong physical reaction to him, by a woman with less power than I, it was clear to me that I was not the only person he had "made uncomfortable" (see also: repulsively harassed). I thought about the issue again, and discussed it with one or two trusted people.

Later still, when The Stem decided to apply for a permanent position, I instantly - I mean, within five minutes - went into my boss's office and phoned him while he was travelling. HE took me deadly seriously, and HR had an executive meeting with me almost immediately.

I thought about this guy's kid. Yep. But I also thought of that woman I had seen squirm. The Stem took his risks, knowing he had a kid. He behaved execrably, knowing he had a kid. Oblivious as he was socially (this is a man who discussed with me on scant acquaintance the extreme gruesomeness of his ex-wife's labor in bearing said son; he was ALL kinds of awkward, this guy). If, in his book, the "no hands" approach seemed even POSSIBLY valid - never mind potentially impressive - he needs a new book, and I'm not responsible for reading the text he was working from. Nor am I responsible for his son.

I was, in my knowledge, responsible for that woman I had done nothing to help. I was, too, responsible for the reputational risk to my own employer, who would have been exposed to legal risk by allowing a serial harasser on board. My employer: who kept me in mortgage payments, and that woman's family as well.


The woman manager, who dismissed my concerns? She didn't dismiss me because she was covering for a valued or powerful colleague, she shut me down for thinking what he'd done was an issue at all. His power, in the moment he flummoxed my pungent personality to the extent of an awkward joke and sheer befuddlement, was transient. And, in the end, mine was greater: my report had more power than his resume.

I have often thought about the background and experience that leads to attitudes like that manager's, though. These days, I imagine she's scoffing a great deal about all the precious little daisies enduring Weinstein's casting couch, so-called "consenting" to Louis C. K.'s displays, and on and on and on. Blaming them for being so sensitive. And maybe she has dismissed other women, too. Very possible.

I pity that woman more than myself. But, for her initial reaction to me and my opting for silence, I am GUILTY: about the other woman who worked there, who transferred away from our location I suspect to get away from The Stem. Whose price to pay I do not know, and is among the debts on my own soul. I pity the manager, whom I did not name but did talk about in that meeting with HR. But the other woman lives with me in a much more direct way.

I will leave this post with the following excerpt from the link ...

I struggled a lot internally about whether to name the Harasser at my former job. I decided not to, largely because I understand something about how things have turned out. In a rare outcome, I — along with some of the women he pestered — now have more power than he does. He is, as far as I know, short on work, not in charge of any young women. And so I decided, in consultation with former colleagues, not to identify him.

But here’s a crucial reason he behaved so brazenly and badly for so long: He did not consider that the women he was torturing, much less the young woman who was mutely and nervously watching his performance (that would be me), might one day have greater power than he did. He didn’t consider this because in a basic way, he did not think of us as his equals.

Many men will absorb the lessons of late 2017 to be not about the threat they’ve posed to women but about the threat that women pose to them.

This is not a gotcha. This is: manning up.

Preying Animals

Again.

And again. And again. And again. And again.



The Weinstein (etc. etc. etc.) scandal in Hollywood might seem to beg comment from a blogger such as myself, but the simple fact is my main reaction to the whole thing was, for a good while, mere exhaustion. The fact that MEN are surprised and offended ... I don't know. Maybe it's nice. But there isn't a woman I know who's taken aback at the information unearthed so far. No, not even the scope.

Remember, kids: we just watched a proudly bragging sexual predator take the White House. Oh yeah, and the supposed fall of Bill Cosby, though that story seems to have been forgotten ("Thanks again, Trump's distracting Tweets!") You think we are shocked about a movie mogul?

Watching the astonishment of *men*, who rather loudly insist upon swearing they had NO IDEA about all this, might be almost be amusing for some, but - again - merely a bit tiring for me. Talk about bad acting: "gents", you are either criminally incompetent, intellectually compromised, or lying your asses off. (Same goes for women.)


So, why am I bringing it up at all?



The drumbeat right now is all about men in power taking advantage of women who cannot reasonably consent, given that consent requires autonomy, and so few have it in the situations encountered.

That is an important dynamic to consider, it's important to fight.

But I know this: SEXUAL HARASSMENT IS NOT METED OUT ONLY BY THE ECONOMICALLY POWERFUL.

For men power comes in other forms, and other magnitudes, than Trump or Weinstein or congressmen or kings.

Sexual harassment comes from the contractor at work, whose only power lies in the fact of his maleness and his speaking up after-hours in a deserted office. Sexual harassment comes from an awful lot of guys at work, in fact - just everyday guys in cube farms - the guy leaving anonymous notes which are TERRIFYING evidence of being covertly *watched* by unknown eyes, the guy cornering a woman in the break room. It comes on the street. It lives in every possible environment.

It could by ANY guy. That's what's got me mad: that in sanctioning this "Hollywood is the dangerous place" "Powerful men are the ones to watch out for" groundswell, we are safely defining boundaries around predators, pointing to the most unusual varieties as if they encompassed all the perniciousness women face every day. And thereby nullifying the fact that indeed it IS every day. Everywhere. Not just these rich monsters. NOT just desperate actresses.

It's every woman. And it is, potentially, every man we meet.



It is pissing me off that the sudden vogue for pearl-clutching focuses so narrowly, so significantly, on plutocrats alone.


Not all power comes in the form of famous men using women who think they need these men in order to advance in an industry - or politics. These situations are not limited to the casting couch, or to some town or business the majority of people aren't in.

And not all blame belongs to these wealthy ... "exceptional" ... men.

#NotAllMen? Sure. Certainly not anyone I'd even call a "man".

But more than just a few, kids. And not just the one percent. Not by a long damned shot.

September 17

Image:  Wikipedia

This date was the day, in 1849, when Harriet Tubman escaped slavery and began a journey which freed so many others from inhuman bondage.  She was the builder and the conductor of the Underground Railroad, that route out of the American South that has become legend in our history.  We often romanticize the idea – yet the origin terminus of the Railroad tends to be lost in the telling.  We like the idea of escape from harrowing straits, but history, as it was taught to me anyway, tended to focus on freedom over slavery.  Even when the conditions were considered, it seemed to be from the white point of view – “we were bad” – not really about those who were sinned against.

Yet all my life, even here in the white-flight south, contained threads of truth.  Sojourner Truth, of course.  Maggie Walker, one of the most important figures in the history of finance in the United States, whose name is not enough spoken.  And Harriet Tubman.

Harriet was the figure of excitement, when we were kids.  Sojourner’s spirit may have been beyond our grasp, and Maggie’s accomplishments those of a boring adult.  But Tubman was a real *story* – the story of how my people did wrong, but somebody escaped.  The story of how she helped others to freedom.

Not being an adventure-story seeker, perhaps the tales appealed to me by assuaging some formless seed of White Liberal Guilt, but hers was the figure, of all these Black women, who seemed to mean something to me when I was very young.  Her powerful physical presence, her turban, her manifest *liberty*.  Easier, perhaps, to contemplate her than to imagine than those thousands of others who did not escape, not even with her indomitable struggles.


Harriet Tubman’s mother is said to have stood up to the masters when hers agreed with another to sell her youngest son – and to have succeeded.  Her father was manumitted in 1840, at the death of his master.  She married, before she herself was liberated, a free Black man.  Enchained she was, but freedom was no faraway concept in Maryland in those days.

But Harriet Tubman was enslave, even after she was a married woman, even after she adopted the name of her formidable mother.  She suffered beatings and being loaned away from her family, from that remarkable mother she loved and longed to be with.  From a young age, she was given the hardest work in the field, and endured illness and labor without respite.  She had her skull cracked open for standing up to a white man, and later wrote that it was her hair – her tight and thick hair – which saved her, perhaps, from bleeding to death, from life slipping through the break.

And yet, today, the culture in which we live dares to shame black women for wearing natural hair, even stealing from them the right to make a living.  It sounds, to lift a phrase from those who feel just as free to expend bigotry upon arbitrarily defined periods of time as some feel to wield it against other souls, “positively medieval” to punish, so brutally and in such extraordinary ignorance, someone for the way their hair grows.  For the way they are made – designed, if you will, by the very G-d we have presumed to invoke in defense of the institution of slavery.  Shameful as that was, we are hardly stainless today.

Imagine being wronged and physically injured – reaching to your head and feeling the wound – feeling, even, the bone, no longer whole.  Imagine that you can feel your very HAIR staunching the blood; or knit, perhaps, thick and strong, over two pieces of yourself where once there was one piece.  Imagine feeling that here, like Samson, was the thing that held you to life.



One hundred sixty-five years ago, on this day, one woman escaped for the first time (she was forced back and had to flee again) – and, by her will and her power and her conviction, eventually dozens of others found the liberation she had.  Though not without allies along her way, she was utterly alone in flight, and became a stranger in a strange land.

By the time she had begun the Railroad, white slaveowners presumed some white abolitionist must be siphoning away their slaves – it was unthinkable a Black woman could have succeeded as a leader, taking so many to freedom.  Yet she rescued her own family.  She worked with John Brown and with Susan B. Anthony.  She refused to allow her “passengers” to quail, to quit, to fail, she assisted the Union in the Civil War.  She offered this lesson to President Lincoln:

(T)he negro can tell master Lincoln how to save the money and the young men. He can do it by setting the negro free. Suppose that was an awful big snake down there, on the floor. He bite you. Folks all scared, because you die. You send for a doctor to cut the bite; but the snake, he rolled up there, and while the doctor doing it, he bite you again. The doctor dug out that bite; but while the doctor doing it, the snake, he spring up and bite you again; so he keep doing it, till you kill him. That's what master Lincoln ought to know.

Asked to speak a word of Harriet Tubman for a biography of her, Frederick Douglass said:

The midnight sky and the silent stars have been the witnesses of your devotion to freedom and of your heroism. Excepting John Brown—of sacred memory—I know of no one who has willingly encountered more perils and hardships to serve our enslaved people than you have.

September 17 was the first time she escaped … and, in some way, she spent the rest of her life – escaping, again and again, and bringing with her so many others.  One hundred sixty-five years.  It isn’t all that long a time.

August 26

Neat - on this day in history, women in the United States finally gained suffrage, and in 1973, August 26 was named Women's Equality Day.  This is also Geraldine Ferraro's birthday, which is almost too perfect.

"You Don't Understand, You Don't Understand"

The headline is a quote from 9/11, when Zuba called me from her walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, and explained to me how I would never, ever understand - "There's no Towers!  There's no Towers!"  My instant response was, No, I don't understand.  I never could, I never would.  But the fact that she reached out to me - from that Bridge, no less, has always been my bridge, my way to at least reach for comprehension.

Being the child of privilege, there is a LOT in this world I will never understand.

(T)he care taken with a black girl’s hair signaled that she was loved and cared for, that she belonged to somebody. Having one’s children out in the world with unkempt, uncombed hair has always been considered a major form of parental neglect in black communities.

Those of us who have “liberated” our hair are quick to think of the continued black cultural investments in long straight hair, perms, weaves and ever-more ubiquitous lace-front wigs, as evidence of a kind of pathological investment in European standards of beauty that will always elude us.

This article is a remarkable look at the heritage and the politics of Black hair in America, particularly Black women's hair.

Beauty and fashion are important.  The choices we make, the looks we project, those fashions or styles or statements we make, passively or not - the things we subscribe to by choosing to literally wear them - have never been trivial, and arguably are more fraught than ever with intention, meaning, and power.

Just ask noted collaborator and anti Semite Coco Chanel, whose fashion house has spanned two centuries now and made billyuns and billyuns in profit worldwide.  Ask any juror who ever let a rapist off based on the altitude of a victim's hemline.  Ask LinkedIn, that purveyor of articles I refuse to even link, tut-tutting the idea of a woman IN SHORT SLEEVES, attempting to give a presentation and expecting to be taken seriously as a professional.  (I am not kidding, this was in my "latest updates" today, and it was not a joke.)

What the United States Army is doing to Black women is unquestionably racially-specific, political, historical, clearly painful.  Please read the Salon link.  It's a great education.

Even for those of us who will never, truly can never, actually *understand*.  Because even if I went through airport security with my hair Jacked Up to Jesus, it would NOT get patted down.  Because there's no Towers, Diane, and no amount of frienship, love, sympathy, and deep pain will ever let me see them now.

Mixed Message Mesmer

This collection of vintage beauty ads is a morbidly interesting study in the many messages women get about their bodies - you're too thin! - you're too fat! - your hands are not lily-white!  No matter the delivery, "You are nothing but the object of someone else's gaze" is the point.

It's all meant in depthless, breathless fun, but the fact is, the archaeological/anthropological breadth in this collection is fascinating from a scientific standpoint, creating an incredibly clear gauge for anyone interested in analyzing the fashion for curves versus uber-thin, boyish bodies (WEAR OUR AMAZING RUBBER GARMENTS SO YOU TOO CAN BE BOSOM-FREE ... "medicated" no less, some of these ...).  I actually had an aunt who took the weight-gain tablets in the fifties.  And even in the 80s I knew a girl who intentionally took up smoking to lose weight, per the now-outrageous come-ons in the Lucky advertisement (though she used Marlboros - it was something of a rule, given we literally lived in Marlboro country ... on a side note - there was a smoking area at my high school; for the *students*).

Possibly the creepiest of a thoroughly creepy lot is the "Chubbettes" ad, which appears to be shilling girdle control garments to a grade school girl, so she can look "yummy" ...

"The heartbreak of dishpan hands" was a real, actual thing, kids.  I remember seeing stuff like that when I was a kid, and the line spawned lots of jokes - though none of those was particularly enlightened.

But the easy winner for offensive sexism is "I suffered from menstrual cramps" (image 25 of 26) - with the picture of the sneering (middle-aged) MAN bitching about how awful it is for husbands whose wives' tribulations apparently turn them into creased-foreheaded, over-the-shoulder-griping grossly wrinkle-necked whinge machines with more opinions than they could possibly have been worth enduring even in the 1950s.  What.  A.  Prize.  Schmuck.

Collection

Congratulations (again!) to Tom Williams - he unveiled his cover this week, and I was slow to share it here, but it's a good looking design ... AND it's entirely authentic!  I love that in a cover, because it's remarkable how seldom historicals get that kind of graphical respect.

The History Girls have an excellent word or two for Michael Buerk (and an entire industry), on lookism and sexism - and historical beauty treatments - and the hideous catch-22 of women's conformation we still live with today.  The excellence here is that these words can actually be applied beyond the particulars of this one post - which is where good writing becomes great reading.

Finally, I am grateful to Two Nerdy History Girls for sharing this vid (worth a click-through to their post for a bit more on antique automata, with a little background and some other links as well):

Bloomin' Bicycling, Barefoot Little Heathen, and There Shall Be A Multitude of Hats

Though the transcription here (from the digized copy of an old newspaper clipping, included on the same page as an image) suffers, the points made by the writers of letters to an editor asking “Should women wear bloomers?” in the Los Angeles Herald, circa 1895) are worth winkling out – that clothing defines far more than the statement of an individual, but their affiliations within their societies, their communities, their expectations of themselves (and others … should those critics mired in the depths of vulgarity see and judge).

(Quotations left with transcription errors intact.)

The ill health of American women has long been deplored by all who have thought on the subject and all agree that lack of vigorous out-door exercise has been the chief reason for that Ul health. The bicycle promises to be the greteat boon to health that American women have known. It should oh that accoont he welcomed by men and women alike,for men suffer quite as much from tbe Ul health of women ns women themselves. Tbe continued newspaper comments on tbe suoject frighten tbe nervous, timid women wbo would be most helped physically by tbe use of the bicycle, and wbo would, but for this constant criticism, be using tbe health-giv-ing wbeel.

Tbat tbeie ia anything immoral to be feared from its adoption it the argument pf a sensualist, and shows the depth of vulgarity to wbich criticism may descend.

I have words of censure for the immodest exposures of person tbat every ball room furnishes, and for tbe extravagance of style which dictates tbat yards of material aball be put into sleeves serving no purpose but to jostle tbeir owner into prominence, and force her upon the attention of every passer-by. I abhor the untidiness of the long skirt on the street, and I deplore the wickednessof the tightly corseted waist, but for tbe bloomers, which make out-door exercise for women a fascinating delight, I nave only commendation and admiration.  ...  

My profile says “I contain multitudes” and one of the central ways this has always been expressed in my life is through the way I dress.

When I was a little girl, I was MAD for “twirly skirts.”  There are a LOT of you reading right now who are immediately nodding; you know precisely the garment I’m describing, and you remember exactly the appeal of a dress or a skirt, cut full, which either belled or entirely fanned out when you spun in a circle, round and round.  I can’t say how many conversations I’ve had in which fond memories of The Twirly Skirt arose, but it’s something many of us recall as being a fond and fun, and very particular part of childhood.  I have memories, too, of a certain flame-haired imp I know, not so very far past these years (perhaps not at all), the sight of whose vivid coloring, in a bright pink tutu skirt, capering across the green of a lawn only the Pacific Northwest could produce – who might nod as gravely as any old lady my age might, understanding the joys of twirling across the grass, barefoot, in a properly designed flounce, with a properly calibrated spin …;

But I wore many things other than twirly skirts, as most of us did.  Shorts were fun, and bathing suits, and – oh joy! – the new Mary Jane patent leather shoes every year, in time for Easter.  Because – there was Sunday Best, and then there was EASTER Sunday Best.  White tights, a pale green dress with a pink satin flower, or yellow bow – and patent leather shoes.

You didn’t get to wear Sunday Best every day, and so it held both the excitement of a luxury held in some reserve, but also the powerful association of pretty things with A Sense of Occasion.  To this day, I still dress up for church, though it’s by no means necessary to do so in my congregation.  Dressing on a Sunday morning carries with it the memory of family bustle, the feeling that you present yourself at your best for G-d and the gathering.  Dressing on a Sunday morning – wearing those things I wasn’t allowed to wear “just” for school – had all the sartorial anticipation, beauty, and pleasure of a party dress.  Dressing on a Sunday morning was probably half the means by which I could be persuaded into two hours (Sunday school, then the church service itself) to behave at all like a civilized child and go to church at all.  If I went to boring-old-church, at least I got to do so all decked out.

And yet, after church, coming home and changing into play clothes was exhilarating, too.  I learned the utility and comfort of different clothes early – and so, I learned early, that as much fun as it is to get dressed up, there is also reward in “boring” every day clothes, in which I could curl up and read, or run around outside, or hang off my mom’s elbow, whining about how there’s nothing in the world at all to do.  (It is a sad truth that the latter of these comprised perhaps the bulk of my childhood …)

Clothing imparts a rhythm to life.  Sundays had this heightened activity in terms of wardrobe; weekdays, I’d come home from school and almost certainly not change until time for beddy-bye and a nightgown.  Going out to supper with my family, we’d dress up a bit, but not like for church.  If family or friends were coming over, we may not change, but there’d be a hair-combing and a bit of a wash on tap (yes – har) for us, after a quick but effective inspection.  The energy my mom imparted, from more attention or frustration for those occasions calling for more formality or visibility, set the energy for given events.

In me, this translated into an ongoing extension of that same sine wave of intensity in my habits of dress.  I don’t get stressy over work clothes, but I do plan what I wear and how I hope to look – in recent times, this has resulted in the careful modulation of Interviewing Clothes worn on days I didn’t want anyone to think too hard about how I was looking, and an adjustment from a fairly formal place of employment to a new job in which I can get away with glittery nail polish – but am still forty-six years old, and not trying to look like a teenager.  I’ve gained a little freedom to indulge the Frowsy Middle-Aged Authorial look around here … but I’ve also lost my key spectator, too.  Because dressing for work is dressing for those friends who’ll ooh-and-aah over the latest new pashmina in my collection, or the great little vintage shoes I bought while out shopping with my friend and former workmate Cute Shoes, or (on rare occasion) showing off that I’ve dropped a pound or two.  Dressing for work is about indulging in seasonal change by indulging in new colors, and pieces that have been in storage for a while.

But dressing for work, I have found, has lost MUCH of its charm since Cute Shoes and I no longer get to work together.  And here we  have the truth of the statement:  that women dress for *each other* …;

After work clothes, for me these days, it’s dog-walking pants.  For shopping trips and errands, it’s jeans and either brisk or bohemian casual tops or sweaters.  For church, still, it’s low heels and dresses or skirts.  I never feel I fit well in my nicer pants these days (and there lies at least one sewing project I’ve been putting off for too long).

There are men and women, I know, who never have to change their mode of dress, or who don’t want to.  TV reality stars seem particularly prone to enslavement to an “image” – heavy makeup/false eyelashes, ridiculous stillettos, and evening and/or cocktail dress no matter the day, time, or occasion.  Certain tatty magazines or shows produce GASPING images of “stars without makeup” as if (a) the stars’ looks reside only in pots of pigment, and/or (b) celebrities actually *sin* by ever appearing in anything but their approved, stylist-generated masks and costumes.  It looks to me exhausting, and surely must take all the fun out of getting dressed up.  Their states of undress are duly recorded and regurgitated for audiences, talking around makeup artists or their stylists or supposed-servants as they are outfitted for some scandals-on-tap scripted fiasco, providing entertainment as we see them how they “really” are (always a minimum of 75% of the way through any given process, so those “no makeup” shockers are actually not to be).

Likewise, there are certain people – famous and not – who formulate a more particular look for themselves early, and somehow end up unable to get out of it or develop it beyond a certain point.  There’s a particular starlet, actually not far from my own age in fact, who’s spent some years rocking the insouciant vintage pinup girl thing, and as we age, I find myself wondering – how is this woman going to be able to grow old?  Even Bettie Page stopped modeling at last – and, though honestly I think she made a very lovely old woman (the photo or two of her in her seventies are difficult to find, but they are out there), she consciously preserved her image by retiring both from it and the public eye, so her actual youth would never be compromised by ever-diminishing returns in the attempting-to-hold-on-to-it department.  One of the truly odd things about that statement, above, that I don’t look my age, is that … it is because I’m not trying to look younger, per se, either.  There isn’t too much jarringly age-inappropriate fadishness drawing attention to how old I really am – yet there isn’t too much holdover-from-when-I-*was*-younger, either.  The clue-catcher 80s bangs don’t give me away, nor the untied LA Gear high-tops and scrunched down socks.  If I look young enough, it’s precisely because I’m not working too hard to do so.

We’ve all seen examples of those who do; the pinups who end up, as Queen Mary was once described as appearing, basically enameled into an image they’ve lost forever.  Epoxied, some of them.  Or those who gracefully let go, and are castigated for ageing.

It goes both ways, of course, with those who can’t/don’t/won’t dress up for any occasion either.  I’ve become acquainted of That One Person who has a matched set of sneakers/hoodies in multiple neon colors.  It happens to be someone I like, and it’d be asinine in the first degree to think this person needs to vary their wardrobe beyond the eyeball-smacking palette.  We don’t all have the same rhythms, and why should my multitudes apply to ANYONE but myself?  As long as we’re all clean and covered to the current mores of society/our friends/our office/whatever, it’d be boring as hell for us all to dress the *same*.  And, of course, the sneaks and hoodies look won’t age poorly; someone in their eighties or whatever is perfectly endearing, running around not letting him or herself become invisible, and blissfully exempt from any uniform of expectations the rest of us may choose to hew to.

… and when I am old, I shall say to heck with wearing purple – or a red hat – I shall wear whatever is comfortable to me in whatever mood I find.  And – bless me – I’m old enough to do that now!  When I am old ... I shall wear *hats*.

"Dropbox" ... Is Apparently A Pun

Though the more subjective points here are a bit glib (girlie-types are a-skeered of Trek posters and superheroes), the realities are deeply true and deeply disturbing.  Dropbox (pun apparently very much intended by the male hiring staff, even if they don’t realize it) comes in with an engineering staff consisting of barely over six percent women, and in the past twenty-nine years, computer science graduate statistics have gone from thirty-five percent women down to eighteen.  You might have thought a career opportunity so new then, which has come into such a dizzying maturity, might ATTRACT women – yet the men who form its core evidently have gone the Alfalfa route and systematically turned this vital industry into a very literal boys’ club.

Please click through on this – to understand how scary and alienating it is that the world contains a PROFESSIONAL SPACE named the “bromance chamber” ...

It’s one of those things which, being as old as I am, leads me to a geriatric prone-ness to judge that we have moved backward.  While I’m aware I have my long-held and some long-developing prejudices, this really does seem to me to be objectively true in too many ways to ignore or be comfortable with.  Yes, I am a woman able to live on my own and on my terms, which historically has not been an available choice for my gender without exceptional circumstances – yet I am also the product of a culture dominated by corporate over human interests, in which a certain mega-beauty brand (DOVE) pretends to glorify “real” women even as it spends billions creating the neurosis that our armpits need to be prettier.

It doesn’t make me Henny Penny, either, to look at plain stats – and to realize how apart-from-average I am – to see that the odds are stacked against my entire gender, if they don’t have the strength to be apart-from-average, or if they just want to make a living and not have to jump through ridiculous hypothetical nerd scenarios in order to do so.  I find it so sad and also outrageous that we’ve come to a place where, basically, *anyone* really wanting to make a living feeds themselves at a young age into a massive machine and just manages along.  It’s not just the economy, either – it’s the fact that so many of us are limited by circumstances and resources into “taking what we can” for a living, rather than having the luxury to make a living by work that actually inspires us.

If I had gone into computer science in 1985 … there is little doubt I would not have left it by 1993.  I am not a crusader now, even having realized at something like age 45 that I have a voice at all – but when I was twenty-five or so, I would have quit on a dime.  “It’s hard” would have stopped me in my tracks, not whetted me to push all the harder and change the way things were.

That may make a wuss of me, but the world isn’t necessarily populated by those willing to fight just to pay their mortgages, and that’s not a moral shortcoming, when we’ve had recession after crisis, and more people are likely focused on their relationships than on their offices.  Goodness, and I hope they ARE more focused on their lives than the means to pay for them, honestly.

And yet, and yet.  The lack of energy to fight for our rights, or even just for professional visibility, equity, agency … so far, it seems to be leaving us with this.  With men holding ninety-four percent of the cards at Dropbox.  With “successful” (which is to say – backed by enough money and resources to make a wide impact) innovation coming only out of the minds of a fairly narrow and particular portion of the world’s population.  With that segment of the world guiding technology and methodology which reaches more and more OF the world every single hour.

What super power would I give my best friend?  The ability to cut through the BS.  And I’d give it to all of them.  Women, minorities, those with their heads tucked down just getting by.  All of them.

Junkyard Blogging

My Twitter friend Mark continues to be spiritually articulate and wonderful.  "It took cancer for me to believe" and "These are my problems. I like them."

Because he wants to know, I'll say this here and finally, having not wanted to do so before.  This post was hard to read.  It made me feel bad.  It made me think, "My BODY is not your bet with G-d."  It bothered me a little bit, but for a surprisingly long time - like, a couple of weeks, before I put it away and decided to say nothing.  My body is G-d's chief gift to me.  It's not a joke, and it's not a metaphor.  It is mine.  And it is far more than the sum of two of its softer parts.  Those parts come with so much that is not soft.


And Mark, I respect you to pieces for the way you work through your questions, and like you more the longer I "know" you - your honesty is pretty amazing.

Prey It Stops

If your way of flirting scares and repulses people, then you need to stop and find a new way of flirting.  --Soraya Chemaly

Yes.

Trek Post ...

... just because it's been a while since I geeked out on Trekkery.  From an email I wrote to Mr. X this week - I won't rewrite it for the blog, just edit as needed.  If I rewrite, it'd never be posted.  Right now, I'm too busy being lost in that comic.



Over the weekend I caught the 3-episode arc of Brent Spiner guesting on “Enterprise” (directed by LeVar no less), as Dr. Noonien Singh.  Though of course there’s no appearance by Khan (Noonien Singh), there’s a serious tip of the hat to Wrath in the costume design and hairdos for the “augments” (genetically enhanced human beings the Dr. is working with/”fathering”).  Nobody wears a fake chest, though, of course.  Well maybe the women ...

Of course the whole thing ends with the doc musing about artificial life forms – “it would take a generation or two, but ... cybernetic life forms ...”


It’s remarkable to me how little of “Enterprise” I have recalled, re-watching that series.  It was still on the air when you and I started dating, and I seem to recall deprioritizing its space in my life for other interests at that time.  But I am having a few “oh yeaaaahh - that!” moments.  It’s a good series, but it is interesting to see the gender roles really thrown back to TOS in a lot of ways.  At first they were clearly having a go at the amorous captain thing, recapturing some Shatner fun, and in season one the whole cast’s prettiness is *much* exploited, but it’s fairly strange watching what they did with, of all characters, the Vulcan science officer.  T'Pol ends up reduced to breathy chick status an awful lot of the time as the series goes on.  They even went so far as to explicitly weaken her and make her a drug addict, so as to put her together with another cast member (because, in Trek, outside of DS9, a woman owning her own carnal interests is still impossible to countenance).  The only other female officer, the token Asian, and the one African American man on the crew, have been all but abandoned as I cruise through season 4.  Very subtly, too, the design has slowly crept backward in sophistication from the cinematic look which was so popular at the time production began, as the show swings focus back onto The White Guys (and one horny Vulcan chick).

I recently read, and have been meaning to refer/respond to, an interesting essay about how gender progressive Voyager was, but in a lot of ways (revisiting this series as well) I’m not sure I’m persuaded of that premise.  On the surface, I see the points – female captain, strong focus on female characters who aren’t a bunch of pansies – but my recollection of frothing fanboy-dom over the super sexy avatar of abuse survivorship, Seven of Nine, is still bothersome.  That’s what men remember about that show; if there was a real message about the evolution of women in/and power, it is not what stuck with a significant portion of the audience.  Not to mention, I’ve seen one too many eps of Janeway pining to disappear into the Victorian era – and just watched one where ensign Harry Kim is kidnapped by a planet of women right on the heels of The Lorelai Signal, which doesn’t exactly speak much for the evolution of Trek’s writing/enlightenment over a THIRTY year period.



That post will probably still come; I want to address the points of the essay just to deal with them myself.  For now, this quick infusion of Trek is the offering of the day.

MY Body. Not Your Decor.

Our culture is loaded with things like this - The 9 Weirdest Facts About Boobs ...

The term "boobs" is, in this context, calculated to distance readers from the FACT that these body parts are attached to human beings (who, by the way, are indeed more than these appendages).  All but one of the "facts" cited are about men:  these "facts about boobs" in fact only involve women's breasts insofar as they affect and/or interest MEN (straight ones, of course - because gay men don't exist any more than women do).  The solitary fact about women indicates what suicidal morons we are if we get fake boobs.

Here is the news:  my body means more to me than its appeal to or its effect upon ANYBODY who doesn't live in it with me.  Men, women, wombats, brickbats.  You're not in here with me.  So you aren't invited to judge, fact-check, analyze without consent, nor consider my body like any sort of exhibit.  Period.

My breasts are NOT ABOUT YOU.

This.  Is what.  It is LIKE.  To be a woman.

(Collection Post) We Now Resume ...

... some programming, at least, if not "your regularly scheduled" ...

The past week has been a bit much, but it is time to make myself do some normal writing, reaching out, etc.  Starting off with a collection post so limited in options it's really just a pair.  But it's something.

Off we go:

First off, a discussion of the human concept of ancestral "descent" I would find rather wonderful if I weren't such a jaw-clenching jerkweed about use of the "word" millenniums.  The not-at-all-incidental sideline to this piece is a spiffy deconstruction, if not precise debunking, of the Merovingian Heresy.  I always love those!

The risk of today's genetic genealogy tests is that they tend to divide people into groups, whereas the real message that emerges from genealogy is one of connections. ... In the 18th and 19th centuries, they pounced on the idea of race and used it to formulate hypotheses about human differences that had disastrous social consequences.

Secondly, yet another extremely charming example of the ridiculous "snips and snails and puppy dog tails" school of gender understanding (I'm sorry - that's contamination, actually) which still - and more than ever - informs and downright rules our culture thanks to advertising.  The Mad Men were and still are bastards.  Even the ones working from the thriving advertising industry outlets within my own community ... where that dadgum lizard was born, y'all.  Gender conatmination - because, even without millennia-obsolete male-dominated religion to keep us in order, women are still ritually unclean.

Le Sigh.

(Edited to be completely disgusted that Blogger accepts the non-word millenniums above with no problem, and marks the correct term, millennia, with a jagged red MISSPELLING underline.  Speaking of bastards.)

Prey About It - Again and Again and Again ...

Most of the men I know who read my blog, or at least these posts about what it is like to be a woman, have asked me what exactly triggered what essentially appears to them to be an outburst.  Triggered is an interesting word choice, given its increasing association with the post traumatic stimuli of violative assault (I repudiate the term "sexual" assault, as rape is not and never has been about SEX - which is a sacred and blessed part of our humanity), and - yes - there was an incident recently that got me thinking about just how little most men understand the experience of womanhood - and, sadly, of girlhood.

The trigger, for me, was not something to get upset about.

And, the more I have let it sit and the more I have thought about it, THAT is precisely what upsets me so much and has got me talking.  The fact that an incident of personal violation, because it's "just" verbal, is not "worth" getting upset about in our world.

If it were a man, or a boy, people would smack foreheads and freak out.  But the thought of a woman's being inappropriately approached, in public, is quite literally "nothing" to us.  To men, *and* to women.

Which is simply an outrage.

There are a lot of other things going on in the world, too, which are worthy - indeed, demand - upset.  The boys club of the Texas legislature.  The depravity and intimate brutality to which a woman must be subjected by strangers because she has the temerity to create a professional career in sex education (this link is the story of a woman first verbally assaulted with vulgarity and insuperable presumption by a stranger with sexual advice for her to take with her own husband, and it is perhaps the finest written piece of meticulously reasoned, and REASONABLE, outrage I've read in months).  And it's not all sensational stories about ass-grabbing, either.  Sometimes it's disguised in terms like "gravitas" as we dismiss the (imaginary - and faultily reasoned) specter of the "gender backed" "female dollar."

We live in an excessively screwed-up (terminology and entendres quite entirely intentional, yes) world, society, and culture, and the rapidly increasing control exerted by every aspect of it upon women is frightening and angering an awful lot of us.

But, yeah - I began talking, began my personal version of "activism" by airing out the things I have to say and participating, well, actively in this "conversation" because of those things - and because of the recent thing - which have happened to me.  These things MUST be exposed to the light of day.  The intrusive consequences of simply being a woman are immoral, and these things must be said.  Again and again and again.

I regret, to an extremely small and not particularly uncomfortable degree, minimizing what has triggered me most recently - and yet, I also feel that, as Jill McDevitt points out, there's an awful lot about the experience of my gender and my body which are flat-out nobody's business but my own.  I may privately backtrack somewhat and explain what I am discussing here, for those extremely few men whose concern I actually give a rat's behind about managing - because I care about them and The Unknown, particularly when so archly published on the internet (after discussions dismissively saying "nothing happened") is sort of a wench move.  It may lead to clinical and substantive conversations which aren't all about me, and for those men I care about who have daughters, it could be worthwhile to take the instructive posts I've already written and contextualize them in the current events of a woman they care for in return.

As for the rest of you - given the disturbing and intimate personal information I've already shared, I don't feel it's appropriate nor necessary to go on about more.  This doesn't bear further actual explanation, no matter how strongly I feel that "these things" need to be said again and again and again.  Please understand that no new sexual (again there's that inappropriate terminology) harassment at work has occurred.  That physically I am intact and untouched.  That, depressing as it is, "It's really no big deal" is all it deserves, in terms of public discourse.

That my privacy is as much my own as my body.



Sometimes, I look at the extent to which my parents emphasized for me my bodily and spiritual autonomy, beginning way back in the wee hours of the 1970s, is almost miraculous.  That is the people who raised me - human beings of such dignity.  Who put a premium on their children.  Whose ultimate goal, whether it was religion or politics or personal experience of violation, was to protect and preserve and always to VALUE their daughter.

My sense of self wasn't something they taught me with tedious explicitness, by rote, even by words.  It was their inimitable example.

I am incalculably grateful for their lesson.

Talk About Bitchy

Wow, people can get mad about just about anything.  To wit:  stamp rage.

Preying and Hoping - the Difference

When I wrote The Uncensored Post, it had been my intention to follow up pretty quickly with a post about men which would put the negativity and outrage into better perspective, but time and inspiration have gone against my doing so to this point.  For that, my apologies, but now is the time.

Though a feminist and avowedly, publicly so, I have never fit into that half-delirious stereotype so many men *and* women fear, who refuse the label for themselves, or outright revile it for everyone.  I'm not a humorless, man-hating creature, out to set traps so I can consider men to be failures in one context or another.  Indeed, I never quite got over the eager proneness of my innocence, to indulge in crushes, and I was every bit as boy-crazy as any other kid when I was one.  It's just that my ability to find objects to crush on was refines with age, and my ability, too, to stick a landing so to speak - to stick with *one* crush (permanently) - reached an apex and hasn't fallen back down.  It's something of a privilege (and relief) of age.

Fun fact:  my very first crush of any kind, before I even had any idea of romantic interest, was Muhammad Ali.  I was about four or five - and he was right:  he was beautiful.

So on to the point, then.

Just now, in the grocery store (oddly enough - given how I was going on about grocery stores in that first post), I was approached by a guy.  (I say guy rather than man because, as young as he was, I feel almost squicky referring to him as fully mature, because I feel a certain need to repel myself from any hint of cougar-dom.)  He asked me what gym I work out at (I was wearing a knit cami and my "dog-walking" pants).  I laughed I'd been playing with my dog, and moved easily on.

The key to this encounter:  he let me move on, no further interest shown, no question, not even a backward glance.  It was fairly clear he was gauging his own possible level of attraction, but when the message came that there was not prospect, he stopped completely.  Passed him again a few minutes later, and zero "signals" of any kind.

The phrase men need to remember:  NO HARM/NO FOUL.  Now, most of us can live with a guy taking a shot.  As human beings, we'd never procreate at all, if  nobody approached anybody else, ever.  If there were no physical attraction.  It is vital to our humanity to make connections where none existed before.  The only problem is when there is no availability but that is ignored.

Persistence is a virtue - but a woman has an absolute, hermetic right to refuse and even to rebuff overtures.  So do men - and, in full disclosure, I have been rejected myself in making an approach.  Since I was eighteen (I remember the first time), I have been the one who started an approach which resulted in a relationship.  I get hit on, sure - but for pretty much all the significant relationships of my life, I initiated first contact.  That boy I watched Tootsie with.  The one I was sure I'd marry, senior year.  Beloved Ex.  That one with the metrosexual pants, whom a few folks were sure was gay (he was not).  Mr. X, in fact, has told me a hundred times he never would have crossed that room when I smiled at him, because he was sure I must be with somebody.  Shameless flirting is not enough.  So I just get pointblank.  There have been occasions it didn't work for me.  But I've been pretty lucky.

When someone says, though, "I have a girlfriend" or makes some demurring remark - I do precisely what I would expect and require any man to do in kind:  I let the heck go and either depart completely or change the subject.  Flatly.  The idea of pushing through a show of not being wanted is bewildering to me.

But our culture, unfortunately, has this "hard to get" practice, which renders BS in a man's mind any show of reluctance from a woman to his desires.  Even worse, there are women who actually *do* play hard to get.  (I don't mean to presuppose all games are terrible and must be forgone - but this one has created more problems than it can possibly be worth, and there are safer ways to tease someone you wish to keep on a hook; so "worse", above, isn't precisely a moral judgment ... even if I do find that dynamic personally worthless.)  So we've institutionalized the idea that "no" doesn't mean no, and that subtler signals, lord help us, might only be gaming cues.

I am again fortunate in that it is not typical for me to be outright misunderstood by anyone exhibiting interest.  In the past, I have indulged in ostentatious Ice-Queenery to get a point across, and when truly pressed, I've been able to provide acrobatically nimble rejections which leave no doubt and no room for further pressing.

Not all women are fortunate enough to have confidence enough that they're allowed to say no, never mind blessed with a pair of parents who taught them by unwitting but unremitting example just how to do it effectively.  I was given, and understood, boundaries from the earliest age.  It was also demonstrated to me in no uncertain terms that as a human being - as a girl - I had boundaries of my own, which were to be defended.  To some extent, this was a religious imperative imposed on a virgin daughter - but it was also the simple worth and value with which I was treated from the moment of my birth.  I was worth something, and nobody had a right to the core of me in any way, without my consent.  Ever.

Through my life, I have found men who did not plough over that worth, but who admired and valued it too.  That boy, that first love, that Beloved Ex - and Mr. X.  All of them responded to my sense of self with instinctive support, not some adversarial imposition of *their* sense of self as if it were an opposing force.

Not one of these men was in the slightest an emasculated nor submissive person.  As I expect not to be halved nor dominated, I do not reduce nor dominate either.  Beloved Ex and Mr. X, to be sure, are almost stereotypically manly - in all the good ways.  BEx has the warmth and comfort in his own skin I associate with manliness - with, indeed, the very model of manhood in my life, my own dad.  Who, himself, was no milquetoast.  He was passionately in love with my mom from the moment he found her, and was never anything less nor the worse for it.

No man has ever been diminished by emotional commitment to his partner.  Indeed, the measure of a real man (and a real woman) is the person who can give themselves completely and not see it as submission, as any negation of self.  To give fearlessly.

And I like:  real men.

I like them a very great deal indeed.



Edited to add that, ironically, this episode of Voyager happened to come up on my queue just after this post was finished.  Somewhere between Fatal Attraction and Trek, we have another character violating a crew member.  At least it wasn't Deanna getting raped again this time.  Voyager has a way of inverting the explorations of human relationships done on some of the other series.

Prey - the World We Live In

Anyone who doesn't understand why I posted the personal and uncensored post I did has not been paying attention.  When men habitually get away with claiming to "suffer" from the imaginary illness of "sexual addiction", when two weeks' vacation in therapy is prescribed as a "cure" for decades of self-oriented thinking - these things need to be said.  Again and again and again and again.

The men in these obvious, dominating power play situations are not the ones in need of "help" - they are in need of simple ordinary decency, self-control, and the clear awareness that those around them are actual, real human beings with rights, sentience, and desires all their own.  That they are not entitled to anything and everything *they* desire, instantly and upon demand (if they even stop to demand).

These men are not suffering.

They are the cause of it.

Prey: An Uncensored Post

This blog is usually written to a standard that literally anyone could read it - my mother, my coworkers, my bosses, my nieces.

This post is written to that same standard.  And it has absolutely filthy language and ideas in it.  Sadly:  this needs to be said.  Again and again and again.


The first coherent experience I had of a sexual predator, fortunately, was anecdotal and not personal.  The Guy in the Yellow Camaro.  It is so general as to almost be an urban legend, but when I was pretty young, maybe nine-ish, there was a guy in the neighborhood driving around in his car trying to get little girls into it.  There were no horror stories (we heard) about his actually succeeding, but the word was out and the word was clear:  girls were for hunting.

I've tried, without enthusiasm, and realized that to catalogue my experience with creeps would be impossible.  I remember them all, but again - without enthusiasm.  There was the guy at the lake, when my family and my cousins' family were all together eating chicken and swimming.  The first stranger who ever told me to smile; we were on a trip and my family were all going to the bathroom or warming up the car - in any case, I was standing by myself in a restaurant and found the experience of a strange man attempting to turn my emotional state into his personal life decor - which must be *pretty* - ineffably horrifying and invasive.  Those boys at that party thousands of miles from anything I understood, whose Maccabee beer-driven sexual desires were more important than mine or my cousin's humanity.  I was fourteen.

The one who tried (and failed) to get in my pants all the while telling me he thought "that smell that girls have must be urine."  Because he found it filthy, as girls were apparently, and his grasp of feminine anatomy began and ended with "wanna grasp" and that was it.

The one my freshman year who fortunately was too drunk, even as huge as he was, to overcome me for meaningless, but still more-important-than-my-personhood reasons.

The one my freshman year I never so much as stood in a room alone with, who sneered a sexual smear against me to one of my best friends.

The one who pulled my skirt up over my waist while Beloved Ex, then my boyfriend, was onstage.

The ones my mother heard, on the night before my college graduation, screaming "I WANT SOME PUSSY" outside my apartment window (not particularly at me).  Mom got to like Beloved Ex, and understood why I was dating a "Townie", a whoooole lot better that night.

The one at that temp job who left anonymous notes on my car, when I worked sixty miles from home and was completely alone.  I never did find out who that was.

The one who walked me to my car, because that's what you do, you walk women to their cars.  So you can then attempt to coerce them into letting you into their cars so you can fuck them, again meaninglessly, because that is always more important than her dignity, her desire (or lack of it), her humanity - than anything about her except her genitals.

The ones who came up behind Beloved Ex that one night while he sat in his van waiting for it to warm up.  They saw beautiful blond hair and said to it, "Hey, baby - you want some cock in you?"

Beloved Ex, bless his very fine soul, was utterly horrified by that.  He was shaken.  I still remember his coming over to my apartment after that, telling me about it, genuinely bewildered, deeply offended and shocked.  "Do men SAY things like that?  Really?"

Yes, B.E.  Well ... not *men*, no.  But human males come up with that sort of thing all the time.

I kvetch a lot, sarcastically, about the whole "there is no war on women" thing we hear all too regularly (from the same quarters who helpfully inform us "it's not about race" when a young black boy is heedlessly murdered).  But it occurs to me ... one declares war on an enemy army.  The men who say these things, who do these things, do not consider women to be anything like an actual force.  We're seriously nothing more than a series of holes to these creatures.  Nice to stick a penis in, but otherwise only to be dismissed, and violently if necessary.


***


For any male who has read this far - ANY male - and, yes, I am thinking of all those among you whom I know will read this, my family, my friends, any one and every one of you:  this is what it is really like, to be a woman.

I am one of the lucky ones.  I've held my own, pretty much, even through my own utterly stupid years.  No man has ever hit me.  No man has ever called me worse than "bitch".  The man who did that cannot begin to know what it was he wielded, the abuse and damage that was simply by virtue of its being said by a man.  None of you can ever experience what it is actually like, all our lives.  Not even the ones who've heard things like, "Hey, baby, you want some cock in you?"

Because that happened once in the entire lifetime of a person now approaching half a century.

Because even if anything so shocking could be said to a man consistently, for life - merely by that physical presence we women hate to know is so different - the threat and the experience of it could never be the same.  As it is for a girl of nine, walking with a cousin across a parking lot near a lake, family not more than a couple hundred yards away ... but as far as the moon, if things had gone differently.  Being approached by a man pointing out her nascent breasts, being appraised like meat because that is what girls are for for too many men across our society.

Don't kid yourself it's just some creep in a yellow Camaro, either.

It's that rich boy in college, raised and tumescent with his own entitlement to satisfaction - and reared on ideas that women aren't really people.

It's the awkward guy in an office, who ties up a cherry stem, hands it to a woman after everyone has left the building, and says to her (honestly imagining this is a pick-up line ... and utterly unaware that there is no place for this behavior in this - deserted - setting), "NO HANDS."  Or who tells her confounding and gruesome stories, of all things, about his ex wife's bloody and horrific childbirth of their son.

Or the one who walks up behind a woman, again at work, whispering to himself - very archly so she can hear it - "I just have to say something" and then corners her OUTSIDE THE BATHROOM for fifteen minutes, starting off with the question, "are you married?" as if a wedding ring is the sole possible defense for a woman in any possible scenario denying him her attention.

It's the banker who, in 1962 or '63, my mom and all her coworkers have to use a buddy-system to avoid being alone in the vault with.

It's a perfectly nice guy on a date, who begins talking about the sex swing he and his ex had as a viable option for future time together.

It is the stranger in a parking lot, sure, who says "want some cock in ya" to someone he can't even identify as female ...


... but it's also the ones in disguise.  The ones we don't know for sure are harmless.  The ones who force us, every day, all of our lives, to gauge our personal safety, completely aside from "hating" men - but entirely because in order to function normally in an abnormal and sometimes terrible world, it is necessary to keep with us the gift of fear, at all times.  Without the healthy skepticism a certain level of fear for our personal wellbeing provides regarding interacting with other people, no woman can survive our society.

Period.

I am one of the lucky ones, and I am richly talented, full of life, confident, even sexy (sometimes ...).  And there isn't a day in my life fear has no role at all.

Someone recently scoffed at me, after a new door was installed in my home.  It has a large window, and I cover that window every night with a towel.  In order to see in that window, it would be necessary to come far up my front walk, to be very close to my house, to be making a stalkerly point of attempting to look in.  I cover the window anyway.

Live for twenty-five or so years of your life, as a woman alone in our country.

Live in that one apartment where the guy across the hall (a "nice" looking person, an upscale apartment building) comes to the door at three a.m., clearly with the intent of getting laid - and shocked that not only do you answer, when finally and awfully you feel forced to do, looking bleary and sleep-mussed (not in a sexy way), but that you evince instantaneous and forbidding hostility at the obviousness of his intent.  That bastard is fortunate I never called the police.

Live for a couple years with a registered sex offender as another neighbor.

Live, essentially, your entire adult life as a woman alone.  Not a woman hideously abused.  Not a woman with unusual experience of others' sexual deviance.  Just an ordinary woman.  In our decidedly non-ordinary world.  And see if you don't feel you have the right to cover a damned window, and let logic be damned.


***


My experience isn't even remotely encapsulated here.  I share what I have to give a reader ... to give men, frankly ... the slightest shred of understanding what goes into the life, even, of a highly privileged and fortunate woman on her own.  Every single one of you is a RISK, for us.  Every hello in an elevator, every passing car honking, every would-be friendly fellow at the movie theater trying to strike up that conversation we must navigate with painstaking care so as not to offend, and so as not to encourage.  Every.  Single.  One.  Of you.

Every man, whether WE like it or not, at the point of introduction (no matter the introduction) can be a threat.  That one boss who used to like to throw the rubber band ball at the front window of our office when women walked by - and who talked about the most illegally inappropriate things.  The nice guy we go out with once several friends and family are informed exactly where and how long we will be on a first date.  Even the friend of a friend, whom nobody could have known was into "that" ... or the man in the grocery store, who could be perfectly nice, but whose clear attempts to gain our attention will *not* desist no matter how utterly they are ignored.  Even the weird religious guy and his wife who interviewed me for a job that one time and who scared the bejeezus out of me with endless probing questions about whether I went to church and what my social life was like.  In an after-hours interview.  When nobody was in the office but the three of us.  *URK*

You think you are Just This Guy, See.  And we get that, and we aren't hateful about that.

But we require proof.  Just to survive.  KNOW this.  Know that I wrote this post specifically for you, and even to upset you.  For you to show your son, for you to remember if you have a daughter.  Know that nothing you ever do, say, nor consider, where a woman you don't know yet is concerned can be said or done without her having to go through a sophisticated process of calculation and vetting, just to swipe a damned ATM card at the damned grocery store.  Know this:  for your children.

Don't hold it against us because we put as much of a premium on our life and limb - and genitals - as some men put on their random and impersonal urge to domination and sexual release.

But do remember:  our lives are not like yours.



And, no.  Most of us, on the whole, are extremely unlikely to "want a little cock" in us if the approach is anything like so entitled, threatening, and dangerously random.

The man who doesn't even know I am a human being at all, I don't want to entrust with my decidedly human, and spiritually priceless, body.