Saturday, December 28, 2002

Cough Cough

Oh, joy.  Everyone in the house is coughing.  It sounds like a TB ward.  Kim and I woke up this morning with sinus headaches. 

Blogging might be reduced until the plague has left our home.

Let’s hope it’s quick.  Hey, at least everyone got it at the same time.  I won’t have the usual month of caring for one person at a time and then getting it myself when everyone is better.

But I have work to do!  Argh!

Eject! Eject! Eject!: EMPIRE

Go there and read the rest.

History has never, and will never, record a time when such power existed in the hands of a nation, nor of a time when opposing forces were so weak and in such a state of disarray and abject surrender.
And these feared and ruthless Americans, a people who had incinerated cities in Europe and Japan and whose ferocity and tenacity on island jungles and French beaches had brought fanatical warrior cultures to their knees – what did these new conquerors of the world do?

They went home is what they did. They did pause for a few years to rebuild the nations sworn to their destruction and the murder of their people. They carbon-copied their own system of government and enforced it on their most bitterly hated enemy, a people who have since given so much back to the world as a result of this generosity. They left troops in and sent huge sums of money to Europe to rebuild what they all knew would eventually become trading partners, but also determined competitors. Then they sent huge steel blades through their hard-earned fleets of ships and airplanes and came home to get on with their lives in peace and quiet.

Deference - A Female Perspective?

Much is being written on Internet discussion boards and in the news about male-bashing. Feminism is a controversial topic, heatedly debated at women’s and men’s forums. The day that the feminist agenda turned to one of bigotry, rather than one of civil rights, is unknown. The day that it had gone too far, however, should be well-remembered.

My sister was a twin. She and her brother started school together. Their eventual school separation was a result of a specific incident in the first grade: My sister was asked to state her address and phone number and she replied to the teacher that she didn’t know them. The teacher pressed her on how important it was, and scolded her for her indifference. She got up, walked over to her brother, and sat, sniffling in his lap, "I don’t need to know it," she said, "because Greg does." And so began their separate, but equal, education. 

At one of the Internet forums I contribute to, one of the male respondents replied to one of my postings, with an air of deference and gentility, "an interesting perspective… a female perspective."

I shouldn’t be upset because people are nice to me. I’ve always been opinionated. I’ve always expressed my views. But, I want people to treat me as they treat others, regardless of my gender. I don’t mean this to sound like I don’t want doors opened for me, or people to treat me as female. I do! I like doors being opened for me. I treat men differently in person. I expect them to do the same. But in writing or in opinions?  In the debate of essays, should I expect or desire deference?

As we women do, we mull things over, we think about intentions, we read between the lines, we analyze, and overanalyze. Why does someone pointing out that my perspective is interesting… female make me hostile?

In thinking this through I came to a very important revelation, one that finally, as Albert Jay Nock once said "it was the glue that bonded the faggots together."

Of course it’s a female perspective! What other perspective could I have? I couldn’t possibly share or express any other perspective than a female one! 

Anything written by a man is a male perspective.  A piece expressed or written by a woman is a female perspective.  This does not add, nor does it subtract from its merit. Neither has more worth. To state the obvious of my opinion being a female perspective could be considered condescending. It had never occurred to me to qualify my positions as female, nor have I seen postings written by men, qualified as male. It seems obvious, and more importantly, irrelevant.

To elaborate on why all of this resulted in a revelation, and to explain that there’s more to it than this, I need to provide a little background: 

Not too long ago, I sat down to read Thoreau’s, Walden. It was one of the books on my stack of betterment reading. I started with the book’s preface and read about 10 pages when my mind started to wonder. I knew enough about the subject to know where it was going. This was going to be a story about a man reducing life to its simplest form and then discovering the meaning of life, abandoning all thoughts and ideas that were superfluous, and thus shedding the chains and shackles of the life of meaningless, material acquisition. 

Ho Hum (yawn). 

There was a part of me that felt shame in finding the subject so boring. This was one of the great feats of literature that reshaped humanity! To use consultant speak, it was a paradigm of philosophical thought. It was sacrilegious of me to find the topic boring. It must have been that I was tired and not up for such lofty reading. But, as I laid the book down, and began what I thought to be the start of a nap, I realized that it is perfectly reasonable that I should find this book boring--for exactly the same reason that I began reading Homer and Socrates with the same, eventual, ho-hum-take-a-nap-instead conclusion. 

All of these great works of philosophical paradigms are distinctly male. The thoughts, ideas and conclusions were thought of, explored, written, and debated only by men. While I can understand, appreciate, and respect them, I cannot identify with them. Just as real men cannot stomach Oprah or any movie in which Alan Alda has a substantial role. 

I had decided I was no longer going to read philosophies written by people who did not have children, such as Thoreau or Steinem. The childless can easily have a fatalist attitude towards humans and the future because they have no stake in the future. 

Children give us a stake and a connection to the future, and lacking that connection, a philosopher cannot fully understand the nature of human beings. Children force us to be optimistic; however unrealistic or misguided, it forces us to be full of hope, even when surrounded by hopelessness. People who are childless might think they can relate by loving nieces, nephews or cousins, but, they can only relate at a distance, and cannot understand how it encompasses all thoughts and ideas about the future of humanity and the importance of our own mortality (even though having children sometimes makes us wish to end our own mortality!). 

I brought this into my thoughts and weighed it in relation to my unenthusiastic attitude toward Walden. How could I solve this problem? I didn’t want to stop my philosophical exploration. I thought for a moment that the solution would be to try to read ancient philosophy written by women. There’s a short list (!), likely as long as female professional football players. As I said, I thought about it for a moment before I realized how silly it was. 

But as I thought about it, I realized there aren’t any great, ancient philosophical works by women (at least not that we know of). This had never occurred to me before. Maybe there are a few titles that were written by women, under a nom de plume of a male… but no, no, even I couldn’t make that stretch. 

I could argue that there must have been great women of ancient philosophy and in our male-dominated culture their works were censored or ignored. That, too, would be a stretch. I am certain, however, that this is at the forefront of the mission and objectives of Women’s Studies programs. I’m a firm believer that what is treasured and kept is done so because it is worth keeping: when the Huns were breaking down the door, Aurelius’ works were grabbed, but I guess Aurelia’s weren’t as good and so they were left to burn.

The fact is, there aren’t any great works of ancient philosophy written by women. 

Would the nonexistence of literary works mean then that there haven’t been any great revelations of the meaning and purpose of life from the minds of women? Would it mean that women cannot or have not ever been philosophers? No, it wouldn’t mean that at all. 

All of this brings me back to my original point...

The struggles of the suffragettes, the demand for equal pay for equal work, the need for active participation in representation has resulted in it being too easy for women to emasculate men. It also made it possible for me to almost miss how condescending it was to state female perspective as somehow less worthy, or even worth mentioning, or to qualify my arguments as different perspective. 

Emasculating women and female-bashing men are opposite sides of the same horrid coin. Devaluing the female and feminine worthiness has resulted in the breakdown of moral principle and ideals, possibly even more so than the devaluing of what is masculine. In order to achieve equality, it was easier to expect women to become more masculine than to place equal value on what they offer as feminine. Had women’s work been valued, the need for some sort of equality, of equal footing, or the desire for recognition, might not have been necessary at all. Had the genders been able to value and recognize the importance of each’s contributions, the gender battles would have ended long ago. 

So how did this all start? Many would argue and believe that it began with the women’s movement. Other people might argue it began with the women’s suffrage. I don’t believe either of these are correct. I believe, that these were symptoms of a problem that began much earlier. 

With the exception of the last hundred and fifty years of our history, the gender roles were much more specific and certainly clearer. Men hunted and gathered, women kept the nest. Even during early American expansion these roles were clear. Men are stronger than women, they have keen spatial skills that enable them to stalk prey and find their way home. Men have a basic nature to defend their families and an astute ability to recognize and ward off potentially dangerous males that invade their turf. Women have a tireless ability to deal with children, to repeat monotonous chores, to maintain order in the nest, to keep the fire burning. Men and women needed each other for survival. 

When we began to move away from a wilderness/agrarian society to one of a larger community/city living, much changed. The clear distinction between the roles began to gray. 

Men no longer hunted; they went to factory jobs and earned wages. Restaurants, boarding houses and the availability of store goods made it possible for men to exist, quite comfortably, without women. As the roles began to gray, the natural physical dynamics between men and women began to shift to one of emotional dynamics. Men began to emotionally and physically dominate women in an attempt to demonstrate their masculinity, rather than the obvious of carrying the large buck on his shoulder. 

Women no longer had the difficulty of the daily chores and the time it took to accomplish them was dramatically reduced. Public schooling made it possible for women to be child-free for long periods of the day.  

Women could be replaced by a boarding house. Women no longer needed the hunter. Men could be replaced by a local butcher and a policeman. 

With all this free time, the genders also had more time to think, and some of this thinking time was spent thinking about how they felt about each other. Women and men tried to find and exercise their power over each other in other ways. Women nagged and men bullied. But they have no inherent power over each other.

None of this was clear anymore. Good providers or good homemakers were no longer admirable, no longer necessary. Men no longer needed women and women no longer needed men, but we clearly were desirous of each other for company, for companionship, and for breeding. 

These gradual changes and confusions led to increased wife beating, more divorce, which led to more bullying, more nagging, more single family homes, and more and more of everything we now find wrong with our society. Feminism was only a reaction and a symptom. Male dominated oppression was only a symptom. 

With the exception of the upper classes, women had always been the educators of the children. If there was a woman in the home, the children were taught to read, to play music, to converse. Through women, children were taught the customs and manners of society. Men taught children the practical (hunting, fishing, and skinning). Both men and women taught, by example, the importance of honor, self-respect, and dignity. The relationship between the man and the woman was the model for how the children should treat each other. A woman would never tell her husband not to teach her son to hunt, use a knife or use a gun. A man would never tell the woman not to teach her son to appreciate literature, or call it "wussy" to be polite, kind or gentle. 

By the 1940s things changed again and more dramatically. It was critical for the returning soldiers from WWII to find work and the easiest way to create more jobs was to vacate the positions held by women. The American propaganda mill (yes, we have propaganda too), worked very hard to convince the public that women don’t work and worse, that they never did. 

Women never worked was a phrase my mother said to me as I grew up. I was in my 20s before I finally turned to her and said, "Huh? Who milked the cow, fed the chickens, cured the bacon, kept the stove going, and baked the bread? Do you think that wasn’t WORK?" 

It is true that women weren’t going to the office, but neither were men. If it is true that women didn’t work, then it is also true that men didn’t work. The men were in the woods stalking game or in the fields plowing. Both men and women worked--existing was their work! 

Post-WWII saw a heavy hand of male dominance. This was countered by a push of women’s issues beginning in earnest in the ‘70s. We’ve shifted from a primarily male dominated society to a female dominance, and the female dominance has outpaced, and exceeded the male dominance period that preceded it. 

I am not certain that many realized that the pendulum swing of feminism began its long and forceful swing back to the male dominant side when the world heard the future First Lady, Hillary Clinton state sarcastically, "I could have stayed home and baked cookies!" 

I think we all agree that women shouldn’t have to bake cookies if they don’t want to. They can choose to work or choose to be stay-at-home Moms--just as men can choose. If a woman chooses to work, she should be afforded the same choices and opportunities as men. With minor exception, I think most of us agree on this. I think it is also true, for most of us, that emasculating men, and the casual way that we have accepted male-bashing as normal, is just as horrid as the stereotypical nagging and henpecking woman. 

But what is obvious, although surely missed by most, is that the very idea of thinking of cookie baking as something unworthy or trivial (or even easy) was the clang that closed the coffin of true equality, gender-compassion and respect, and gender co-acceptance. And what was worse, it was said by a woman! 

In the same breath that men are screaming for a renewed acceptance in being male, everything that is uniquely female has been tarnished and labeled as less worthy. I cannot speak to what has been done to men, but I can surely speak to what has been done to women. Do we regard the baking of biscuits as highly as landing the big account at the office? Does a man praise his wife for the skillful use of carefully measured ingredients and monitored chemical reactions that result in a balanced and all-hot-at-the-same-time dinner? 

• Child-rearing and educating has been handed over to the State. 
• Irresponsible and irrational experts claim that day care is preferable to mother-care.
• Women’s TV programming is called dumbed-down programming. 
• Teaching, once primarily a philanthropic contribution by women has been adjusted to a male and female profession, expected to be profitable enough to be self-sustaining. 
• Cooking has been usurped by take-out and microwave dinners. 
• Great chefs are supposedly all men, while preparing and serving ordinary meals is the work of a scullery maid. 
• Diaper washing has been replaced by disposable diapers.  
• Manners and etiquette have been criticized as being elitist and therefore politically incorrect.  
• Flirtations, lash flickering, and feminine wiles are viewed as manipulative. 
• God forbid that any woman should sew a stitch! 
    

But it is in these tarnished fragments where I find my identity. Not the identity that was forced upon me by a male-dominated society or a bigoted, anti-woman feminist, but an identity that I inherited, proudly, from my female lineage:  

• Our family’s Thanksgiving dinner menu that hasn’t changed in 100 years. 

• The pleasure and pride in mending and hemming my husband’s clothes.  

• Teaching my son and my daughter how to set the dinner table. 

• The contentment in serving both satisfying and savory meals to my family and enduring, unfalteringly, the drudgery of doing it several times every day. 

These are the connections. These are the philosophies of women.  

While men have been wounded in war, women have prepared the bandages, provided the nurturing, and delivered the sustenance required for recovery. While men have fought the battles for freedom of ideas and thought, while men have written the philosophical histories, women have been their muses,  filled their bellies, and supplied them with sons. Frontier women may not have cared to or been good at firing a musket, but they certainly knew how to reload one.  

Men prepared their sons to be warriors, to hunt, to shoot, to toughen them, as well as how to use tools.  Just as importantly, women taught their daughters how to cook, how to manage the home and all the other vital elements necessary for a household to survive.  In times of peace and prosperity, both men and women taught their children how to act civilly and passed on the oral and written history--to civilize them.

And yes, of course, women find glory and reward vicariously through our mates and children enjoying the smell and taste of homemade cookies—and damn the shrew that says otherwise!  

As for the soul searching and desire to find the meaning of life and the true philosophy through the writing and ideas of ancient great males? I have to admit that the betterment reading is mainly vanity. While I am open to new discoveries, I do not expect to find any greater teaching of the meaning of life, or any philosophy greater or wiser than the simple one found when I first suckled my daughter. This experience cannot be put into words, philosophized or justified--even the attempt would degrade its grandeur.  

Circumstances forced me to both suckle my children and financially support them. Women who are forced to work outside the home, out of necessity (or choice), should be given the same treatment as their male counterparts. The woman’s movement of my youth had this as its goal. But I have never known (although I know they exist) a single woman, who on her last day of maternity leave did not sob and detest the day she needed to return to work. But in our attempt to achieve equality in the workplace we have allowed things to go too far.  

The pendulum will, of course, swing back with all its force to a male-dominant side. I hope that in my lifetime, or at least in the lives of my children, the swings will not again need to be as great or as forceful. We need a balance, neither female- nor male-dominated society, but one where the genders are unique, but inherently equal.  

I do not need to be warned of the threats and risks of emasculating men, when all too easily, casually, and without awareness the female perspective is devalued. For in dismissing it and gentleness as inferior, men have swallowed and are practicing what they fear most: that I, as a woman, will devalue what you offer as a man.  

Not too long ago, there was a less-than friendly response on a forum that suggested that I should learn to do something my husband does for me. To that remark I respond, as I nestle carefully, sniffling, into husband’s lap, patting his full and contented belly, and unashamedly and with my feminine wiles state, "I don’t need to know how to do that, because HE does."

Fred Reed, Fred On Everything wrote a five star essay on this topic,  Sex, Equality, and Kidding Ourselves.  Fred is always worth reading.  This one should be dropped as leaflets out of airplanes, added to 6th grade primers, and read from every pulpit.  It’s THAT good.