Gender Roles

There was a time, months ago, when I babysat my siblings for about a week, while my parents were taking a vacation. I stayed at their house, and hung out with my siblings. Most of them had school, and my brother (who was still living at home at the time) was old enough that my parents probably could have done without my services, except that my youngest brother was too young to be in school, and thus to be watched, so I had to stay at home all day with him.
This is to explain how I came to watch a show on Animal Planet called Animal Planet's The Most Extreme--my little brother loved that show.

The premise of the Most Extreme was that they would pick a theme, like Fighters, or Big Mouths, or something like that, find the ten animals with the biggest mouths, and present them from least to most, with information about the animals, and often related information about humans interspersed throughout the show.
So, the episode I'm thinking of was The Battle of the Sexes. It began with Tasmanian Devils (the females have their own burrows, which the males invade in order to mate with her, and then he guards her burrow ferociously, not allowing another male to enter--or the female to leave) and ended with a species of lizard that is entirely female, and "reproduces" by the females mounting each other to trigger the reproductive hormones, creating clones of the mother.
During the last segment, they discussed the Y chromosome in humans, and the theory that it seems to be shrinking and possibly one day humans will evolve like those lizards and be able to reproduce clones without males.

However, the point. (Yes, the background for my point may be overly-complete, but ... )
Animal Planet uses an obviously computer-generated human form when talking about human bodies during those parts of the show.
What I realized while watching various episodes of The Most Extreme, but especially that one, is that unless they discuss something that specifically relates to human females, the human form is male.
The default human is male.

I also saw a couple commercials for something that I never understood--something about Take me fishing.
Anyway, the commericals featured young children asking their grandpa to take them fishing, because before you know it, I'll be all grown up, and it'll be too late.
Anyway, the boys say things like, "Take me fishing. That way we'll always have something in common." The little girl says, "Take me fishing, because my wedding will come sooner than you think."

And then, on a different note, I want to relate a conversation that occurred in my writing group before I moved.
Two of our members are the most awesome women I have ever known, and were like mentors to me. One of them was writing an awesome fantasy book, that took place in an unspecified past-like setting--with peasants and kings and magic.
She wrote a scene where one of the characters was giving birth, and one of the women told the men, "This is women's work, get out of here."
One of the men in the group objected, on the grounds that it was sexist, and said something like, "I especially can't believe you two would write something so clearly offensive as that."
The thing is, I don't find that offensive (and told him so).
My most firmly held belief is that men and women are or should be equal, but that does not make us the same. I am, of course, not advocating that women should stay in the kitchen, or the bedroom. What I believe in is gender roles that make sense: women give birth. Presumably, this means that women who have given birth before have some kind of expertise, or at least some experiences, that man, no matter how long he studies medicine, will never have. Thus, midwifing is women's work.

Gender roles are a complex subject, but the one that I am most passionate about. I will discuss it further at another time.

Teeth: a mini review

I saw the movie Teeth the other night.
It was probably best that I didn't know very much about it before I went, because I'm not certain I would have seen it if I had. But it was excellent.
Briefly: Dawn is the local chastity group's most active particpant. She discovers she has a toothed vagina when she becomes the object of violence.
Teeth borrows from the vagina dentata myth, giving Dawn a toothed vagina (the teeth are similar in shape to a cross between a shark tooth (the root) and an eel tooth (the serrated edge), but have human DNA, according to the tooth expert), which she learns to use as an empowering tool after suffering violence and assholes.

When it was over, me and my friend looked at each other and said, "I want one!"

See it. I regret to say that the toothed vagina never makes an appearance (but I felt I had to say it, just so you know), but there is plenty of blood and chomped-off body parts that you do get to see. (And yes, the chomped-off male genitalia looks more like a dildo than an actual penis that has been severed, but I'm pretty sure that that's because if it did, it wouldn't look much like a severed penis.)
Two thumbs up!!

She is coming back.

The more I think about it, the more I think that, really, we don't have to do anything, to cure this imbalance between men and women. Blasphemous? Perhaps. Outrageous? Certainly. 

Disclaimer: I am talking very generally here. I am talking not about individuals, but about Men and Women as a whole, or the Masculine and the Feminine, in symbolism, or Masculine energy and Feminine energy. (Or the Divine Masculine and the Divine Feminine.)

See, the way I understand it is, men created the imbalance in the first place, and the imbalance, of course, is all in our own minds. Why did they create this imbalance? 

Well, hierarchy, organization, form, structure, and many other similar things are all characterized by the Masculine, in symbolism. What this means is that, on a general, symbolic level, Men create hierarchies, Men create pecking orders and Alpha positions, etc. And Men need to be #1. 

The problem is, that when you view men and women from that Masculine viewpoint, women are clearly superior. We give birth. Holy fuck, Women can create new fucking life. Can I make that any more clear? Also, there are little things like, (the way I understand it) Women are the genetic default: adding testosterone at the right time makes the fetus male. 

Also, there's the fact that Women don't view the world like Men do. Chaos, cooperation, interdependence, organic organization, going with the flow (flowing of water, adaptability), and many other similar things are all characterized by the Feminine, in symbolism. (This is to say, above, when I was talking about Women being superior, that was not MY personal viewpoint, nor is it the viewpoint of the Feminine.) Women are much more egalitarian and sharing. So when the Men struggle for power and to be the Alpha, Women mostly smile and shake Their heads, like We don't understand it, but if it make Him happy ... 

But then of course, Men realized that (according to the Masculine viewpoint) Women were superior, and the Masculine did everything in His power to BE NUMBER ONE! Which of course led to all sorts of nasty things, devaluing the Feminine and raising the Masculine. (Sometime I'll talk about Greek myths and the Hellenes.) 

So, ever since then, we've been fighting to be equal in the Masculine's eyes. 

Well, it's not going to work. 

You see, by fighting, we're only playing His game, the game of who's better? because only one person (group, entity, symbol) can be better, in the world of hierarchy. 

What we want is equality. That's something we can only get by refusing to play the Men's game, and drawing on our Feminine symbols: cooperation, organic organization (that grows naturally and dies naturally, like elder men and women giving advice that is taken very seriously, like women who have given birth multiple times telling the younger woman who has never given birth before, "Sit down and shut up. When you've given birth as many times as I have, then I'll ask you where it hurts!"), interdependence, etc. 

Also, by valuing our selves and others equally. Once we can do that, once we can free our selves from hierarchy, from viewing some others as better than our selves, and some others as less than our selves, then we will be free from the hierarchy that Men dreamed up. 

Also, there exists a beautiful article in a magazine called Snake Power! (I believe; and I'm pretty sure the magazine no longer publishes. But I'll try to find the article)

This article suggests that, instead of a horrible mistake that now needs to be fixed, the devaluing of women and Man's takeover were instead a natural outcome of the nature of the Divine Feminine that will just as naturally be resolved. The author uses the Moon aspect of the Divine Feminine, giving each phase of the moon a time period, roughly five thousand years.  She says that every five thousand years, we switch to a new moon phase, and that right now we are transitioning from the New Moon, the dark and the absences of moon, when the Divine Feminine was in the Underworld/Otherworld, tending to the souls of the dead, to the Crescent Moon.  She is coming back.  You can see that in the upsurge of interest in the Divine Feminine, in women's rights, in the environment and egalitarianism, in everything that relates to the Feminine.  

She is coming back.  

This idea has been very interesting to me, as I look back though history: a lot of big things seem to happen at those five-thousand year marks.  Five thousand years ago (at the beginning of the New/Dark Moon phase) saw the Savior Gods, the Rising-and-Dying Gods, coming into the fore (Christ was a bit late), cities were built, civilizations founded, and the Neolithic period ends.  Ten thousand years ago (at the beginning of the Waning Crescent phase), the Ice Age ended (or took a break, depending on who you listen to) and humans first started doing serious farming and animal-rearing.  It gets fuzzy, the further we go back.  But the pattern is there.  

Anyway, I'm starting to ramble, and I also haven't had breakfast yet, so I think I'm going to close.  I may clarify, or finish later, if I find this isn't very clear/finished.  

Bleeding

It's the bleeding time again.  

First thing to report is this: the new/dark moon occurred on Friday (11:14 am CST), and I started bleeding Sunday, around 2 or 3 am (what with the fucking stupid Daylight Saving bullshit, it was difficult to tell what time it actually started)--but I call it Saturday night, because I hadn't gone to sleep yet.  (And honestly, midnight is such an arbitrary "Day Start" time, anyway ... )

I feel I should also note that my sister started her cycle Saturday morning, so it may be less my energy in the direction of moving my cycles, and more us synching up together now that we live together.  I think it was both.  

Also, Saturday night, my sister and I held an impromptu party, and in the beginning, there were four women and two men (and thus it was perfectly balanced), and we talked very openly about all sorts of things.  

(A side note: because of the way we learn to have conversation, because of automatic, learned deferring to men, and men learning to take control, and such, it takes two women to balance out one man in a conversation.  I'd never really been in a group that was perfectly balanced before, and I can tell you, I felt the difference when one of our guest's boyfriend showed up, thus unbalancing the group.)  

This post will be short.  Apologies, but I have things to get done today!  

Life Intrudes: An Apology

I meant, of course, to post something on V-Day. But the next day, February 15, insanely early, I was leaving to get on the train to move to Chicago to live with my sister. So, as you can imagine, I had quite a lot to be getting on with on Thursday, and I didn't get around to it.
And then of course, Friday and Saturday were spent on the train, and Sunday in moving in. There were difficulties. We didn't have heat, or running water. The first night, Saturday night, we spent with my sister's friends. Sunday night, she and I both threw mattresses on the floor of my bedroom and set up a space heater and put plastic on my windows and threw blankets over my windows and over my door to insulate us as much as possible. We had a space heater in the main room, too, and blankets separating the main room from the smaller living room and the kitchen, so those rooms would be freezing and the main room would be warmish. The kitchen, we didn't need, because there was no running water, and also no gas hookup for our stove/oven--that was something we needed to do, but we weren't capable of doing so for a few days. We had to unplug one of the radiators to plug in our microwave, or else the circuits would blow and we needed to call our (incompetent) building manager so he could give us electricity again.

We learned a lot about Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs during that time period. When we had no heat, that was all we could think about. When we had heat, we had room to start thinking about hooking up our gas so we could cook real food. Now we're thinking desperately about our water, because it's still not properly set up, and our dishes are piling up. I managed to do some yesterday, by heating up water (from the bathroom, which produces either freezing cold or burning hot water from only on faucet in both the sink and the tub) on the stove and pouring it into the plugged up sink, and using water in a pitcher to rinse. The kitchen sink produces a trickle for a time. The toilet is non-functioning. We have to cross the hall to the neighboring (unfinished) apartment for their toilet and shower, which work fine.

I've been looking for a job, and need to find one really soon. I don't really know Chicago very well, so I've mostly been looking online, which is a bit of a hardship, because my laptop is shit (my parents gave it to me), and is very, very slow. The internet connection I'm using is coming from one of the neighboring apartment buildings (we only have one other tenant in this building at the time--they're remodeling everything--and I don't think I'm getting my internet from her), so the connection isn't very good, either, which all adds up to mean that doing anything on-line takes way too fucking long.

Which brings me to why I have been silent here for a long fucking time.
I apologize.

On a more feminist note: I've been feeling inspired to create a Tarot deck featuring the feminine mythic cycle, rather than the masculine mythic cycle that is common with standard Tarot decks. I was inspired this morning by some awesome ideas in that direction, and just yesterday, my sister said she was interested in creating the art for a Tarot deck (she's a visual artist--mostly painting--and I'm really not, which is what stopped me in the past from seriously considering this project). So, we'll see how it goes.
Also, I feel compelled to share this link. We'Moon Land is a women's earth-based spiritual community located near Estacada, Oregon. It is an intentional community, dedicated to learning and growing and healing.

Bleeding, Part 2

The thing that strikes me about my last post is the story of my first menstruation. My friend that I told. We were in the same grade, went to church together, played the same instrument in band (clarinet) and often competed between us for First Chair (which is the best of that instrument).
She had clearly either menstruated before I had, or she at least knew more about it than I did.

But she didn't say anything. I told her my stomach hurt, she thought that it was my cycle, but didn't say anything. Until the next day, and I already knew what had happened.

It's shrouded in secrecy. We don't talk about it. We refer to "that time of the month", "on the rag", etc. I came across this great site right now, of menstruation euphemisms (http://www.mum.org/words.html), and while some of it is funny (Blood is fighting its way out of my vagina "I know several women in the Pacific Northwest who use this phrase. It is particularily effective in clearing a room of men if announced loudly upon entering. For those less-euphemistic among us." See also Bleeding out my vagina, which sounds as if it's from the same person. (July 2005)), a lot of it really makes me sad ([The] bloody mess "I am 39 years old and have always hated 'the period,' or as I really like to call it, 'THE BLOODY MESS!' I don't refer to it as 'my period' because frankly, I have nothing to do with it - it just happens." emphasis mine).
It's so detached from us, our bodies, our selves. We don't speak honestly or straightforwardly. We speak in whispers, in code, or we use it to shock.

Women, we'moon, do not speak of our experiences as women and in our cycles in an honest, let alone reverential, way.
Even I refer to it as "bleeding" or "my (moon) cycle".
We have to use words, labels, and we have to categorize. It's part of being human. And menstruation is such an awkward label. (Godsdamned Romans) (I do like the word menses, though, and I don't use it enough.) (By the way, according to etymonline.com, menstrual is the original word, and menstruate/menstruation is a back-formation, a later reconstruction.)

I believe the silence is damning. I believe the refusal to speak honestly is what keeps the genders separate, and unequal. I believe that our truths are all we have.

You'll notice my preoccupation with honesty. In my personal life, I actually have a very hard time being honest. I come from an abusive family (not physically (or physically-sexually) abusive, but abusive all the same), where we were taught not to speak our truths, to keep silent about certain things (our femaleness, our growing-up questions about life, sexuality, gender, our religious questions, our doubts about the rightness of things my parents did and the way our household was run, etc.). Abusive growing-ups all share that silence and secrecy. If honesty were possible, the growing-up would not be abusive.
My inability to be honest (without effort) drives my motivation for honesty in all things.

Bleeding

I was going to write something about Persephone, since this blog is basically dedicated to her, but as I started bleeding today, we're instead going to talk about cycles.

So, first, let's talk about mine.
When I first started menstruating, for the very first time, I got cramps the day before. I didn't know what was going on. I was very confused. I told a friend of mine my stomach hurt. The next day, I was bleeding, the cramps had gone, and my friend nodded and said that's what she thought it was.
For years after that, I never had cramps. The only thing that happened when I menstruated was that I bled. Maybe I had other types of pre-menstrual symptoms, like irritability, but I never connected it. Also, I was a teenager. Feeling misunderstood is practically the teenager's bread-and-butter.
Years into my cycle (which I could predict more or less), it started changing. I started cramping. It started out being just the first day. Then, several cycles later, it was the day before and the first day. Then it was the day before, the first day, and the second day. Slowly I've dropped the day before. My cramps are now near-debilitating. I go to work because I have to, and I have to medicate. I am trying desperately to find different ways to deal with the pain, because I'd prefer not to take drugs. I have teas with cramp bark in them that usually work while I'm drinking them. I've tried yoga, but don't know yoga well enough, and I can't usually concentrate/relax when I'm in so much pain. So for now, Midol is my best friend.
I welcome suggestions.
Anyway, 38 cycles (nearly three years) ago, I discovered Taking Charge of Your Fertility, by Toni Weschler, MPH. I believe that every woman should own this book, and every man should read it at least once. It's extremely informative, discusses women's bodies and reproductive systems/cycles very openly and honestly, and provides the information we need to track our cycles, know when we're fertile and when we're not, and her system can also help you understand what's healthy and normal for you and what's not. For example: she provides charts to photocopy, where you mark your temperature every day. It has a range of temperatures in tenth-of-a-degree increments, starting with 97.0° and going to 99.0°. I had to adjust mine to read 96.0° to 98.0°, because my temperature always fell lower than her premade chart allowed.
Now, it took me a while--I was worrying about other things, actually, like the fact that I had done some stupid things, and really REALLY should have been pregnant, and also the seemingly unconnected constant tiredness, sleeplessness, low energy, etc.--but I got her book from the library again, and was trying to understand why my cycles were so messed up, and why I wasn't pregnant, and I came across a short paragraph on higher- and lower-than-normal temps, and she suggested thyroid problems (something I had already been suspecting for the tiredness, etc.), and also said that thyroid problems (particularly hypothyroidism, characterized by lower-than-average temperatures) can cause infertility.

I'm getting a bit off-topic.
My point: This book is amazing. One of the biggest benefits for me (better than the thyroid thing, even) is knowing that I am not adrift in this sea of uncertainty when it comes to my cycle. When I'm with a guy, and he talks about condoms, and oh-no-I-could-get-pregnant, I feel so empowered, knowing that, No, actually I can't right now. It is physically impossible. Or, Yes, if we had unprotected sex right now, I would get pregnant. (Or, I would if I could get my damn thyroid problem fixed.)
I don't usually bring it up during more casual encounters, because there's still diseases and shit roaming around, but it still makes me feel good. It makes me feel in control.

Other points of interest related to bleeding:

• I am not taking The Pill. Birth control deserves its own post, so all I will say here is that except in rare cases, I really believe the Pill (and most other forms of birth control) is detrimental, rather than beneficial, and "injures her health and reputation" (to paraphrase Emilie Autumn or one of her friends).
• I do not use tampons, and am working on making the switch completely from disposable pads to reusable. Reusable pads are made from cotton, can be worn all day on extremely light flow days or "maybe" days without falling apart, do not irritate the sensitive area to which they are exposed (unlike pads with plastic backing/sticky or invasive, drying-out tampons), and simply make sense economically and ecologically. I use GladRags, but there are several different companies that make them, and even patterns out there so a woman could make her own, if she felt so inspired.
• I recently started wearing a red ribbon (on my finger, where I could see it) and writing in red pen in my journal during my bleeding days. I started it last cycle, and I'm continuing it this cycle, because it helped me focus on the cycle, the moon time. I feel that our cycles are something to be celebrated and acknowledged, not shameful, dirty events that must be hushed up. Seriously, even if you think the idea of a reusable pad is disgusting and you'd never ever want to try it, please check out the GladRags site, just to read some of the things they say about women and cycles. It's uplifting.
• I'm focusing a lot of my energy to shifting my cycle so I bleed during the new moon and ovulate during the full moon. I've heard some people equate the full moon with the bleeding time, but that doesn't make sense to me. The full moon is the time of fullness, of new growth, of things generally related to fertility and babies. The new/dark moon is the time of darkness, of power, of blood. It's the time of introspection, self-searching, and magic. I'm getting closer. I used to bleed during the waxing gibbous phase of the moon; it is now the waxing crescent.
• I really, really believe that our cycles are a blessing and not a curse. I believe that attitude is important. I believe that much of the shit we go through (cramping, bloating, irritability) can be changed or eliminated altogether with knowledge, attitude and some changes to our diet/lifestyle. I do not believe the bible, that women were meant to live in pain; I believe rather that this is a newer symptom of misunderstanding, devaluing of women and the Feminine, and our lifestyles that detach our selves from our bodies.
  

Happy cycles!

Strength

I'm a writer. Mainly fiction/fantasy. I grew up with High Fantasy, elves and dwarves, etc., but I really like dark modern fantasy. Anyway, I have recently discovered about myself that I write not just to tell a good story (which is what I thought), but also for a "moral" purpose. Which kind of annoys me, because I always hated books that had obvious moral purposes.

But anyway, one of my big "things", my main morals I write about, of course, is gender.

A friend of mine told me about a series she was writing, the Emperor series. She told me, with a note of pride in her voice, that she had gotten an entire group of people (the writer's group who was reading/critiquing it) to see a female face when reading the word Emperor. Her mission (one of them) is to turn masculine-oriented words like prophet, priest, emperor, etc. into gender-unbiased words, and to get rid of words like prophetess, priestess and empress.

Something I have observed and my thoughts:
Women are often portrayed as weaker-minded than men. Ophelia goes mad, but Hamlet only pretends to. I watched two instances of older couples and driving and saw indications of how we as a culture view women's minds. The first: the woman picked the man up, but got into the passenger seat so he could drive her home. The second: two older men in the front seat, two older women in the back seat. They stopped at a house, the passenger side couple got out, and the driver side older woman stayed where she was, and the man drove her home. Both instances, the impression I got was that weaker-minded women couldn't drive as they got older, because their minds would become too weak for such a complicated procedure.
My thoughts: Women are susceptible to greater weaknesses than men are, because of their greater inherent strength. Men have bodily strength, and they can lose that as they get older. Women have other strengths, less noticeable and more subtle, granted, but I think that makes them greater, deeper, more. And they can lose that strength.

This is a Feminist Blog

I was talking to a (male) friend of mine the other night, about the feminist blogs he reads, and decided that I needed to start my own.
So, a few things about me:
I believe that men and women need to be/are/should be equal, and that 'equal' does not mean 'same'.
I refer to 'women' and 'woman' and 'history'--because I don't like most variant spellings of 'woman'/'women' (except We'Moon, which means 'we of the moon', and I may start using that occasionally), and because 'history' is not actually a sexist word, it refers to learning, and lore-keepers/lore-keeping--although it is not related to hyster- (of hysterectomy and hysteria, and meaning 'womb') like my ex once told me it was. So maybe instead I will refer to hystery. Knowledge of the womb? Maybe not.
I am not angry. (Most of the time)
I am unreasonable sometimes. I am human.
I create myth. (mythos, n. a pattern of beliefs expressing often symbolically the characteristic or prevalent attitudes in a group or culture) I create myth, and use the myth I create to explain the world to myself, to understand people. To understand myself. My mythos will come up in this blog.

That's enough for now. It's time for me to eat.