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.