In contrast to my earlier post, this essay, which begins:
Becoming an old woman has been a sexually liberating experience for me. It has given me, among other things, a great ability to love generously, since I am not impelled to act out that love.
Go and read all of it. It’s a wondrous reminder to both young and old, about how healthy sexuality evolves.
Can you feel it? That big downhill slide we’re on?
Pipe lines wrecking the rain forest, fracking wrecking the water, greenhouse gases wrecking the weather. The “big picture” is all wreck [sic] and ruin.
My way of coping with that awareness is usually by focusing on my own little picture. And blogging about it — grandsons and gardens, nostalgia and nuisances.
But when it comes to the way, across the globe, that women are treated, portrayed, denied, discouraged, wrecked and ruined, I take it personally, especially since I remember the early days of our feminist struggle, when so many of us joined with each other, and with wise and willing male supporters, to push back against a sexist system set to designate who we were and are and could or couldn’t be.
If you think it’s any better these days, all you have to do is look and listen to know that you are wrong. Cultural attitudes. in general, and the attitudes of many males, in particular, have become even more misogynistic.
NPR’s article about the Amanda Knox case points up one aspect of this rampant “cultural sexism.”
If Amanda Knox had been Andrew Knox, the breathless and prolonged excitement around his sex life would be greatly diminished, or absent altogether. If Amanda had been Andrew, he wouldn’t have been labeled “a sex-mad flatmate” in the media.
No, just in last Sunday’s New York Times, the “veritable drumbeat of sexual shaming” heaped on Amanda Knox amounts to sexism run rampant.
While we should have already evolved way beyond the gender roles that our early progenitors adopted as necessary for survival (see NPR article linked above), the attitudes and behaviors of too many young males indicate that the opposite is happening. As a culture, we are not only backsliding; we are slipping into a subversive hatred of women that is triggering both vocal and physical violence against females.
Voicing the young, strong, liberated, and angry perspective of women who refuse to let sexist male attitudes intimidate, suppress, and repress their sexuality is Lindy West’s article in Jezebel entitled Female “Purity” is Bullshit.
She says:
Girls and women, if no one has ever told you this before, or if you just have trouble believing it: you are good, you are whole, you are yours. You do not exist to please men, and your value as a human being is not contingent upon your sexual capital. “Purity” is a lie. Do not even worry about any of this garbage, because it’s about as real as a fucking unicorn. And like my Nana always used to say, “Never take life advice from a grown man who believes that unicorns are ‘extinct.'”
And this “good girl” shit isn’t just limited to odious ding-dongs like dude-who-doesn’t-know-the-difference-between-extinct-and-fucking-mythological. I know plenty of progressive, liberal, adult men who openly say they’re looking for a “good girl”—who prioritize some paternalistic illusion of “self-respect” over personality and chemistry. And to those dudes, I say, HOW DO YOU NOT SEE HOW CREEPY THIS IS. Can you imagine if women went around saying they were just looking for a “good boy” and sometimes they “jokingly” scout kindergartens for promising baby virgins?!?!?! Groooooooooss!!!!!
West’s article is a hoot and holler to read. It is raw. And truthful. And angering. It is the way it is but shouldn’t be.
I don’t know how the bad attitudes of misogynist males can be changed. I don’t know how to prevent their younger brothers from becoming just like them. Is there a warped Y chromosome or strain of testosterone that is being unknowingly spread to each generation of males? Is it something in the water? Is it something that we should put in the water?
I don’t know the answer. What I do know is that there needs to be more females refusing to put up with stupid men’s bullshit.
[NOTE: If you have landed here before reading the previous post, please go and read it first.]
This post tells the end of the story I began in the previous post. It is a story with an ending that I didn’t expect, a story with an opportunity for learning on all kinds of fronts. I begin this post by saying that I cancelled the PayPal claim. But that’s not the end of it all.
There are three participants in this chat — me (the American consumer), staff of UPlay (the manufacturer of the unique phone/tab I bought), and staff of JSXL Technology (the online distributor from whom I bought the device). Two of us, I think, came away from this “chatty” business deal a little wiser about how to communicate with others and how to do business in a way that satisfies both consumer and product provider/s.
The communication issue here was not triggered by national culture or language. It was about attitude and trust. It was about civility. It was about respectfully listening and responding. It was a lot about good business practices and how to build and keep a customer base through good customer service (or the opposite). It also was about how to behave as a decisive consumer who doesn’t always know the right questions to ask when it comes to technology.
I am not a distributor or a marketer, but I am a thoughtful (if somewhat impatient) consumer. In many ways, I am a good example of today’s global consumer: I have a good idea about the product I want; I know how to use the internet to research my options; I expect complete and accurate product and ordering information on e-commerce websites; I order online from a global market. And, like the usual “shop-from-store-to-store-and-deal-with-store-clerks shopper, I expect my product questions to be answered thoughtfully and politely.
I could have been better at my consumer chatting; UPlay staff could have started off better; JSXL Technology has a big #FAIL, right up to the very end when I was still figuring out if and how I should return the phonepad I ordered from them. Bad attitude and bad customer service does not build a business or consumer trust.
JSXL Technology is a brand new e-commerce site, less than a year old. (My bad for not noticing this right away, but they were the site that offered the UPlay phonepad I wanted. The UPlay site itself did as well, but I gave up trying to figure out how to order from them.)
While JSXL might have a good website and know technology, they are worse than worst at knowing how to run a consumer-dependent business. They have a lot to learn and obviously (as demonstrated through their email conversations with me, their consumer) know less than nothing about how to deal with their customer’s questions. My advice is to not buy from them until they have more experience as an e-commerce business; they are hell to deal with.
That leads us to the other chatters and what we might have learned.
I have learned that I have to be more patient and accurate about explaining what it is I am asking about. Part of the problem is that you don’t know what you don’t know. And phrasing a question about a technology problem in a way that will get you the answer you need is severely hampered when you don’t know what you don’t know. (You know?) I don’t know what I can do about that, but I think I might want to get into my more patient “educator” mode when dealing with unhelpful, arrogant, (supposedly) consumer support staff. This time I lost patience, stopped trusting, and entered my warrior mode.
Lastly, UPlay staff, who resolved the whole issue by finding a way to return the phonepad for a reasonable postage cost.
And so here is the unexpected end to the story:
I have decided to keep the phone/pad — despite a really wonky boot-up process and the problems with time-outs when trying to download anything. I still don’t understand why the “Android drivers” come up as downloaded but uninstalled (Code 28) and don’t know if the mobile phone component will work when I eventually get to T-Mobile and get a SIM card and a plan. I’m hoping that the UPlay staff will explain what I still don’t understand and will answer future questions should they come up.
Meanwhile, I have successfully installed an SD card and used the camera; the GPS works; I have downloaded Words With Friends, OverDrive Media Console, Kindle for Android, and a few other apps I use. All of that is working. I am trusting that it will continue to function as I need it to. And I am trusting that UPlay consumer support staff will give me some advice if I run into function issues.
It’s a very cool little device, a whole lot cheaper than the ones I read about that soon will be reaching the American market.
I have not yet tried to download into the phonepad what I need to blog through WordPress. While I’m writing this on my HP Pavilion Notebook with a 17 inch screen, who knows that but soon I will be blogging from my 7 inch UPlay phonepad gen 3. (But first I will have to buy a keyboard case to make it easier; I found one, online, of course.)
I’m the kind of consumer you want to be nice to, young JSLX Technology. I hope that this all has been a valuable learning experience for you.
It has for me.
[UPDATE: Countless email back and forth with uPlay did not provide any solution to the problem of why, even sitting right by the wifi router, connecting to websites and downloading continued to frequently fail. They didn’t know why; I should send it back and they would check it out. Instead, I decided to do a “restore to factor settings.”
And that solved the problem.
It makes me wonder if the folks at the seller’s site put in a setting or something that wound up causing a problem. So, the uPlay phonetab is in play. I haven’t yet activated the mobile phone part of it or purchased a smartphone data plan. I’m still experimenting with all the features of the tablet component, which are impressive.]
(The television program to which I refer is one of those that was too good not to be cancelled.)
They found her buried in the Steppes of Russia, a tall woman, leg bones bowed, probably from spending a lot a time on a horse. She was buried with her earrings and other gold adornments. And a mass of arrowheads. A Warrior Princess who lived 2500 years ago.
They had found other skeletons too, in other places. Tall women, with bowed legs, some positioned in the historically ancient pose of the warrior — one leg bent at the knee. Buried with arrowheads and swords. The DNA from one of these skeletons has been found in a young teenager currently living in a nomadic tribe in Mongolia.
The most famous Amazon warrior Penthesilia, Herodotus wrote, died at the hands of the greatest warrior of Greece, Achilles. Many think that the Amazons were a myth, but evidence is showing that such women probably did exist in various parts of Europe and Asia.
Archeologists are finding that there were others of these strong warrior women who, for generations, taught themselves and their daughters to hold their own in a world controlled by male aggression.
These women were as ruthless as the multitudes of men they fought and killed or enslaved.
There is something empowering to know that we can be as ruthless as the most ruthless men. There is something even more empowering to believe that we have the moral courage to choose not to.
I watch the new television series Commander-in-Chief and am reminded that there are many ways to be a strong leader — some more ruthless than others.
Bush is a failure as a leader. (Type in “failure” in a Google search and then click on “I’m Feeling Lucky.” Heh.)
A woman wouldn’t necessarily be a better leader. After all, there was the woman who is now Skeleton 227.
But there have to be individuals who could lead this nation with true commitment to all of its people, to the spirit of its Constitution, and to its responsibility to demonstrate how to make decisions based on ethics as well as necessity. I hope they’re watching Commander-in-Chief for some tips
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Each week, Harper’s publishes a weekly review of what’s happening around the world with links to the original source.
What I’m always interested in is the stuff that isn’t widely covered, for example, these in this past week’s Review:
! In Afghanistan, suicide bombers attacked the defense ministry and spectators at a game of buzkashi, a sport played on horseback using a headless goat carcass.
! In Egypt, where the attorney general’s office was encouraging the practice of citizen’s arrests, soccer fans set fire to a police social club, a fast-food franchise, and the headquarters of the national soccer federation in protest of death sentences that were upheld for 21 rioters involved in a 2012 stadium riot that killed more than 70 people.
! Archaeologists in England uncovered a mass grave thought to contain the corpses of fourteenth-century Plague victims.
! In Tshwane, South Africa, eight-year-old Sanele Masilela was ritually wedded to 61-year-old Helen Shabangum.
! in Amsterdam 70-year-old twins Louise and Martine Fokkens retired from prostitution. “It is very different now,” said Louise. “No sense of community these days.”
! Faced with a shortage of swordsmen, Saudi Arabia was considering replacing beheadings with executions by firing squads.
It all makes you wonder, doesn’t it?
I know that at my age I could easily be misremembering, but I don’t think so.
Back in the early 1980s, I found two books that I gave to my pre-pubescent son to read.
Girls: A Book for Boys and Boys: A Book for Girls
They were the best two books for kids that I ever saw analyzing gender/sex and the physical and psychological changes of puberty in a way that supported respect for both your own and your opposite gender. Both the explanations and the illustrations were clear, honest, and age-appropriate. Together, they provided an approach to sex education that also placed a high value on each gender, encouraging understanding of the differences and appreciation of the human similarities. I eventually I gave them away to another mother, and now neither Amazon nor Google has any mention of them.
I think of these books now because of all of the discussions around the rape of the 16 year old girl by the high school football players.
My son says that he doesn’t remember reading those books, but I sure do remember sitting there and watching him read them, ready for any questions he might ask. Even though he doesn’t remember those books, the reality is that his strong respect for females can be traced, in part, back to the concepts in those books that became embedded in his subconscious.
Next month he’s participating in this, offered by Ball State University:
Gender Through Comics: A Super MOOC is a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) that examines how comic books can be used to explore questions of gender identity, stereotypes, and roles. This highly engaging learning experience is designed for college-age and lifelong learners. I guess that there are some things I did right as a single mom bringing up a son.
I keep thinking that kids today need those two books more than ever. But all traces of them seem to have disappeared from both the real and virtual face of this earth.
If you know any feminist parents who were raising young kids back in the 80s, please ask if they remember those books. They were published about the same time as the original Our Bodies, Ourselves.
I know that I used to have one, although it certainly was no rival to Audrey Hepburn’s. 
But I do remember, as a 50s teenager, knotting a small scarf around my neck, western-style, as was the fashion in those days. The fashion these days is those long, wide scarves, wrapped twice around the neck. I love the look, but you need a neck to make it work. On me, that kind of scarf covers me from clavicle to mouth. Maybe OK for chill winter weather, but as a fashion statement? Uh uh.
And whatever happened to my chin? Where did all that extra skin come from?
Getting old is neither for sissies nor the vain.
I discovered Wonder Woman when I was about 7 years old in 1947, and I have blogged about her several times, including this:
We females need Wonder Woman as the awesome myth she originally was intended to be — connected to other mythic females on Paradise Island more than she is to the mundane human world in which she has to find a place. Her struggle is to fulfill her destiny while still finding a way to make and enjoy her place in the everyday world.
Because isn’t that what so many of us still feel is our psychological destiny — to feel the power of our mythic history and to use that power to make the world a better place for others and for ourselves?
So, when I found out about plans to make this movie, I got inspired.
WONDER WOMEN! THE UNTOLD STORY OF AMERICAN SUPERHEROINES traces the fascinating evolution and legacy of Wonder Woman. From the birth of the comic book superheroine in the 1940s to the blockbusters of today, WONDER WOMEN! looks at how popular representations of powerful women often reflect society’s anxieties about women’s liberation.
The movie is being shown around the world at various film festival, but as one of the early Kickstarter supporters, I was sent a free DVD copy.
Today I finished making what I decided to make when I first heard about the movie. I don’t make art; I make “stuff” — stuff to wear or use somehow (and I’ve blogged about that before as well).
And here it is: a tote/purse pieced with fabric and downloaded old Wonder Woman comic images that I printed out on special fabric. The two sides are different, as I played with the images and the fabric. The inside has a separate zippered middle compartment so that I can actually us it as a purse.
Well, OK. Walking around with a purse in honor of that 1940s superheroine is not going to make the world better for women, especially these days, when superheroines in comics are portrayed by their male creators so very differently than my idol was. Now they seem to be all boobs and butts and oddly proportioned and posed.
Happily, there are women in the comics industry who keep battling the misogyny that permeates today’s comic world — the fantasy world that informs so much of the attitudes of pubescent males toward females (and also the attitudes of those males who seem to be stuck in that phase of their lives). I can’t help wondering if that’s where all of those idiot GOPers got their ideas about what “rape” is.
It’s a syndrome, all right, and comic creator Gail Simone began to lay it all out more than a dozen years ago when she coined “Women in Refrigerators.”
If you’re at all interested in how strong women heroes are portrayed in our culture, check out “Ink-Stained Amazons and Cinematic Warriors.”
And in the meanwhile, I’m going to have fun explaining to people why I’m walking around with a Wonder Woman purse.
More than a dozen years ago, when “personal” blogs were beginning to blossom, I managed to brazenly infiltrate a small group of such bloggers. all of whom were expert in some aspect of communications technology. That they welcomed me — a technological dilettente –into their virtual family still amazes me.
In many ways it was the best of times for personal bloggers, as we played off each others’ posts, bantering and badgering and behaving pretty much like affectionate siblings — even though many of us had not met in person. Like most siblings, after some years of sharing a rolicking range of adventures across our global homestead, we drifted apart — catching up periodically these days via the much less adventuresome terrain of Face Book.
Michael O’Connor Clarke was a warm, funny, and energetic member of that original blogger family. To learn that he is in the hospital with esophageal cancer is more than just disturbing.
But it is not surprising to learn that members of that old virtual family are again coming together in an effort to generate both emotional and financial support for his actual family, because as our blogger/friend Jeneane Sessum shared on Face Book: They are a one-income family. That income is in a hospital bed right now and for the foreseeable future.
One of the blessings of the Internet is that it enables the coming together of like minds and hearts to help things happen. We can’t cure Michael; that’s up to his doctors in Toronto. But we can help him by helping his family. If you are moved to do so, go to http://supportmichaelocc.ca/ and see if you might be able to help.
Like every human on this planet, my heritage traces back to the heart of Africa, from where the original homo sapiens emerged around 100,000 years ago.
Somewhere around 40,000 years ago, their descendants descended on what eventually would be the nation we now know as Poland. Since the time of these early forbears, the land that was considered “Poland” shrank and expanded depending on the whims of glaciers and governments. Pretty much land-locked except for its limited access to the Baltic Sea, Polish land has been traipsed over, lived on, and fought over by tribes and nations from the Turks to the Celts. The 19th and 20th centuries, alone, saw Poland’s boundaries recede and expand drastically as various histories and wars played themselves out.
While I know that America has claim to the title of “melting pot,” pre-historic Poland has to come close because of the hundreds of different peoples who settled there at one time or another, coming upon its central location accidentally or on purpose. So, even though I can trace my bloodline back through several generations of “pure” Poles, the truth is that I have in me genetic traces of countless races, leading back to that elusive “Mitochondrial Eve.”
Why I’m thinking about all of this is that I’m taking a class in Polish language and culture to help me remember how to converse in Polish. I have no immediate reason for doing that, except that it’s free at the Senior Center, and relearning the language is helping me to exercise my brain.
I have never been very good at just sitting in a class and listening. I like to participate. So, I offered to do a session next week on the traditions still alive in Polish culture today that have their roots in that land’s pre-history. (Of course, that means “pagan,” but I didn’t use that word in my offer to do the session. All of the other students seem to be Catholic, and I didn’t want to use language that would turn them off.)
For anyone who is interested, there are a very few websites that deal with Polish/Slavic pre-history. This is the best of them.
More than a dozen years ago, I stumbled upon a wonderful site explaining the pagan origins of various Polish folk customs and chronicling the Polish pagan pantheon and magical symbols. I printed out all 80-something pages of information from that now-defunct website, and I am so glad I did because I would have to track down a ton of books to compile it myself at this point. I’m thinking that I probably saved it on my old computer but somehow lost track of that document.
Growing up Polish in America (as did the other students in my class), what I was told about Polish history made it seem as though it all started with the the conversion of Poland to Christianity back somewhere around 990 A.D.
In the course of the Christianisation of Europe in the Early Middle Ages, the Christian churches adopted many elements of national cult and folk religion, resulting in national churches like Latin, Germanic, Russian, Armenian, Greek and so on. Some Pagan ceremonies became modern holidays as pagans joined the early church.
It just goes to show you — children are told the history that their “responsible adults” want them to believe. But there’s always more. Always more.
Do zobaczienia.