Category Archives: feminism

it’s still the wrong answer

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Thanks to Jim Culleny for his daily poetry emails.

Myth
Muriel Rukeyser
Long afterward, Oedipus, old and blinded, walked the roads. He smelled a familiar smell. It was the Sphinx. Oedipus said, “I want to ask one question. Why didn’t I recognize my mother?”
“You gave the wrong answer,” said the Sphinx. “But that was what made everything possible,” said Oedipus. “No,” she said. “When I asked, What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, and three in the evening, you answered, Man. You didn’t say anything about woman.”
“When you say Man,” said Oedipus, “you include women too. Everyone knows that.”
She said, “That’s what you think.”

Rachel Rachel

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Nope, not Rachel Ray. She’s sort of the antithesis of the Rachel who has really impressed me recently.
Rachel Maddow, who has her own program on Air America, and has been on MSNBC’s Countdown as a political analyst, recently has stood in for usual host, Keith Olbermann (who, by the way is the one man with whom I’d like to be stranded on a deserted island.)
Maddow has the presence and the personality of a true news media star. She’s brilliant, articulate, appealing, confident, and down-to-earth. She’s also openly gay, and the way she presents herself visually reflects that fact in a very professional way. She has developed her own female — but not particularly feminine — style, and it works.
I suppose, if I had to be stranded on a deserted island with a lesbian, I’d just as soon it be Rachel Maddow.

Myrln Monday (2)

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Myrln is gone, but his spirit remains with us in the power of his words:
Fathers and Daughters
Little girls are nice,
but we do them wrong
fussing with their hair and dressing them up
like dolls –
teaching them from the start
they are decorative playthings.
Better we should feed them
words and numbers and tools
to remind them
that before women, they are people.
Teach them love and caring and nurture, yes,
but not as the entirety of their being,
else those qualities
become walls and prisons.
Give them, as well, wings
and teach them to fly –
in case later in life
someone builds walls around them.
Little girls are nice,
but daughters who are their soaring selves
are better.
Fathers and Sons
All the time they’re growing up,
sons try hard to please their fathers.
They play ball, follow dad’s interest in cars,
or in building things,
or in fishing –
whatever it is that pleases dad.
Mostly learning how to be a man.
If they’re lucky,
they’re not required to embrace any of those
for a lifetime.
If they’re lucky,
somewhere along the way,
they’re let loose
to strike out after their own interests
and to please themselves.
And fathers,
if they’re smart,
realize that somewhere along the way
is a turning point:
a time when sons become teachers,
and fathers can learn
what their sons became on their own,
how manhood is not a fixed concept.
And say to their sons,
“Good job.”
Then both will know
they did right
in pleasing each other.
William A. Frankonis, 1937 – 2008

Hillary be damned

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I think that Hillary Clinton would be damned by public opinion no matter how she ran her campaign. If she had Barack’s eloquence, charm, and public persona, she would have been damned for being to theatrical, too smooth, not tough enough etc. etc. Oh yes, she’s made too many mistakes in her campaign, but I don’t think that’s the reason there’s so much animosity toward her.
Many American’s love the idea of good vs. evil, the bad vs. the good, and they’ve been handed a perfect opportunity to set up a METAPHORICAL (not racial) black vs. white battle. No grays here (except creeping in on Hillary’s battered head.)
And, despite all of the backlash against Ferraro, I believe that if a white male with Barack’s change agenda AND LACK OF EXPERIENCE were running, he wouldn’t have made it this far.
Oh, wait a minute. A white male with Barack’s change agenda AND CONSIDERABLE EXPERIENCE was running and didn’t make it.
Perhaps what it all just means is the time is right for someone like Barack — a moving, persuasive orator, a symbol of radical change from the status quo (symbolized by his bi-racial ethnicity), someone from a new generation who appeals to the new generation. If he could be canonized by us liberals, he would be called Saint Barack, patron saint of idealists.
So often, timing is everything. And, as we saw on Ellen, Barack’s got the timing down pat.
And late middle-aged, thick waisted, experienced, tough broad Hillary be damned.
But not by me.

our president, ourselves

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I have not been a supporter of the Hillary Clinton campaign, but I was given a good smack on the head by an article by Robin Morgan, which, among other things, makes this point:

So why should all women not be as justly proud of our womanhood and the centuries, even millennia, of struggle that got us this far, as black Americans, women and men, are justly proud of their struggles?

Morgan pointedly criticizes this campaign…

… where he has to pass as white (which whites—especially wealthy ones—adore), while she has to pass as male (which both men and women demanded of her, and then found unforgivable). If she were black or he were female we wouldn’t be having such problems, and I for one would be in heaven. But at present such a candidate wouldn’t stand a chance—even if she shared Condi Rice’s Bush-defending politics.

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And she reminds me of why I am a devoted feminist:

Women have endured sex/race/ethnic/religious hatred, rape and battery, invasion of spirit and flesh, forced pregnancy; being the majority of the poor, the illiterate, the disabled, of refugees, caregivers, the HIV/AIDS afflicted, the powerless. We have survived invisibility, ridicule, religious fundamentalisms, polygamy, teargas, forced feedings, jails, asylums, sati, purdah, female genital mutilation, witch burnings, stonings, and attempted gynocides. We have tried reason, persuasion, reassurances, and being extra-qualified, only to learn it never was about qualifications after all. We know that at this historical moment women experience the world differently from men—though not all the same as one another—and can govern differently, from Elizabeth Tudor to Michele Bachelet and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.

Morgan’s lengthy piece brings the issue of electing Hillary Clinton into focus.

Hillary said she found her own voice in New Hampshire. There’s not a woman alive who, if she’s honest, doesn’t recognize what she means. Then HRC got drowned out by campaign experts, Bill, and media’s obsession with everything Bill.

And she ends with:

Me? I support Hillary Rodham because she’s the best qualified of all candidates running in both parties. I support her because her progressive politics are as strong as her proven ability to withstand what will be a massive right-wing assault in the general election. I support her because she knows how to get us out of Iraq. I support her because she’s refreshingly thoughtful, and I’m bloodied from eight years of a jolly “uniter” with ejaculatory politics. I needn’t agree with her on every point. I agree with the 97 percent of her positions that are identical with Obama’s—and the few where hers are both more practical and to the left of his (like health care). I support her because she’s already smashed the first-lady stereotype and made history as a fine senator, because I believe she will continue to make history not only as the first US woman president, but as a great US president.

As for the “woman thing”?

Me, I’m voting for Hillary not because she’s a woman—but because I am.

The above excerpts can’t really capture the force and fury of Morgan’s article. Go and read the whole thing here.

the anti-woman new Wicker Man

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I saw the original Wicker Man in the mid-seventies. It was by far the most gut-clenching film I’ve ever seen. From here::

The Wicker Man is a cult 1973 British film combining thriller, horror and musical, directed by Robin Hardy and written by Anthony Shaffer. The film stars Edward Woodward, Christopher Lee, Diane Cilento, Ingrid Pitt and Britt Ekland. Paul Giovanni composed the soundtrack, a recording cited as a major influence on neofolk and psych folk artists.

The original Wicker Man film focused on an island population of pagans that included both men and women — all of whom were engaged in determining what was to befall the “hero.” I remember that the film was steeped in a ancient eroticism as the members of that island population struggled to find their balance between all of those natural forces of opposites.

The new Wicker Man is devoid of male-female tension and eroticism of any kind; the pagan population is totally female (except for a few drones). The new version attributes only to women the chthonic spirit that the original movie rightly attributed to all people who followed the pagan ways. The unspoken message to us in these times is “watch out when those women take over” especially those females who find personal strength in the mythic histories of their gender. They are dangerous. They will destroy you.

The primal darkness in all of us is a powerful and dangerous force. The original Wicker Man captured that terrifying power. The new Wicker Man is a weakened and distorted version of what was once a truly horrifying tale.
(Side note: The star of the original Wicker Man was Edward Woodward. In the new version, the name of the “hero” is Edward Woodward.)

I don’t know if you can rent the 1970s Wicker Man, but you can buy it here.

It’s worth the price.

Lililth in the Darkness East of Eden

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lilith in the darkness.jpg

If you’re familiar with Kalilily Time, then you know who Lilith is. The image above is from here, a treasure trove of Lilith images. Lililth was said to be banished by god into the darkness east of Eden.

If you read the previous post, it should be obvious why that image resonates with me tonight.

I think of the days when this one would have been the Lilith image that spoke to me. And I think of the time when, again, the crone in me will fire up and fly away.

Skeleton 227

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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 an 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.

Assassination Christmas

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Bizzare.

It’s Christmas. I just finished watching The Bourne Supremacy and made my mother some chicken soup, since she’s got what looks like a tooth abcess — swollen jaw and pain and on an antibiotic prescribed by her dentist after I called him at home early on Christmas Eve.

Christmas Eve I spent reading Hunter’s Moon, a paperback escapist novel that defies categorizing, but does feature an assassin who is a werewolf and a female who hires him to kill her because her mother is driving her crazy and she can’t bring herself to be mean to her mean mother.

Aha. A pattern here, bizarre though it might be.

A month or so ago, I rented Assassination Tango, a movie that deserves a lot more than the little attention it got. Robert Duvall made my mouth water. Perhaps there’s a little werewolf in me.

Loveable assassins. Wishful thinking?

That mesmerizing flow of light and dark. That dancing with your demons and stepping fast to keep your balance. Life with adventure, sweet danger, passion, power.

No dancing here for me this Christmas, though. Just fantasy assassins with heart.

The Crone’s Wall of Power

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A couple of months ago, a long-time friend of mine who’s a quilter agreed to quilt a “portrait” of me that I could hang on my wall — not a literal portrait, but her creative interpretation of “me.”

And she did it. And I hung it on the wall above my couch. And then I surrounded it with images of the people in my life who empower me, because the piece that she made, for sure, exudes pure power.

She usually quilts pieces that hang as rectangles; but mine she made as a diamond, with the diamond-shaped inside pieces representing the four elements: earth, air, fire, and water. The fabrics are rich and textured and appliqued and metalicaly embroidered — with milagros attached — hearts and turtles and salamanders.

It’s like a magical “ojo de dios” watching over me.
I’m not sure that my friend knows what an “ojo de dios” is, yet she created one as she delved into her feelings about what she knows about me. (She’s out of town now, but I’m going to check with her when she gets back to find out if she ever heard of it or not; she might well have, since she travels often to Mexico and collects Mexican art.)
Here’s my wall of power:

smpowerwall1.JPG
Meanwhile, I’m collecting textured yarns with which I want to make a mandala based on the “ojo de dios” idea. This site provides directions on how to make one. Jay Mohler, the artist, makes and sells them, but I have my idea for my own — one with lots more texture. I want to hang it over my computer, across from my wall of power — the eye of the god and the eye of the goddess sparking the space between.
Cool, huh?