Musings on The Women’s March

Milt and Florence (Mashino) Storey, married in 1936 in The Middle of Nowhere. No martyrdom, no marching, no Machiavellian manipulation, and yet…

I know some of you are thinking I might be tone deaf with that caption here in March, Women’s History Month. I am not tone deaf. I’m actually pretty sensitive to tone, which, in the literal sense, I’d attribute to my other grandma, on my mom’s side, Dorothy (Mason) Barnett.

I guess it was both grandmas, through the pico-cultures they established, their extended families, that made me sensitive to another kind of tone, which has been the beating of drums, so to speak, and blaring brass, so to speak, that diminish a side of Women’s History that is barely honorably mentioned, so to speak. As a man, can I comment? I do/did hesitate to bring it up, but hey.

Full disclosure, I’m not usually particularly aware of whose month it is, because 1) I don’t watch the kind of programming/news where it gets mentioned and 2) the practice raises some conundrums in terms of recognition that I don’t think are necessarily benign. I might be in a small minority in this, but I’m not alone. (It isn’t a political thing, unless “Everything is political”, to which I’d have to say “Then political no longer has meaning.” But then we’d be here all day.)

The thing is, Grandma Storey’s birthday is on March 2nd (1917), and I had some awareness of Juno from Roman mythology, so I tied some things together for fun and wrote a different-perspective-piece. Then I was reminded that March is Women’s History Month. I decided a counterintuitive, to most, commentary might be useful, or something, because there’s a meta-implication in a lot of the normal-channel messaging this month.

When I was a high school teacher I realized that the message, and many of our well-meaning messages, had a dark or darkening side, you might say, and I want to acknowledge some of that. So I’m going delve into that this month. It’s a sort of synthesis of what I’ve just started touching on here and what I posted last week. I’ve modified last week’s post a little, which is below. I think both of my grandmothers would like to have seen this mentioned.

Beyond Pop Reverance and Women’s March

Grandma would have been 105 this past week, if she'd only have lived as long as we expected when she was 95. I'm guessing she missed the 1994 episode of The Simpsons that the overlords meme came from, when newscaster Kent Brockman mistook the enlarged appearance of an ant on the spacecraft video as an indication of malicious insectual alien intent. (The saying has apparently been misattributed to a related 1977 movie, but I don't digress.)

Kent not only announced, "I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords," as a way to presumably garner a better position than the average underground sugar cave worker he imagined in the near future; he offered his services for their takeover.

I played Kent, in a way, a couple of years ago at MatchBOX when I explained why women should have been running the world all along. I had decided that, besides the fact that only about one in fifty humans needs to be male in order to maintain the population, we men might function mostly as jesters and servants for the typical traditional women’s lives of childbearing and childrearing. Jesters, warriors, hunters, and lifters of heavy things.

We men are probably here to lighten the load, in various meanings, for the gender that naturally has to take life more seriously, generally, naturally, again, given their more direct function in producing, feeding, and caring for the young. Yes, yes, some responsibilities get shared, but that's in support of the mother, you could say. It's always in support of the mother. She is the natural, rightful, boss.

Then I went on to wonder, out loud, about if it made sense, now that we'd messed things up and let the males "take over" in various ways, for women to take back a world and a way that was mistakenly developed by men, of all people.

If it always should have been a woman-directed world in terms of economics and everything else, while the men played the jester, took orders and lifted heavy stuff or whatever, along with some occasional fertilizing of eggs, then it did not really make sense for women to simply assert themselves as equal humans, fully-capable-mere-functionaries, in a man-designed system. Right?

Toil away in a man-designed system instead of redesigning something better? Woman empowerment to simply fill more slots in poorly designed man-made system, that's a feminist's goal? There are better goals, it seemed.

So far so good, it went, my semi-public musing, until I also wondered out loud if what women needed was a man, like me, to lead their empowerment movements, at least in term of goals. I mentioned that maybe it should be called Timinism instead of feminism, to distinguish it from efforts to have women simply jump behind the wheel of a doomed societal bus, overpowered with turbo-charged nitro-injected engines, yes plural, as men had foolishly designed and worshipped.

As you might have suspected, somewhere along the line I lost my small audience, but I kept thinking about it. In so many cases (not all, I know!!!) it seems that the man is likely to be saying/doing goofy things more than the woman--and this made evolutionary sense, to me, maybe.

The woman, maybe, needed to, or tended to, based on neurotransmitters and their ties to deep personal experience, focus more on future well-being, for nearly everyone, while the man needed to just lighten the various loads she had. It was a hey-wait-a-minute moment, which is kind of like an aha moment, except it’s just something to explore without a conclusion necessarily.

These aren't things we need to make Shoulds out of, or legislation, or posters--they're just things to think about for some, perhaps, potential value on some level of understanding, maybe.

The Latest Poemification of Some Serious Related Stuff

Here’s the poem I explained at Motivate The Mind last Tuesday, and it ties in with all this. I’ll just put the poem here, but you might want to go back to that link for background if it seems interesting.

As I explained there, I had just started a cute little rhyming thing about the vernal equinox coming, but Allie and Stu took over and created something more serious. The only remnant of my unassuming little rhymes are in italics, kind of a token allowance I guess by Allie and Stu to let me feel like I contributed to their more serious musings.

It turned out to be kind of appropriate for that day, International Women's Day, except some of the points...point to certain mindsets that are, unfortunately, gender neutral in terms of what some might call unnecessary damage or pain for themselves and others in very different ways. That's Allie and Stu for you, blending a couple of different perspectives.

More Smiles, Serenity, and Satisfaction

Three…weeks before the Equinox

Two…until we move the clocks
ahead to, some say, save some time

I say to Juno, let it shine.

Let her light of wisdom win.
Let the light from Sun soak in,
and light the Selfish path some laid
that led to this abyss you’ve made.

Amiss, you valorized a way
of Want and Grasp and Seize the Day
for what you’re “owed,” but what bestowed
a right to harvests that erode?
Erode the soil of loving bonds.
A river grows and flows, absconds
away with meanings more than More
or “I will seek what I adore.”

But Juno brings a light to show
where More of any type will go.
From Left and Right the paths poured in.
The Bliss Abyss, the dins deafen.

The squawking birds, the broadcasts, shrill
“Do not suggest I curb my Will.
My will’s divine, I think you’ll find,
if not, these books should change your mind.”

Your mind? Your books? The grind, the crooks,
they block the light—they dangle hooks.
From Left and Right the paths poured in.
The Bliss Abyss, the dins deafen.

And as dim light lights up the sky
The Flow’s delights might catch your eye.
A lure, alluring, but no real use.
Perhaps you’ll bite and get set loose.

But barbs, on hooks, that lure you took,
they leave a gash. You didn’t look.
Some light was there, you didn’t care.
Your sight lost to delight’s bright snare.

But Juno brings more light today,
a goddess in that Roman way
of stories meant to ready minds
to find the fruit within the rinds.

Will mothers stand and ease the fray?
Once smothered under the Selfish Way.
The paths of More from Right and Left,
the Me & Now of might, bereft
of understanding…satisfaction…
down the road…not gut reaction.

Have others smothered mothers’ sight?
Will you recover with Juno’s light?
Will sunlight raise the daffodils
from trampled soil and paths of ills
proposed as ways that “pay the bills”?
You know the shells. Do you know the shills?

Or will you acquiesce again,
or argue over Original Sin,
as if the question matters when
you’ve seen the tears, where these paths end.

Three weeks before the Equinox,
Daffodils, tulips, daisies, phlox…

The lures, now bright with hooks that show,
the crooks and crimes that bring you woe.
The warm sunlight makes flowers grow
embrace the light wise mothers know.

Allie and Stu


Okay, well that's a lot to think about, but fitting for this season of beginnings. We could probably talk about that all day. But not today.



And Another Hey-Wait-A-Minute Moment

Diverging from what's above, and really along another vein, sometimes in my reflecting on the many many stories I've always heard about strong, capable, intelligent, insightful women with broadly known reputations makes me wonder why they still get so much airplay, as if they're exceptions, or as if we're not aware, and as if the ubiquitous mothering, nurturing, and uncountable contributions don’t really…count (and that seems suspiciously Stralfian, Stu and Allie would say, because what is the message about those subtler ambitions?).

Some will say the narrow emphasis is because of persistent inequitable compensation, low occupational or managerial representation, dismissive attitudes, etc., so the endless and well-meaning Did-you-know? campaigns are meant as a countermeasure. I'm not sure it makes sense though.

It's a little like how PBS seems to believe we're not aware of the non-European contributions to science, literature, philosophy, medicine, etc. Sure, the cultures that modernized (we'll come back to that term) modern society, and post-modernized postmodern society, were mostly white males with European backgrounds.

The sociology, psychology, and statistical probability behind how that happened, and how most things happen in a particular circumstance earlier or more often than in another, would be more than a mere digression here. But even common-sense perspectives (life experience combined with free-range reflection) would suggest that likelihood of notable innovation or culture-wide innovation/expansion increases with concentration of related activities and focus, which was, which happened to be, inequitably, in a particular general geographic area among individuals with the available time to do it, by whatever multi-level factors had been in play for however long. The same people also wrote very long sentences very frequently, unlike my infrequent transgressions.

Certain cultures have tended to be more steady-state than others, right? These are sometimes called traditional cultures. Do we call the one that creates a lot of carcinogens and endocrine disrupters as well as creating a few mitigating antidotes more desirable than the steady-staters? It depends. But it's not clear that we should. There are advantages to both. (Weapons come in handy sometimes, because there are crazy people all over the place at various levels and scales of endangerment, as we’re being reminded recently.)

Is the culture better that herds everyone and their kids into a fossil-fuel-burning car, then to a (unsightly, intrusive, disfiguring, environmentally expensive) wind-turbine-powered car, while they're distracted from wholistic life by exploitative least-common-denominator sexual advertisement, entertainment, and release--and incentivized pursuit of more kinds of More than our happiness-pursuing forefathers and (I assume) foremothers ever imagined? Apparently yes, given the apparently preferred manifestations of empowerment I see...everywhere.

What would we have ever done without the magical and universally licensing word empowerment? What better word is there for helping herd more and more people into the fray of Want and Get, currently with more psycho-biodiversity than Ferngully or Pandora, now that virtual virtuosity has let us presumably shed the shackles of reality, relationships, and actual bodies with actual emotional connectedness and fleshly outcomes (including a legacy/future).

And I'm probably not the only one who wonders if maybe want should now start with wh not w, whant, with a very delicately staccato t sound, to make it a little more sensual, and desire should be desiiiire, like Tim Curry might have done as Hexxus in Ferngully. (I just finished The Overstory, so maybe the life force woven in the pages jumped into the narrator and through my ear buds…)

Summing This Up, Seriously, In a Way

I’ve had two seemingly great pre-production meetings on This Project, or The 7th Pie, the past few weeks. By pre-production meetings I mean discussions of core ideas and plans for putting this project right in the Stralfs’ faces. No one got mad or rolled their eyes, and I settle for that as confirmation of the themes involved, which ultimately reflect Stu and Allie’s 7th Pie Theory. I’ve never needed much for confirmation, so the past two weeks have provided plenty. Onward.

And I’ve never been a rebel, and I’ve never been for burning it all down or even talking about that. I’ve tended to be more of a balloon flight escapist, not that I don’t love working on the ground. Recently I’ve referred to the hot air balloon view as the sweet spot of perspective, and that’s what all the musing and mulling above was about.

Hey-wait-a-minute moments tend to come during hot air balloon expeditions, physical or imaginary. Sometimes its kind of like a ride in a pontoon plane like my parents and I took over southern Ontario where we fished, near where the road north ends. Pristine boreal forest on the shorelines, clearcut “bear pastures” behind them. We didn’t know.

It’s good to get off the ground, but you need to brace yourself sometimes, because things come into view that you might not have considered as a possibility. Sometimes it’s just a matter of having, or taking, the time to wonder and investigate for the heck of it, with no agenda at all.

If you go too high you can just make up whatever stories you want to about what’s happening on the ground. If you stay on the ground, you can get pre-occupied with proximal problems, pains, and pleasures. I feel like we’ve tended to focus on these two perspectives too much, but I’m not going to harp on that. Maybe this is more of an And thing than an either/or thing, like the kids say sometimes.

Anyway...to close

This past week would have been Juno’s Matronalia celebration a couple thousand years ago, as I wrote about last Tuesday here and at Motivate the Mind. Wednesday would have been Grandma’s birthday celebration. She joined Milt, and that joined up two farms in Ade Country, on the southern edges of the Beaver Lake Marsh. And that is where my own hot air balloon ride began and where I saw the beginnings of something I didn’t have a name for, which was actually The 7th Pie, according to Stu. More soon.

Thanks for reading. Have a great week.

Tim