Lady Rant

I hate feminists. Perhaps I shouldn’t, because I know there is a reason for them.  I know that these implements to our culture need existing, since I am a woman, and been a rather lucky one. Other than the usual cat calls, to which I gage energy and respond in the proper fashion – a good natured, homeless man who yells a jazz like WOW when I crossed his path, well, that’s some element of life force winking at me, and neither am I to look down on this man for being “inferior” in my mind, nor place him in the seat of the angels, where his reaction is all about my eyes. Cause I know it’s not.  But I smile for him, tell him thank you, dance a ways and pretend my fake dime store ring is actually on my ring finger, and we go our separate ways.  On the other hand, when the energy is bad, conniving, controlling and filled with anger, I spout my grandfather’s favourite Croatian curses, translated into English, like “I hope your mother gets raped in the ass by 1000 inmates” or some such bursting nugget of reactionary self-anger. 

I know I am coming from a different place, wherein if I am to attend a “ladies” anything – brunch, meal, party, get together – I sweat a bit more, I get nervous and tongue tied, and feel…..unsafe.  Women have this way of living in a duality of trust and if they sense you are taking something imagined from them, they will lash out. Or worse yet, try to slice your skin with each passing fake smile or kind word which tends to insult you at the very same time.  Maybe this is a game once played in Eden, maybe it all comes from the serpent and the blame.  I always preferred the story of Lilith, who had the knowledge and said “fuck you” to the voice in the trees who told her she shouldn’t and ascended to heaven, or the skies, or somewhere where she didn’t have to feel held down. 

Back to this time period though – give me a film with a bunch of men in it, whether violent, or crass, silly or downright aggressive, and I love it.  The action is always stronger than the word.  Or the idea that an actor can produce a long and antiquated soliloquy seems outdated and less effectual than one look caught in the dreaded silence of James Dean’s eyes.  Women have all these plans…ones which on their own are just fine to think about, to enact and have, but half of them live their life to this already mapped out notion in their women heads about who they are and what they need to feel like they want to feel, or who they need around them to feel that way.  It’s all about control.  You take that from them and they crumble to the ground, their 10 story building made of paste and flour.  They aren’t all like this.  Many are like me, and those women are the greatest friends and compatriots I could ever ask for.  But feminism – I always took to Camille Paglia more than Gloria Steinem.  True, my mother was born during WWII and went from her father’s house to my father’s / her husband’s, and was a housewife throughout my childhood.  I hated it then – I wanted to be like the other kids whose mothers were out there working and making something of themselves.  Boy is that idea overrated.  But I understand the other side, I do.  I just have this rule – any fashion, idea, pastime, or action which is mostly or solely made up of well to do white people, hipsters, the rich, those who need hobbies and activates to fill their vacant minds…those things are suspect is all I am saying. 

Feminism as an idea, I know, is not cycling, or trying new restaurants like hats.  But the scale of what is being fought for gets jumbled in my head.  Suburban, or just generally comfortable women can get a lot done, but seems to be they’re not fighting very hard for those who are shit poor, saddled down with an army of children, and regrets, and worries that will not allow their minds to even contemplate an idea outside of that struggle.  That is the true difference between the haves and have nots.  The ability to dream.  This is untrue, at the heart of it all.  A man serving a prison sentence for life can dream and grow and change and sail his mind to anywhere possible, and it happens, but on the whole, those who are slaves to money (all are, but they actually work the fields in heat and seemingly Calvinistic destiny) are never let their heads to rise about the murky poisoned backwash that the rest have flushed their way.  They can, but they forget, and then the whip comes down again and they have to worry, and strain and fight and struggle.  I don’t see why women should be fighting and organizing for such immediate, easily deal able things, when there is so much MORE out there.  I wouldn’t mind their workings, if they even recognized the world, as it is. 

If you think about the entire histories of the cultures as they’ve existed, women were the spoils of war, like rancid meat, you conquered a country, you stole them and fucked them.  You wanted a wife, you took her, probably as a child, fucked her in the body and in the head until she accepted it.  In Bosnia, rape was systematically used to defeat the weaker side.  Stories bouncing around my head of a woman who was raped by the soldiers, her baby put into the oven, another women received similar, only they cut her head off while her infant lay at her side.  These are extremes but they have been happening all throughout the nightmare of history and are happening all around this spinning firestorm we call a planet.  Women have and are being beaten, enslaved, silenced and forgotten about day after day after day, and all I can see is well dressed women in silk blouses picketing about their being offended by some character in a TV show or banding together to turn men into the grandest pussies on the planet. 

This is where Camille Paglia comes in.  She remarked once about real men, and what in the hell happened to them.  IN women standing up for themselves mainly in the Western, modern world i.e. America, they changed the roles up, demanded more, and believe me – I know the way women’s brains can pick at men like dead weeds growing out of a swimming pool.  I’ve been guilty of it – but the word nag comes to mind, I stop myself as quickly as I can.  There is nothing worse than women nagging men about their very own thought process, or lack thereof.  Camille talked about how her father and that generation (my father’s too) were strong, able bodied, absolute men.  For better or for worse.  There will always be doting, docile women who want to be given a little place to hide, and that’s just fine.  There will always be curving, fire hearted ones like me who would rather Create a world in which to spar rather than tell you about my day.  But, the men have changed and not for the better.  They’re like puppets of whitewashed masculinity – in the place of their male egos (which have the same amount of place as ego in general but still, you have to play your part in the performance of life) is the rot of circumstance, just breeding soft, ineffectual hatreds below the surface. 

As with any other ‘commentary’ on life today, I find myself outside of it, looking for the mask of eyeliner eyes, deciding that my mind cannot cease its knowledge absorption, and that the hackneyed, teetering strands of people have circled our mouse-trails too many times in this world’s civilizing for nearly anyone to really engage the Fire of what makes their hearts beat loud in their collective yearning.

~ M. Lucia