I spend more time than I want to in waiting rooms. And while I’m there, when I find myself without the book I meant to bring, I peruse a couple of Arkansas magazines, generally well written and well intended, full of the sweets of the South: pictures of local Homecoming Dances, cheerleaders, charity events, makeovers, home interiors, gardens; articles on couples and families, profiles of a local celebrity (always including a discussion of church activities and family life); inspirational essays; instructions for Your Creative Project – decoupaging the cover of Your Bible Study Notebook or stenciling nursery rhymes on the walls of your baby’s nursery.
Sometimes I see a photo of one or the other of my more civic-minded friends; sometimes I like looking at an interior I’ll never be able to afford.
One magazine in particular has “Women” in the title, and apparently has the intent of appealing to the whole gender, but I think of this magazine as Southern Affluent Conservative Certain-kind-of-Christian Mothers and Wives. So, recently, reading the marriage counseling, and being told, based on St. Paul, that women primarily want to be loved, and men primarily want to be respected, my heart sank.
Here I am again – outcast and reprobate. I must not be a real woman; I just don’t fit that ruffled pink suit with 4 inch black heels idea of the feminine. It’s not my color, and it’s not my style. More than that, I like to believe I’m a little more complicated than the marriage counselor thinks, and that I actually do require a lot of other things in my life including a full measure of respect, intelligent conversation, and a sporting chance at the TV remote.
Oh yeah, I’m also not so conformable anymore.
On International Women’s Day (Happy Belated March 8th), as I went through the cash register line at Krogers, the cashier and I talked a little about coupons and such – nothing mean-spirited, nothing personal, nothing offensive in the least to anyone was discussed, but apparently, the cashier felt she’d said too much. “Oh,” she said “I just need to bridle my tongue.” I’ve heard any number of Southern women say this to me. And, none of them in circumstances that I thought required silence. I asked my husband whether men ever tell each other such a thing. If so, they’ve never said so to him. I guess this is something taught from the Southern pulpit that discourages women’s voice, something along the lines of “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything,” but with that scary church tang that promises judgment, hell, and other retributions.
I just feel squashed by that women’s magazine – however well-intended it is. I’m hankering for something more: some place where women can give voice to their depths and create larger spaces for themselves, maybe interspersed with articles about 17th century Chinese ceramics, the Baha’i in Arkansas, the life cycle of the Moss Mantid, or some thoughtful observation that moves us beyond the conventional. And where, sometimes, we risk saying something “not nice” and refuse to bridle our tongues. It’s like we’ve got a brand new HD flat screen that only shows black and white movies. Bring on the color! Let’s try the 3-D glasses!
I used to think we had a space already cleared and open for all those new voices, but we seem to have created a big political stage so we can hear the leading female performances of . . . wait for it . . . Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann, who fritter away the power of women in incoherence and inadequacy. Too many other women must be bridling their tongues.
So, Happy Women’s History Month!
Here are a few other voices:
Gloria Steinem recently to Bill Maher:“For Republicans, life begins at conception and ends at birth.”
English Proverb: A woman's strength is in her tongue.
Hillary Clinton on March 8th: "Women and girls drive economies. They build peace and prosperity. Investing in women and girls means investing in global economic progress, political stability and greater prosperity for everyone the world over. So let us mark this day by finding ways to ensure women and girls access to education, healthcare, jobs, and credit, and to protect their right to live free from violence."
Ann Jones in Why Peace is the Business of Men (but shouldn’t be) about the absence of women in peace negotiations although many folk give lip service to the value women might have in them.
http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/01/women-peacemakers-un-resolution-1325
And here, off the beaten path: a documentary about women called Heart to Lead from a group called Imagine the good. http://www.imaginethegood.com/
In the first thirty seconds of Heart to Lead, Rama Vernon chants, connecting earth to sky with an OM bigger than you’ve ever heard. (The trailer for Heart to Lead doesn’t do that first scene justice; in the trailer her voice is just background sound, without the amplitude it has in the film.)
This is a woman creating sacred space through her voice. Need I mention she’s not bridling her tongue?
Showing posts with label women's rights. Show all posts
Showing posts with label women's rights. Show all posts
Monday, March 14, 2011
Saturday, October 2, 2010
Red-shoed Zebras at the Tea Party
Anderson Cooper asked NY’s new Republican candidate for governor, Carl Paladino, whether he’d allow abortions for victims of rape and incest. “No, Paladino said, “They have adoptions available for them.”
Paladino joins a Mount Rushmore of craziness: Ken Buck, Rand Paul, and the Sarah Palin wannabes: Sharron Angle and Chris O’Donnell, all of whom seem utterly lacking in imagination, and capable of valuing creativity only as it is manifest biologically.
So, let’s add a little creativity. Let’s have a little imaginative play here: Candidate Paladino becomes susceptible to an unwanted pregnancy; now, suddenly, he may have to put his big business dealings, his speaking engagements, his work on hold while he lies in bed for several months. (We’ll give him a complicated pregnancy as a result of rape.) Because of PTSD – a common enough result of assault -- he drinks more than he should and the fetus is compromised, not that he even knew he was carrying at the time. He’ll deliver a special needs child, not easily adopted. Also, just to let him experience a few more of the difficulties and get the full effect: because of his age, the pregnancy may be life-threatening. As it happens, he won’t die, but he’ll have a long recovery. Does his stance change? And how soon?
Sharron Angle tells him God has a plan and gets rid of the Department of Education. Chris O’Donnell tells him to put his man pants back on and sends him flowers, against Karl Rove’s advice. Ken Buck tells him to Buck Up. Rand Paul suggests he keep the baby and homeschool it. This will take more time away from the construction business and cut down on those offensive emails. The good news is that Paul thinks that home schools should not be regulated by government, so the baby need not be educated at all, and maybe can be put to work eventually picking up scrap around construction sites.
After all that, Paladino might have a better sense of what women are asked to sacrifice when others control their creativity. The others don’t get it unless it happens to them.
I have dreams of broadcasting myself into those heated congressional debates – say like Bart Stupak’s silliness on the Health Care Bill, and then, when his obstructionism is finally overcome, when even less imaginative members are yelling “Baby Murderer” at him – Say right in the midst of that, like God manifest on the ceiling, I show up howling “I don’t tell ya’ll what to do with ya’lls wieners when ya’ll are at home, so don’t you tell me what to do with my insides!” And there I’d be, a mad cow, a howling post-menopausal lone voice, looking nothing like the conventional God and readily dismissible.
So perhaps the broadcasting into chambers might not work.
Instead, if Christine O’Donnell wins, she will be happy to tell them what not to do with their wieners – and what women can’t do with their own bodies – either for pleasure or for sense.
What I wish for now is more empathy. Empathy requires imagination. Empathy requires a creative leap of faith. Empathy is what we know when we are, for a moment, godlike in our ability to understand how someone else might feel. To develop empathy, we need more than mere life. We need nurturance, we need love, we need security, we need faith. We need experience or education. We need free time, we need play, we need the right to move as we will. Ensuring that for one another requires a lot of caregiving, the kind of caregiving the radical right assumes someone else – probably a mother, if anyone – will supply.
Christiane Northrup, an OB-GYN and writer, explained that she realized she could have two children and write a book, or she could have three children. She has two children and a number of wonderful books. It’s not just the nine months in the womb; it’s the ongoing work and responsibility-- which most women accept and want. But they should be able to parent in their own time and on their own terms.
I’m amazed at how much this onslaught on women’s rights seems to strangle me, and oddly, silence me. In the short term, I can’t figure out what to say in a note to my mother, much less how to finish the poem I've been playing with; in the long haul, I feel this burden in my heart has kept me too sad for years. I can howl, I can rant, but the quiet creative speaking voice that has balance, depth, and vision and the occasional serendipitous rhythm, alliteration, and shine is stilled under the clutching at my gut that doubles me over and makes me cry.
Despair, self-loathing, stress, also prevent that flow of juice that rises to the top in happiness and lets us play in the world.
So, too, is creativity stifled by poverty, hunger, homelessness, and madness: all likely to be increased by the exclusionary politics supported by the current unsilent right. Without Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, health care and “social justice,” without these things, we may see that art, joy, hope will be – again – aristocratic privileges.
Well, perhaps creativity will out in small and sneaky ways: We’ll add to the repertoire of blues, I’ll rant more poetically, and somewhere, someone who might’ve astonished multitudes will thrill his children with his compositions for washtubs and spoons.
And so, I’m drawn right now to the manic joy of HOBBY LOBBY shopping – all those rows of offbeat Christmas tree decorations in amongst much, much, much conventional art. But the display of zebras in purple vests and red shoes, or toads in pink boas with corkscrew bottoms instead of legs, or giant pink platform shoes in spangled multi-colored glory gives me hope we’ll creep past the structure of lockstep. I notice a plastic peace sign with a flag background. I probably wore one myself in protest against the Vietnam War. Four ornaments up from the peace sign, past the fur-rimmed mug, and just to the right of the plastic TV dinner ornament (turkey and mac’n’cheese, miniaturized) gleams a bright Tomato Soup can with bands of glitter around its top and bottom. Shades of Andy Warhol! Warhol and the Vietnam War protesters have entered the Bible Belt mainstream. Sanitized and glamorized, but here they are.
I’m reminded of this summer’s visit to the Grassroots Art Center in Lucas, KS, where, among M.T. Liggett’s political art, Kenneth W. Starr is memorialized as a round-bellied metal fantasy "cigar detective," and where Mri-Pilar has reimaged Barbie, overturning every expectation for Barbie’s clothes, roles, and point of view. Such art reminds us viscerally that not everyone sees the world the same way. Thank God.
And imagination is at play: What if a zebra wore shoes?
What if Barbie became a new age goddess with tentacles coming out of her head? (Think squid, not Medusa.) What if Carl Paladino got pregnant? What if women had choices? What if every child was loved and nurtured and, even, intended? What if we thought less about mass producing ourselves and considered every woman and every child an individual work of art? (And, do I need to say what the government’s policies about education and health would be under those circumstances?) Out of such a world might come something better than Eden -- a knowing, an undeceived, and a clear-eyed Eve, and a hell of a lot of good art.
So, perhaps there is still hope, if Hobby Lobby can stock this slightly subversive stuff, admittedly intended for a Christmas tree, and purchased as hymns play in the background. It is still possible to decorate the backyard shrine to Kwan Yin or some other Goddess with fashion trendy zebras or spangled TV dinners. No one is preventing that yet. And with Kenneth Starr as a green-gold critter and the Barbies as everything: Dino-Barbie, Masked Barbie, Eve-Barbie, Anti-Barbie Barbie, perhaps we can slide right past the neurotic regimentation of the reactionary culture warriors, divert their attention with home decorations or wild yard art and march off into a more hopeful future while they are still mazed and dazed and spending money on glorious consumerism, little zebras in red court shoes marching in line across their mantles, buttressed by luminescent tomato soup cans at either end.
Paladino joins a Mount Rushmore of craziness: Ken Buck, Rand Paul, and the Sarah Palin wannabes: Sharron Angle and Chris O’Donnell, all of whom seem utterly lacking in imagination, and capable of valuing creativity only as it is manifest biologically.
So, let’s add a little creativity. Let’s have a little imaginative play here: Candidate Paladino becomes susceptible to an unwanted pregnancy; now, suddenly, he may have to put his big business dealings, his speaking engagements, his work on hold while he lies in bed for several months. (We’ll give him a complicated pregnancy as a result of rape.) Because of PTSD – a common enough result of assault -- he drinks more than he should and the fetus is compromised, not that he even knew he was carrying at the time. He’ll deliver a special needs child, not easily adopted. Also, just to let him experience a few more of the difficulties and get the full effect: because of his age, the pregnancy may be life-threatening. As it happens, he won’t die, but he’ll have a long recovery. Does his stance change? And how soon?
Sharron Angle tells him God has a plan and gets rid of the Department of Education. Chris O’Donnell tells him to put his man pants back on and sends him flowers, against Karl Rove’s advice. Ken Buck tells him to Buck Up. Rand Paul suggests he keep the baby and homeschool it. This will take more time away from the construction business and cut down on those offensive emails. The good news is that Paul thinks that home schools should not be regulated by government, so the baby need not be educated at all, and maybe can be put to work eventually picking up scrap around construction sites.
After all that, Paladino might have a better sense of what women are asked to sacrifice when others control their creativity. The others don’t get it unless it happens to them.
I have dreams of broadcasting myself into those heated congressional debates – say like Bart Stupak’s silliness on the Health Care Bill, and then, when his obstructionism is finally overcome, when even less imaginative members are yelling “Baby Murderer” at him – Say right in the midst of that, like God manifest on the ceiling, I show up howling “I don’t tell ya’ll what to do with ya’lls wieners when ya’ll are at home, so don’t you tell me what to do with my insides!” And there I’d be, a mad cow, a howling post-menopausal lone voice, looking nothing like the conventional God and readily dismissible.
So perhaps the broadcasting into chambers might not work.
Instead, if Christine O’Donnell wins, she will be happy to tell them what not to do with their wieners – and what women can’t do with their own bodies – either for pleasure or for sense.
What I wish for now is more empathy. Empathy requires imagination. Empathy requires a creative leap of faith. Empathy is what we know when we are, for a moment, godlike in our ability to understand how someone else might feel. To develop empathy, we need more than mere life. We need nurturance, we need love, we need security, we need faith. We need experience or education. We need free time, we need play, we need the right to move as we will. Ensuring that for one another requires a lot of caregiving, the kind of caregiving the radical right assumes someone else – probably a mother, if anyone – will supply.
Christiane Northrup, an OB-GYN and writer, explained that she realized she could have two children and write a book, or she could have three children. She has two children and a number of wonderful books. It’s not just the nine months in the womb; it’s the ongoing work and responsibility-- which most women accept and want. But they should be able to parent in their own time and on their own terms.
I’m amazed at how much this onslaught on women’s rights seems to strangle me, and oddly, silence me. In the short term, I can’t figure out what to say in a note to my mother, much less how to finish the poem I've been playing with; in the long haul, I feel this burden in my heart has kept me too sad for years. I can howl, I can rant, but the quiet creative speaking voice that has balance, depth, and vision and the occasional serendipitous rhythm, alliteration, and shine is stilled under the clutching at my gut that doubles me over and makes me cry.
Despair, self-loathing, stress, also prevent that flow of juice that rises to the top in happiness and lets us play in the world.
So, too, is creativity stifled by poverty, hunger, homelessness, and madness: all likely to be increased by the exclusionary politics supported by the current unsilent right. Without Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, health care and “social justice,” without these things, we may see that art, joy, hope will be – again – aristocratic privileges.
Well, perhaps creativity will out in small and sneaky ways: We’ll add to the repertoire of blues, I’ll rant more poetically, and somewhere, someone who might’ve astonished multitudes will thrill his children with his compositions for washtubs and spoons.
And so, I’m drawn right now to the manic joy of HOBBY LOBBY shopping – all those rows of offbeat Christmas tree decorations in amongst much, much, much conventional art. But the display of zebras in purple vests and red shoes, or toads in pink boas with corkscrew bottoms instead of legs, or giant pink platform shoes in spangled multi-colored glory gives me hope we’ll creep past the structure of lockstep. I notice a plastic peace sign with a flag background. I probably wore one myself in protest against the Vietnam War. Four ornaments up from the peace sign, past the fur-rimmed mug, and just to the right of the plastic TV dinner ornament (turkey and mac’n’cheese, miniaturized) gleams a bright Tomato Soup can with bands of glitter around its top and bottom. Shades of Andy Warhol! Warhol and the Vietnam War protesters have entered the Bible Belt mainstream. Sanitized and glamorized, but here they are.
I’m reminded of this summer’s visit to the Grassroots Art Center in Lucas, KS, where, among M.T. Liggett’s political art, Kenneth W. Starr is memorialized as a round-bellied metal fantasy "cigar detective," and where Mri-Pilar has reimaged Barbie, overturning every expectation for Barbie’s clothes, roles, and point of view. Such art reminds us viscerally that not everyone sees the world the same way. Thank God.
And imagination is at play: What if a zebra wore shoes?
What if Barbie became a new age goddess with tentacles coming out of her head? (Think squid, not Medusa.) What if Carl Paladino got pregnant? What if women had choices? What if every child was loved and nurtured and, even, intended? What if we thought less about mass producing ourselves and considered every woman and every child an individual work of art? (And, do I need to say what the government’s policies about education and health would be under those circumstances?) Out of such a world might come something better than Eden -- a knowing, an undeceived, and a clear-eyed Eve, and a hell of a lot of good art.
So, perhaps there is still hope, if Hobby Lobby can stock this slightly subversive stuff, admittedly intended for a Christmas tree, and purchased as hymns play in the background. It is still possible to decorate the backyard shrine to Kwan Yin or some other Goddess with fashion trendy zebras or spangled TV dinners. No one is preventing that yet. And with Kenneth Starr as a green-gold critter and the Barbies as everything: Dino-Barbie, Masked Barbie, Eve-Barbie, Anti-Barbie Barbie, perhaps we can slide right past the neurotic regimentation of the reactionary culture warriors, divert their attention with home decorations or wild yard art and march off into a more hopeful future while they are still mazed and dazed and spending money on glorious consumerism, little zebras in red court shoes marching in line across their mantles, buttressed by luminescent tomato soup cans at either end.
Thursday, July 1, 2010
Little Disappointments
I enjoy crossword puzzles, although I haven't been doing them lately, but I couldn't resist the one in the paper labeled "Drill, Baby, Drill." I thought it might be a political satire in crossword form, and I was encouraged by the first answer I wrote in: "bias." I had visions of Sarah Palin and BP showing up between the crosshatches. I worked away, hoping for the punch line, only to discover that the puzzle's theme was actually dentists and puns dentistical: "brushing bride" and "moment of tooth."
Speaking of the Palin crowd, I heard the reporting on Sharron Angle's response to an interviewer who asked her whether abortion was ever okay. Her reply was no. The interviewer then asked about cases of incest and rape, and Angle's response was one of those God Trump Cards that shuts down any further discussion. She said: You know, I'm a Christian, and I believe that God has a plan and a purpose for each one of our lives and that he can intercede in all kinds of situations and we need to have a little faith in many things.
Angle has taken a lot of flack about this, perhaps rightly so, with most folks jumping to the conclusion that Angle believes rape and incest are God's plan. I don't think she meant to go there, although her politics in action might boil down to the same thing as if she did, but I was reminded how placidly we can see a difficult destiny for someone else as God's plan. And how infuriating it is, if you're the one suffering, to be fobbed off that way. It is not easy to see our misfortunes as blessings -- or to be told to do so by someone more or less well-meaning. I'm not arguing that we don't learn through difficult situations, but sometimes suffering is just suffering, and the "God will take care of it" answer is just not answer enough.
Even if it were the only answer, most of us would need some sympathetic validation of the unfairness of our situation, some tea and cookies, or an understanding friend.
So, take Jonah. When God tells him to go to Nineveh, he goes the other direction. As a child in Vacation Bible School, I believed that Jonah brought his own fate on himself -- being swallowed by a whale and having to do what God told him to do after all. Why wasn't Jonah being good and doing what he was told? (I was an obedient child.)
Now, I have a lot more sympathy for Jonah. I may yet die in my own big fish. Certainly, I hope not to have to go to the modern equivalent of Nineveh or somewhere worse. And if Sharron Angle tells me that is my fate, she better look like she's at least sorry about it.
Speaking of the Palin crowd, I heard the reporting on Sharron Angle's response to an interviewer who asked her whether abortion was ever okay. Her reply was no. The interviewer then asked about cases of incest and rape, and Angle's response was one of those God Trump Cards that shuts down any further discussion. She said: You know, I'm a Christian, and I believe that God has a plan and a purpose for each one of our lives and that he can intercede in all kinds of situations and we need to have a little faith in many things.
Angle has taken a lot of flack about this, perhaps rightly so, with most folks jumping to the conclusion that Angle believes rape and incest are God's plan. I don't think she meant to go there, although her politics in action might boil down to the same thing as if she did, but I was reminded how placidly we can see a difficult destiny for someone else as God's plan. And how infuriating it is, if you're the one suffering, to be fobbed off that way. It is not easy to see our misfortunes as blessings -- or to be told to do so by someone more or less well-meaning. I'm not arguing that we don't learn through difficult situations, but sometimes suffering is just suffering, and the "God will take care of it" answer is just not answer enough.
Even if it were the only answer, most of us would need some sympathetic validation of the unfairness of our situation, some tea and cookies, or an understanding friend.
So, take Jonah. When God tells him to go to Nineveh, he goes the other direction. As a child in Vacation Bible School, I believed that Jonah brought his own fate on himself -- being swallowed by a whale and having to do what God told him to do after all. Why wasn't Jonah being good and doing what he was told? (I was an obedient child.)
Now, I have a lot more sympathy for Jonah. I may yet die in my own big fish. Certainly, I hope not to have to go to the modern equivalent of Nineveh or somewhere worse. And if Sharron Angle tells me that is my fate, she better look like she's at least sorry about it.
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