Blog Against Sexism Day: 8 March 2007 (International Women's Day)

\'sek-,si-zem

Noun: profound disrespect for (usually) girls' and women's minds, bodies, aspirations, experiences and needs

I know about this because I possess a gendered body in a gendered world, and my brain circuitry has been sculpted by female versions of longing and joy, fear, grief and resignation.

I know about it because I own lovely, small breasts, a strong womb, and a clitoris (which can never, ever be used as a weapon) in a body that has ripened, sought and given pleasure, given birth and provided nurture, and now is aging and even ill.

Rape is out there, and I fear it. Unequal and inadequate pay is out there, and I earn it. Spousal control and cruelty are out there; in trying to co-exist with it, I was injured, and in trying to separate from and escape it, I was nearly destroyed. So I know.

I also know, from experience, that women are as apt as men to profoundly disrespect a girl or woman and, flowing from that, to hurt her or fail to protect her or collude in her injury.

Live long enough, and you become possessor of deep, in part unwilling, knowledge. Live courageously enough, and you talk about what you know. Live wisely enough, and you treat yourself, your children and other human beings better than the world has treated you.

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Like A Heat Wave

Since my last posting some time ago, I have not in fact hibernated, yet here it is 2007! I have kept silent, worked steadily, and been drawn deeper and deeper into the vortex of the change of life. Those who know, know, but for the record: nothing prepares a person for hormonal anarchy of this degree and duration except puberty, perhaps. And the first trimester of pregnancy, for certain. Menopausal morning sickness -- whoever heard of that?!

If the cops were to impound my hard drive – not my personal drive, which has become hormonally garbled and is often illegible even to me; I mean, my computer – this is what its recent, and intensive, search history would reveal (in polite sentences because, like the child that takes apart a radio to find the little man hidden inside, I like to imagine a diminutive being of infinite patience and compassion seated at a wee keyboard behind the monitor): "Are menopause and nape ache connected, pls?" "What about menopause and heightened sense of smell?" "Tell me about menopausal fatigue, pls?" "Is there such a thing as menopausal morning sickness? Is there?!"

A perpetual headache has glued itself to the back of my left eyeball. Chronic nausea, like a sick cat, has nuzzled into the hollow at the base of my throat. And according to my research, it so happens that other women my age are also manufacturing their own weather without reference to seasons or times of day, are also waking up in sweat-soaked bedclothes at midnight to stick their head into the freezer compartment, and so forth. And why do they call it meno-pause, I wonder? Instead of, you know, men-o-stop.

Last week, while washing the dishes and mopping the floor, I cheered myself by putting on Motown's Greatest Hits. Martha and the Vandellas began wailing "Heatwave," and I began swinging my hips, dancing with the mop and singing along. And it struck me that while nothing is a love song anymore, especially that song isn't a love song anymore. And that Martha deserves extra credit for experience and candor. With a few minor revisions to the lyrics, her song is fully relevant, and this is how it really goes:

Whenever I'm wide awake,
Somethin' insi-ide
Starts to burnin'
And I wish I could hi-ide!
Could it be a devil in me,
Or is this the way it's supposed to be?

(Chorus)

It's like a HOT FLASH
Burnin' in my heart;
Can't keep from cryin'!
It's tearin' me apart!

Whenever it calls my name,
I feel so sick, it's insane --
I feel, yeah, yeah, well I feel that burnin' flame!
Has my blood pressure got a hold on me,
Or is this the way it's supposed to be?! --

(Chorus)

It's like a HOT FLASH
Burnin' in my heart;
Can't keep from cryin'!
It's tearin' me apart!

Sometimes I stare in space,
Tears all OH-ver my face;
I can't explain it, don't understand it,
I ain't never felt like this before!

But that doesn't mean it has me amazed,
I don't know what to do, my head's in a haze --

(Chorus)

It's like a HOT FLASH
Burnin' in my heart;
Can't keep from cryin'!
It's tearin' me apart!

Ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh
HOT FLASH!
Ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh
HOT FLASH!

(chorus to fade)

But just as I was getting used to them, the hot flashes have morphed into wildly oscillating hot-and-cold flashes. So cold, my knees chatter and teeth knock. The first time this happened, I thought: Okay. Oh-kay. Nothing like the flu. Leukemia at least.

I queried the invisible, mute, wee being seated in mirror position at the keyboard behind the screen: "Do menopausal COLD flashes exist, pls?"

It is not your imagination, he typed back.

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A Connoisseur of Sleep and Waking

The bears are right to listen to the body's wisdom. Not like me, whom the dog awakens too early on winter mornings, and I obey – not her, precisely, but the economic necessity of waking despite my body's every impulse to cling to sleep.

Oh, but the bears in their wisdom! In the fall, they cram their mouths with berries until the juice is dripping down the outside of their jaws. They scoop salmon up out of cold streams and eat them whole and raw, and chilled as if they were lifted straight from beds of crushed ice, and slake their thirst from these streams. They fatten and sate themselves. Just think of the vitamins and minerals their bodies ingest! Then they seek out lairs deep in the earth where no-one can find them, and wrap themselves in fur blankets, slow their heartbeats, and sleep for a whole season.

In the past several years, I have become a connoisseur of sleep.

There is depressed sleep, which I recommend to no-one, a craving for bed so irresistible that it is like a paralysis. When I give in, I can stay there for days and weeks.

There is, on the other hand, the sleep of physical and mental exhaustion after having worked steadily and well. This is a delicious, earned sleep. Sometimes, it brings dreams, and these dreams are welcome.

Once I knew about post-coital slumber, but I have mostly forgotten. It takes a naïve and reckless trust, a misplaced trust, to continue to allow yourself to fall into a deep sleep in the arms of a man that has turned mean on you outside of bed. I continued to sleep beside my husband, and even in his arms, for many years after he had become dangerous. It took me a long, long time to feel the fear and take it very seriously.

On an issue related to sleep, unlike bears that stock up on nourishment and take a whole winter to sleep it off, and unlike my dog, who is a regular eater of balanced meals, I am a social eater. I, too, would have strong bones and teeth and glossy fur if I followed my dog's regime, but for lack of regular human society at mealtimes, I have become an occasional eater. I can go for days without hunger, and forget to eat.

Then one morning, I will wake up ravenous, and gnaw whatever happens to be left in the refrigerator that, in these years, I have taken to replenishing only when the last morsel has been eaten. So there will be a corner of hard cheese or a slice of bread or a carrot or banana or the last spoonful from the peanut-butter jar.

Last week, the dog woke me and, after I had emerged grumpily from the down comforter into the cold and dark apartment and let her out into the yard, I opened the refrigerator and discovered it to hold a single pita. In the time it took for the dog to pee, and scratch the door to be readmitted – less, in fact – I had a fragrant, chewy, hot pita to take back to my lair. The dog was puzzled: first I held the pita, like an edible hot-water bottle, to the flannel of my tummy, and then I held it to the base of my skull (the migraine points), and only then, when feeling sufficiently warm and relaxed, did I begin to eat. Well, you see, I was experimenting with a comfortable way of waking. But the dog became aroused, and rooted with her snout underneath the comforter, all along its edge, so that I had to share that meal.

This morning, I again remembered to be hungry upon waking and letting the dog out, and a cold, dark morning it was. I discovered a russet potato in the vegetable bin. As I have said, I am a social eater without regular society, and perhaps for this reason have become a no-nonsense cook; 5-minute, 1-course meals are my specialty.

I washed the potato, sliced a triangular plug into the top, poured olive oil inside the carved-out space, sprinkled a pinch of basil, and replaced the plug. Within five minutes, the potato was nuked to perfection, its tissues saturated with olive oil and basil. The dog doesn't like potatoes and, curling up on her blanket and pillow beside the bed for another snooze, left me to breakfast on it alone beneath the covers. After which, warm from the inside and outside and yearning to be a bear, I too went back to sleep.

I wish I could give you a less quirky picture of my life, but this is the truth of it.

Anchorage

This weekend has marked the 20th anniversary of my father's death. I have realized that if I keep this awareness balled inside my throat and pooling heavily behind my eyeballs, where it has been since first I crawled into bed two days ago, I will hide under the covers for another few hours or even days.

My father had dark eyes and, in his younger days, dark hair. He smelled deliciously of shaving cream. He remained physically strong all his years, and was soft spoken and kind, a mixture of the masculine and feminine. I call this quality the mother in men, and all my adult life, my radar has been alive to it.

If my father had lived, he would be over a hundred years old today. He would not have wanted to live so long. He was proud of his physical strength and beauty and would not have wanted to become frail.

My father died believing that I had married a man who could be counted on to cherish and protect me forever. I thought so, too.

I am glad that my father did not live to see my life disintegrate.

I am glad that my father did not live to see the charming young man I married become a bully. My young man was the selfish son of a selfish mother, and there is no great leap from selfishness to cruelty. Put one foot in front of the other and you are there.

Yet now that my abuser is out of my life, I live so precariously in socioeconomic terms that even the metaphor of walking a tightrope without a safety net does not begin to express it. In my married years, I was like the cartoon character obliviously walking on air; then one day it looks down and, abruptly realizing its predicament, wildly paddles its paws or webbed feet as it plummets. Squaaawk.

I am ashamed by my failure to have achieved the security and happiness my father wished for me. Because that's all he wished. The long-ago college graduation and wedding ceremonies, so pretty and hopeful, were for him only icing on the cake. It was personal joy and a safe anchorage in the big world that he wished for his daughter, and which these ceremonies seemed to guarantee.

My father was an intelligent and resilient man, though, with a capacity for appreciating nuance that his own hard life would have taught him. I have no safe anchorage, Daddy, but perhaps, finally, I am coming to your wisdom of taking each day as a gift.

Something About the Dog

Last weekend, I was at the home of friends with a group of friends. We had brought our knapsacks and were preparing to hike from their house down into the nature reserve for a picnic, and while we were awaiting the last arrivals and, in fact, petting the host family's dog while chatting about our own dogs at home, the man of the house exclaimed: "What's that?!"

A big brown heap of something, not obviously alive, lay on the lawn outside the picture window. It had not been there a moment ago.

It turned out to be a dying dog, a mixed breed of chestnut brown. A smoke-colored stripe scorched into the fur across his throat indicated that he had spent his life roped. He was all spine and ribs, as if you were looking at the skeleton of an upturned hull in a shipyard. One hind leg was badly injured. One eye was clouded over. The other eye was clear, dark brown, and responsive to human attention, but the socket was bloody.

Although usually I conceive of God as a source of compassionate energy that can be tapped, and not as a micromanager, in this case I could imagine God's having carried this creature in the palm of his hand and gently deposited him on this particular patch of grass in front of this particular gathering of people, as if to say: "Now, what will you do about it?"

For obviously the animal, which must have dragged himself up from the valley before collapsing in my friends' yard, was possessed of a powerful will to live. He was brought some kibble, and although he could barely raise his large, sculpted head, he ate. He was brought three bowls of water, one after the other after the other, and drank. He made no overtures, he didn't beg, but he took food and drink and was calmly responsive to kindly attention. I would even say that he had dignity.

I am used to petting the top of my dog's head. In fact, the professional who helped me to train her told me that dogs understand this gesture as praise. Leaving aside how he came to that psychological insight, or why it works, when it was my turn to make the dog's acquaintance, I patted and stroked the top of his head. His one clear eye looked up at me unafraid. "Oh," I crooned, "who is a beautiful boy, who is a good boy, who is a good and sweet and lovely dog?"

We did not go on the planned hike and picnic, but instead made phone calls to vets, and when one of them agreed to open his clinic for us, two of the men in the group carried the dog, large and unresisting, into a car and drove him there. The men came back with the following report: hospitalization and feeding, care for the dog's infected eyes and an operation on the dog's abscessed hind leg could come to a thousand dollars and even more, although past the thousand-dollar mark, the vet would absorb the cost.

The group put the issue to a debate and then a vote (which was not unanimous) – would we work with the vet to try to save the dog, and divide the cost of his care and feeding among ourselves, or would we choose to euthanize? One of the couples in the group volunteered to act as the dog's foster family until an adoptive family might be found for what might, after all, end up to be a three-legged, one-eyed dog.

I haven't stopped thinking about that dog ever since last weekend and, given that his new name has become the subject line of a growing e-mail thread among us, apparently the others haven't either. At some point this week, I realized that I am falling asleep every night with the image of the dog's handsome head in my mind.

None of us in the group has a lot of money. I for one owe the bank and the grocer and the pharmacist and! and! and! Yet when I marched to the money machine and withdrew my share of the dog's whopping, approximate hospitalization costs, I felt an additional surge of affection for him.

Yesterday, I went to visit the dog, who lay prone in a hospital cage on a clean blanket with his food bowl licked clean and his water bowl licked empty. He raised his heavy head to my fingers, which I could poke about a third of the way through the grating, and let me stroke the top of his head. The crooning started: "Oh, who is a good boy, who is a beautiful boy, who is a loved, loved dog?"

I put my fingertips to his soft muzzle and warm nose, and he licked them, once. His tail didn't have the strength to wag and, I realized, it will probably be a long time before he rediscovers his bark. But the vet says that he is eating seven or eight times a day and that his will to live is huge.

I blurted out to the vet, who is a stranger, about the dog, who is a stranger, "I love the dog!"

Afterwards, I thought about what that might mean. Because while sweet-talking the dog, and despite seeing his skeletal body and the sores distributed on it, by some trick of selective vision, I don't really see them at all. His beauty registers and not what mars it. When I see that dog, or imagine him and wish for his well-being, apparently I access distilled essence of dog, which is wholly beautiful. Which must mean that this dog has something to teach me about the nature of love.

November 22nd

Although my gut feeling is that the nations in their long histories have accumulated too many memorial days, that is because there have been too many unnatural deaths, and that is because humans are a flawed species and hurt each other.

I have been thinking about this because at some point last Wednesday, I realized that it was November 22nd, which for anyone above a certain age is shorthand for an earthshaking human event. For my generation, it was a formative event.

On that day 43 years ago, the 4th grade girls at my school had spent recess in a secluded corner of the playground rehearsing the role of the Chinese Dolls in the Nutcracker Suite. This had been assigned to us by the school's new music teacher, who had galvanized the children with her ambitions for the winter holiday pageant.

The Chinese Dolls had just received our costumes – embroidered turquoise jackets and black trousers packaged in crackly plastic wrapping that was not to be opened yet, and I was immensely excited by the idea of wearing this costume, and this is what I was thinking about on the morning of November 22, 1963.

We reentered the schoolroom after recess to find our classroom teacher slumped at her desk with her head cradled in the crook of her arm. I remember the part in her hair at the top of her head, but not her hair color or her face or even her name. She lifted her head at our entrance, and her eyes were wet. I had never seen an adult cry before and, in fact, I thought adults couldn't. That when you grew breasts, your tear ducts dried up or something.

This is what I remember of the year 1963: the delicious smell of playground asphalt baking in the sun, the dazzling Chinese pajama costume folded in its plastic wrapping, and JFK's assassination.

When the teacher told us that the President of the United States and Governor of Texas had been shot while riding in an open motorcade in Dallas, I imagined Caroline's father (for at the time, that is how I thought of my country's President) and another man sitting side by side, legs dangling, on the open tailgate of a Ford station wagon (the kind of car my father drove). They were dressed identically in Stetson hats, checked shirts, blue jeans and cowboy boots. The vehicle was jolting, its wheels raising puffs of dust from the desert floor, when suddenly out of nowhere, an Indian galloped up on a pony, whipped out a pistol rather than the expected bow and arrow, shot both men and galloped away.

I didn't know that Texas even had cities or highways, and was incapable of comprehending the teacher's words another way until I had reached home. There, the television set, bought by my parents in order to follow the Cuban Missile Crisis, corrected my understanding.

During my school years, after JFK there was Bobby and then Martin Luther King. At the time of their murders, I mourned these men as the dead fathers of children. When I married, I came to understand them as the dead husbands of wives left alone to fend for themselves and their children. Only much, much later, as I have lived in the world, have I come to understand that everything that is potentially best in people, and everything tender and hopeful that can be made of human society, is jeopardized when little men with cramped imaginations murder visionary leaders.

Green Suede Boots

They are showing women's boots in all the lighted shop windows that I pass on my way home from work. No, that is inaccurate, excuse me. For all my adult life, on winter evenings, lighted display windows with women's boots for sale are the only shop windows that attract my notice.

Some of the pairs of boots in those windows I would like to buy. The high-heeled ones with exaggerated, long, pointy toes suitable for pushing off the ground while astride one's broomstick I would not buy. Ditto for platforms. But the flat-heeled ones with snub toes such as self-confident college girls in my day wore? Mmm. This year, they are also showing boots trimmed with shaggy fake fur. Maybe this is supposed to suggest cave women, and although I can recognize the element of kitsch there, also Mmmm.

Now, look, I don't have a shoe fetish or own, like some notorious dictators' notorious wives, closets full of shoes. I own a pair of sandals, two pair of dirty sneakers, a pair of black pumps, and a pair of comfortable black boots that cost about twelve dollars when I bought them a few years ago, but because they are imitation leather and do not breathe, stink on the inside. I also own a pair of real leather boots of a pearly gray shade embroidered with thick, bronze-colored thread, but these apparently were a bad investment as their stacked heel has proved too high and turns my normally flowing stride into an off-kilter, Tiggerish bounce.

In the past millennium, for fifteen consecutive years, I owned two pair of soft Italian leather boots, one pair the color of dark chocolate and the other pair a creamy caramel hue. I was used to pulling one or the other pair off and tossing them in the corner of the hall as I entered the house and went upstairs (I was mistress of a big house then with an upstairs and a downstairs). I actually liked to see those darling boots carelessly flung in their corner all soft and crumpled and familiar with wear. One day, though, our new puppy ate them. I came downstairs from my nap to find shredded strips of leather beside intact heels and soles, and the beautiful puppy, with her floppy ears and round puppy face, curled up sated and asleep on her blanket. She had thought they were chew toys. And rightly so. It is doggie psychology to think that anything on the floor belongs to the dog. Besides, those boots' matte leather had become so supple and buffed with time and good care that you really could understand how someone would want to eat them.

When I was a little girl, low-heeled, mid-calf boots of radiant white matte leather were the fashion. The leather did not slump when you took them off; those boots could stand up on their own. Go-go boots I believe they were called in the corny lingo of the times, but I am not sure. Love would not be too strong a word for how I felt about the pair I owned. Now, of course, I would only go as far as affection because love is for channeling into children and dogs and women friends and, if one could get past the fear of men's bullying, into men.

Unlike the rest of us, one of our classmates owned a pair of jade-green suede boots. Although they were the same exact style as everyone else's boots, the color and texture made all the difference. I never saw anything like them displayed in the store windows of our neighborhood. It never occurred to me at the time that this girl must have had a remarkable mother with access to a world unlike, and well beyond, the suburbs in order to give her daughter a pair of boots like that.

My classmate wore those boots day in and day out for the entire last two years of primary school, fall and winter and spring, until they had acquired the peculiarly beautiful sheen of slightly soiled suede or buckskin. She was not among my friends and, as I recall, we had no particular reason ever to converse. Nevertheless, I remember that girl's name and face vividly because not a school day of those two years went by when I did not wait for the bell that released us to the playground so that I might secretly admire her green suede boots.

It occurs to me as I write this that in a casual way, I have remained on the lookout for a pair of green suede boots like those owned by my childhood classmate. If ever I were to glimpse on display in a lighted store window boots like hers, I would go in and purchase them. Even if, by then, I am a hundred. Even if I am no longer showing my kneecaps to the world. And when I pull those boots on, even if by then I am a hundred, I will feel beautiful.