Some Political Incorrectness

It's widely known that American women worked in factories during World War II, doing big jobs, hard jobs, because the men were off fighting.  Even so, the patriarchy informed hiring decisions, witness the little hiring guide below.  My favorite bit is in point six:  "Numerous properties say that women make excellent workers when they have their jobs cut out for them, but that they lack initiative in finding work themselves."  This was the water we swam in a short while ago.  Today, much-reviled "political correctness" prevents employers from putting something like that down in writing.  But old stereotypes die hard.

My second favorite point in the below is that husky women, point no. 3, make better workers than skinny ones. Yes! You may also note that having time to freshen up your lipstick is good for workplace morale.So

Throughout, women are referred to as girls.  Another way of keeping us small.

What is Wrong With Everyone

In my experience - and I am just one little case study - American medicine has it all wrong, much like American Zen.  In both cases, they're really good at some things but miss the big picture.  In the case of Western medicine, it's been preoccupied with fixing people and only now starting to think about how to be healthy.

For big-picture medicine, turn to Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) or Ayurveda or, I suspect, many other native healing systems.  It is the gift of what we call primitive people that they don't think in terms of the laboratory or the gold-standard study* as Western science does.

*The gold-standard study in medicine can be defined as a study that follows specific protocol,  indicates correlations and possibilities, and concludes by saying more study is needed.

What is that big picture? Context. We are not isolated individuals. We live in environments.

You sometimes saw contextual medicine in action in the TV series House.  Dr. House was a radical misfit who valued his intuition and often sent his team out to search someone's house for toxins and secrets.  He watched family interactions and quizzed family for information. All that stuff was more interesting to him, and the viewing audience, than lab results.

Our context right here now is Weather. It is actually everyone's context, no matter how much time you spend indoors.  Here in mid-America it is high summer - mid-August - and this brings about different problems than mid-winter, which is happening right now in Australia where my sister lives.  (In mid-winter in Australia you actually have to use your space heater!) And there sure is a lot of weather, drought here, flooding there, as if some climate change is happening.

Weather affects people differently depending on their constitutions.  Both TCM and Ayurveda see human beings as made of elements. And so the elements affect them.

In Ayurveda I clock in as a Vata-Pitta, or air-fire person.  The fire in my temperament is easily disturbed.  And oh, August, season of too much ripeness, as you know if you grow tomatoes or zucchini.  August is Too Much. It's not just the heat or humidity, it's the light.  Lately here we've been getting a little relief with small batches of autumn days down from the North Pole or Canada.

Canadian air is nice.  It is fresh and coolish and breezy. But uh-oh, wind is really not good for Vatas, who are made mostly of air. In Chinese medicine there is actually a disorder called "wind devil."  I relate to that.  To prevent it, we are advised to cover the head and neck, that is, wear what my mother called a babushka. This makes you look like an old lady even if you're only 12, not that I care, as I am 71 11/12 years old.  If I did care I could get a special hat.  They even come in Desert Sunrise. It's a thought.

I notice a lot of fire people looking haggard these days, running around in the heat and the noonday sun. So this post is a sort of public service announcement.  If you don't know whether you're air, fire, or earth, Banyan Botanicals has a little test you can take that may indicate more study is needed. They will also sell you various oils and things, which are helpful to me me (I am not paid for this).

They will also advise you on your diet, since you are composed, in part, of what you eat and drink.  Bear in mind that alcohol is sometimes called firewater.  Yes, it is a heating food.  My own diet at the moment includes nothing hot and spicy, no raw onion or garlic, more cucumber and peppermint tea. I have tested this empirically. It is interesting to me that these ancient folk traditions see mood disorders as an imbalance of fire.  Worth investigating, since Western medicine is notoriously poor at managing them.

Old songs and Strong Men

Above, the man of your dreams?  More about that in a minute.

Below, a sweet song I may have heard when I was six and Vaughan Monroe's version hit the top 10. I loved the narrative - a story in song, a message in persisting through the desert.  Keep a-movin' Dan.   I'm not alone in liking it - a lot of people have recorded it.  I landed on this version first, remembering Johnny Ray, and like it. 


While in that area on YouTube, I saw this and listened to it and looked at it, remembering clearly the movie.  Watching it, many stills from the well-done black-and-white film, I remembered the rigid gender roles in the culture I was born into; the patriarchy - the fundamental culture of the fifties.



I was probably about twelve when "High Noon" came to the Lyn Theatre half a mile from our house.  I was never into "cowboy movies" and thought pretty much nothing happened in it, and it was boring; you could fit about ten of it into one episode of 24 Hours. But I stayed and watched it, of course.  It was a long time until I learned you could walk out on a movie, and then it took me a while to do it.  So there I sat, absorbing the world in which men were interesting and brave and important, and women were . . . pretty. The men did stuff and the women . . . waited. Sigh.

It's been a long, strange trip since then, and most of it hasn't gone as we feminists hoped it would.  Keep a-moving, Jan.  And Susan and Heather and Tiffany, all of us.

I had a second bad fall two weeks ago, and have seen three doctors since then and had an MRI of my brain. Ischemic events happening there, so now I'm scheduled for a neurologist.  I'm tired.  So I'm going to ask you readers to comment, or e-mail me if this strikes any chords with you.  Or reminds you of the stories you grew up with.

There Is No God, and She's Getting Mad

This is a better world for women than the one I was born into.  But not nearly good enough.  A lot of brave women are standing up to systems that abused them, and that have resisted change.  That's not the route for all of us, but we all need to work on ourselves, standing up against the conditioning that tells us that to be feminine is to be nice and while our lives away.

Above, the archtypal scene from the Sistine chapel in which Old Man God creates A Man.  I would have liked to include the scene from the 1988 film Working Girl in which Melanie Griffith asks her best friend to cut her hair, saying a line something like, "If you want a serious job, you have to have serious hair."  Would that the TV weathergirls [sic] would learn that.

But we don't need to work on our hair any more than we already do.  We need to get easy-care cuts, like men, and get to work on our lives.  Our souls.  Our art.  On our work, whatever it is.  On sharing our gifts.  From what I see, a lot of woman-power is being wasted.

I got riled up earlier today reading a blog post by one of the beloved Masters [sic] in the Zen tradition.  It always makes me a little nervous to argue with Daddy.  Really.  I've met Rev. James Ford and followed his writing for years.  He is a deeply kind, generous man.  But I wanted to comment on his review of Brad Warner's new book, and I overcame my (conditioned?) hesitation.  So, here it is.  Dear James -

You write, "I also quibble with his masculine by preference language for God." I'm trying to think of the best verb to describe what I think of that, and how I feel about it.  I don't quibble with this.  Quibbling is mild.  I disagree vehemently. And I am discouraged to think you see it as a minor point.   Language matters.  It matters beyond mere theology.

It matters when we use "man" as if that word means "humankind."  That language grew up in a system men ruled (a time before birth control, may I note), a system that gave us "All men are created equal," which meant what it said: (white, landed) men were human, and had the right to vote; women were not, and did not.

The single thing most supportive of the patriarchal values that allow men with automatic weapons to shoot up our schools and deadlock our legislatures is the mythology of a powerful male God who, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, created a man first.  Then a woman, to serve.  Men rule. This is still true.  It is the single most off-putting thing about the Japanese Zen tradition for women like me - a meticulously drawn lineage of authority passed from one man to another, and thus to Brad Warner.

The choice of "He" to describe God matters.  The male God depicted above is the one who went on to give humans the authority to "fill the earth, and subdue it."  We're paying for that now.  Gaia is not subdued.

I've noticed in Zen and elsewhere, watching from the sidelines the way poets do, how men like the "bad boys," the rule-benders like Brad Warner.  Women need to cultivate that.  Instead of admiring Adele because she lavishes attention on her looks, we need to be admiring real women who are not worried about looking pretty and feeling pretty, but are doing their work.  There are plenty of admirable women on the barricades now, working to raise good kids, working in the arts and in politics, even, amazingly, in the male-dominated religious institutions, some of which offer us, at last, the chance to sit down and get real.
~~~~~~~~~~
Below - a homage to Mother Jones, my personal saint, by two other admirable people, Utah Phillips and Ani diFranco

Caring in a Caveman Society

This is a personal blog, about making my way through life, and I don't often veer into opinion because (a) it attracts trolls, and (b) I've never won an argument yet.  But the whole world affects me, of course. 

I was stirred by reading an article in Tuesday's NY Times, "Low Pay at Weight Watchers Stirs Protest as Stars Rake It In."  This is not so different than the issue of astronomical bonuses for bankers and pathetic wages for the working class, except that it is largely about exploiting women; there are not many male Weight Watcher leaders. (And BTW, not many women CEOs in the largest companies.)  Here's the bit that has me shaking my head:

"It's a female-dominated job, it's in the service industry, and it's caring work," Professor Mastracci said of Weight Watchers.  "Caring work is undervalued..."

Sharon Mastracci is the author of "Breaking Out of the Pink-Collar Ghetto" and teaches at the University of Illinois. Let me repeat that: Caring work is undervalued. Let me change it just a bit:  Compassion is undervalued.

Is it possible to say something sadder about a society?  And it's not just the United States.  It's everywhere  we are not yet freed from the values of patriarchy, which I think of as caveman society, since many of those values grew then, when the strongest men ruled.  These "masculine" values are many, and some are admirable, such as teamwork and courage.  Others run through society like big ugly threads.  They underwrite pornography.  They fire competition for winning, power, wealth, and fame, often with beautiful young women as the prize, and that competition too often leads to ruthlessness.  Over and over someone caught up in it ends up doing ugly things.  Occasionally they get what they deserve.

Lance Armstrong

This is all very personal for me.  I am a woman.  So is my daughter, so are most of my friends, so was my mother and hers before her.  Those in my generation and earlier were taught that we had three career options, if we weren't lucky enough to marry a good provider and have children and be a Happy Homemaker:  teacher, secretary, nurse.  Who knows what many thousands of us might have done if we'd had a chance to see what we could do?  What we wanted to do?

Most of the women I know are in middle-class members of my generation and my daughter's, and most of them  have been involved in caring work, such as child-rearing, homemaking, nursing, support staff, or K-12 teaching.  When caring work is undervalued, it's women that are being undervalued, and women's work: raising children and making homes and caring for the sick - the work that keeps society together while the men make bombs and play political games and decide women can't be priests.

Caring work is the most important work in the world.  Until the men figure that out, we need to be sure we know it for ourselves.  And not be afraid to rock the boat a little in our own lives from time to time, for the good of the world.

Having No Choice

Artwork by Lorraine Art Schneider

 I find myself thinking about my parents, of course, this time of year.  Both have been dead for over ten Christmases now, but their karma really bit me.  The violence in my family seems allied to the violence at Sandy Hook; the violent response of the NRA reminds me of my father, who wanted above all to keep his gun.

My mother never felt she had a choice in life.  I don't think her mother, Leona, did either, though it is bittersweet to know that Leona did have an affair with "the motorman."  I imagine there was passion and pleasure there, but it is not clear whether that had anything to do with her death in her early forties; my mother thought it might have been hemorrhaging from an abortion.  All abortion was illegal in 1943.  That's not my subject, but it is relevant.

What I was thinking about was dinnertime in the house I grew up in.  My mother would put on the table something she had made from scratch, of course, back then.  It might be her famous spaghetti and meatballs, the sauce made from tomatoes she canned.  There would be this tension while we watched my father covertly taste it.  Most likely he would sniff, which was a way he had of sneering, and say, refusing to look at her, "No napkins."

Because my mother always "forgot" to put the napkins on.  Then we would eat in silence.  I suffered chronically from irritable bladder and bouts of diarrhea.  It made me what I am today. 

If I were dealing with someone like him today, first of all, we would have talked about it.  If that didn't stop his game, I would not have cooked dinner the next night, that simple.  I imagine he would have said, "What's this?  No dinner?"

I would say, cooly, "Why should I?  You don't appreciate the effort, and the kids can eat peanut butter."

It's a nice fantasy to think that we might have talked, but I don't know.  My mother seemed unable to negotiate with him.  She  probably tried various passive-aggressive tactics; I know she made up her mind to refuse him sex after one St. Patrick's Day party when he embarrassed her in front of friends by refusing to dance with her, but danced with the rest of the women there.

In a patriarchal system, many women are frozen with fear of overstepping the unspoken boundaries set up by the belief that men are better than women, that women are stupid, that we are here to serve men.  We can be conditioned to these beliefs without ever hearing them spoken that way.  We are so conditioned that we don't know we are afraid.  We don't even think of options. I believe my mother thought,  "Of course you cook for Your Man.  You have to."  That wasn't a matter of choice.

I think I'll stop the domestic story here to remark that my father stole the gun, a Luger, from a dead German (he called this "liberating" it) in World War II.  He had joined the Army during the Great Depression, a poor boy who couldn't find a job, but ended up serving six years once the United States finally entered that mess, after hideous damage had been done to other countries and peoples.  He was in the Battle of the Bulge.  He only talked about that once.  That's about all I know. 

Except that he had post-traumatic stress, and would sometimes have nightmares and wake up calling for my mother.  And now I have it, because he abused me, sexually, verbally, emotionally, every way he could. After death, I learned he'd been making moves to cut me out of the estate.

There's a whole lot of bad karma around power.  Hatreds and illness are born in any system that sets someone up as is intrinsically better than someone else by virtue of gender, race, religion, sexual preference, skin color, intelligence, money, or any other superficial difference you can think of.  Such ideas of superiority were directly behind the Holocaust Hitler was creating until America finally decided it was our war, too.

It's complex.  But peace is not. 

The Perfect Woman

There once was a bar in Columbus with a sign like this; maybe it's still there.  It hasn't been long ago that I drove past it and wondered why no feminists have ever defaced it.  After all, it means to depict the perfect woman in the context of thinking that women talk too much. 

I don't think that's just a cute joke.  I don't think it's merely about talk, but about a woman's place, a kind of systematic demeaning of women that is fundamental in patriarchal cultures, that is, pretty much all human societies.  Without going into the complex historical reasons for this, I will note that in the animal kingdom, sheer size and strength win.  And we are animals.  But we are also human beings and can do better than that. 

In patriarchy, women are silenced.  Are supposed to quietly serve men.  Are not supposed to have opinions. Can women think?  Should we?  What are we entitled to think about?  Should we have opinions?  Make waves, get equal pay?  Patriarchy knows the answers.

What is the opposite of the silent perfect woman serving a man?  Perhaps it is a gentle, loving man who is in no way aggressive.  What would he look like?  Not a castrati, I don't even want to think about depicting that.  I have never seen a pub sign like the above that would show a man mutilated in such a way as to make him a woman's ideal, and don't want to.  So how would I depict him?

Maybe he would look like this.....

Jesus as the good shepherd.  Maternal, long lovely hair, wearing a dress.  Okay, gown.
Or maybe the perfect man looks like this.....

The Dalai Lama. I could not quickly find a full-length portrait of him, but as you know, he too wears a dress.  Alright, gown.

As for a depiction of a perfect woman, I like the ideal of Kuan Yin, Kanzeon, Green Tara in various branches of Buddhism - the buddha of compassion. We ourselves have a statue of Jizo in our little Zen garden, who I believe is sometimes male, sometimes female, a quiet little patron saint of travelers and lost children.  Here she is, in fall color.  She wears a robe and carries a staff with little rings that jingle quietly as she walks, to let animals know she is coming and means no harm.

This is a personal issue for me, this thing about strict gender definition.  I wish I'd been taught that it was okay for a girl to be smart, to think.  I had to fight my way through a thicket of thorns on that, and to my surprise, sometimes I still do.

Domestic Goddess

Domestic Goddess

This morning the collage group I belong to didn't respond to my idea that we create The Porpoise of Art (watch this space), and I think we settled on the idea of balance.  Then, as usual, I went off-road. (You don't have to do the assignment is one of our principles.)  Looking at the array of magazines from which we can cut out images, I picked up a Women's Day dated September 1953. 

That month and year I turned eleven.  This is a moment when a child is anticipating going through puberty and growing up.  Women's magazines like this were my travel guide back then.  An ad for a sewing machine at the front of this issue evoked memories of being a girl dreaming of grown-up life, and the drawing in that ad became the center of my collage.  Everything in the collage  that's black and white was cut and rearranged from that ad.

As I made this collage, I remembered having seven crinolines for under my circle skirts, and I felt the sweetness of the aspiration for femininity and for a well-ordered home.  The dream was only superficially about having a man love you and owning a house and having nice furniture and cooking and cleaning.  It was also about home and family, a beautiful refuge. 

I could write a book about the harm done to me by the patriarchy, especially as filtered through my parents, who never questioned it.  The idea was that the man was a good breadwinner and the woman took care of  their lifestyle.  There was no room in that dream for loving and marrying people of the same gender, or not marrying at all, or not having children, or the two-career marriage, not for most of us. There was not room for women being smart, though a few plain girls were doomed to be.  Despite this prison of expectations, there was something of value in the idea of a home and a dedicated homemaker.  And also in valuing softness and femininity. 

Anyone could tell you I am so far from being a domestic goddess.  Yet, I found as I made this collage, that that aspect of the dream still held appeal for me, and I was glad I recently bought a pink tee with ruffles around the neckline.

Mothers and Moms

I would be crazy to say anything against the term "Mom," which is firmly fixed in our language now, as in SAHM. I will just comment that as a person trained in the ways language impacts us, that I think a Mom is different than the Mothers of our youth (mine and Tom's, your youth if you are much over fifty).

Perhaps in illustration, I recall a Sunday dinner with my high school boyfriend, whose parents were immigrants and went to the 9:00 service in German at their Lutheran church.  His older brother was there, too, with his fiancee, a really sweet, feminine girl named Ann.  Al's mother made rolls every Sunday as part of a very nice 1:00 dinner - from scratch - it was the late 1950s, and cake mixes hadn't been around that long.

There was something stiff and silent about those meals.  At one point, into the silence, Ann said, "The rolls are really wonderful, Mother Nickles."  I'd never heard anyone addressed like that before.

Al's parents were the kind of parents who expected respect. That same year, perhaps it was before Easter dinner, Al said to his father (as he reported to me), "Why can't we do some other kind of grace before dinner once in a while?"  His father knocked him across the room. Somehow, Al had not expected that.

Oh, I am not standing in defense of this kind of parenting, a pure form of patriarchy and its rigid ideas about heirarchy and how people ought to act.  But I confess to an internal sigh, when someone talks about herself as a Mom.  There is something very friendly and casual about that.  But mothering is a pretty intense occupation.

When I was growing up, our mothers were not our friends.  Though as I think of it, I was very close to my mother in my twenties, and ended up at one point in my thirties in a different role, advising her when she was going through a nervous breakdown.  What did I know?  But I told her, "You need to go to college."  She must have wanted to, because she did, and attained an Associate Degree.  Later she would say those were the best years of her life.  She was the only one of twelve kids in her family to go to college; it was my generation that got nudged into degrees and attainments.  Her generation stayed in The Mill - Youngstown Sheet and Tube. My father was the exception in his family too, went through college on the GI Bill.

This is early, but if I try to save it for Mother's Day Sunday, I am likely to forget to post it.  And it does give me a chance to say, if you don't have children yourself, you might not realize how much it means to get a Mother's Day card and gift.  It's different than any other honor I've known.

[image: a tree peony with a Polaroid effect applied.  Instant cameras were the greatest thing back then.]

Small talk, and being small

Seems demeaning when you do it to a dog

I've been intrigued by this subject for a long time, since Leslie offered, "I hate small talk!"  Why? I wondered.  I thought small talk was as defined in the dictionaries---
-casual or trivial conversation.
-light conversation for social occasions
-unimportant subjects of conversation, as opposed to serious or weighty ones.
or in Tolstoy---
"Do tell me something amusing but not spiteful," said the ambassador's wife, a great proficient in the art of that elegant conversation called by the English, small talk."  But I also find synonyms, like babble, prattle that have a negative cast.

Personally, I love the small talk I have with people most Sundays after the service. Maybe it's because we have been quiet and turned toward the spiritual and are not drinking (it's been a while since I was at a cocktail party, but I remember the talk as deadly dull, as it usually seems to be at any event when I'm not drinking and other people are.) It's as if, after church, we touch down for a few moments and talk about what's important instead of circling it with that "babble"  It's my favorite social time.

Maybe what Leslie hated was that other kind of small talk, the prattle instilled in girls, thus in women.  Because it has turned out that she wanted to be someone other than the role defined for her by her mother's life, and she has done some brave things. Maybe she resented her lifelong roles as wife and mother and very good housekeeper.

Yesterday I wrote about good housekeeping, and how the preoccupation with it does not seem congruent with being an artist. No, because it implies a lot of attention given to something other than art, thought, creativity.  Being a girl excludes more than that---it calls for fluffy indecisiveness; lack of interest in world events or, indeed, in ideas; lack of personal ambition.  For girls, life resides in relationships or the lack of them, usually meaning relationship with a man.  So it is about being cute, lovable.

Why do I bother to write?  You can go to Wikipedia on cuteness in Japanese culture and there is so much there, or check out the other nearly four million entries on this subject.  Cuteness is about women, sometimes men, being docile, about looking like children, including maintaining the slender body of a barely pubescent teen, if it kills you.  And it is well-known that it does; anorexia has become one of our standing social problems.

I seem to have known where to begin with this, but not where it would take me.  I just read a report on patriarchy and female subordination that lays out clearly what some of us started talking about in the late sixties. It's from a study done in Zimbabwe, but it strikes very close to home.  A good place for anyone to start who doesn't feel like dressing up as a Princess for Halloween.

Who do you hate?

You all know that I am against hatred, meanness, violence.  As far as I can see, we haven't gone very far in terms of eradicating that big boy's game of war with real weapons.  Dogfighting is illegal but boxing, football, hockey, and other sports that we know often lead to brain damage are not.  This is a patriarchal culture, and was founded as a violent overtaking of other humans, with the nice excuse that they weren't really human like us.  It is still patriarchal, meaning it values and rewards the aggressions of high-testoserone males in business, academia, the economy, god, they even rule the kitchens now, taking a job traditionally done by women in the service of nourishing and community and turning it into a screaming competitive hell.

Okay.  So it has started on facebook already, the vicious posting about that act of terrorism by a handful of deranged young men almost 10 years ago.  And I was in an unpleasant mood yesterday to start with.  So I got into it with someone who was deploring the very idea of "building a mosque at Ground Zero".  He had his facts all wrong - here's an article about the proposed construction at Park51 that explains what the building will house - but the issue for me was the vindictive hatred I was seeing in the comments on this post.  Self-righteous, and backed up by their idea of Christianity.  I had good experiences in my Christian youth, and that ticked me off too - Jesus did not tell us to hate one another.  So I got into it.

I restrained myself, that wasn't the issue.  But my anger surprised me somewhat - maybe it was just a high-fire day.  I often sat and listened to racism and bigotry and idiotic parroting of talk radio hatemongers from our fathers, not rising to the bait to argue or even get mad.  Maybe my long patience was just worn out.

But if I hate the bigot and assign him/her to the category of subhuman (sub me that is), am I not as bad as him? And go further - don't you know liberals who self-righteously hate the sitting ducks of the right - it used to be George W.  Now it's Sarah Palin.  In the privacy of my own livingroom I am not a model of compassion and kindness about a number of people, definitely including that Dominique Strauss-Kahn person.

If you want a spiritual exercise, think about putting some person whose politics you abhor into your lovingkindness meditation, in the spot of "enemy" or "difficult person."  If even thinking about it increases your stomach acid, well here's an opportunity, I guess.  Meanwhile, none of us should be too hard on ourselves - it doesn't help.  Lovingkindness starts with us.  Well, maybe the cat first, then us.