It's your day -- a woman's day
It's your day -- a woman's day
Turning the tide, you are on the incoming wave
Turning the tide, you know you are nobody's slaveIt is quite fitting to be listening to “Shaking the Tree” at the moment. This is because I’ve got women on my brain. More specifically, women’s/feminist issues and problems. Honestly, there is no surprise considering the events of a few days heretofore.
The whole mess started fairly early on Sunday when I read some of Andrea Dworkin’s writings. Personally, I found most of them to be venomous screeds full of misandry and etymological obfuscation. The lone exception was her mournful tale of having been drugged and raped at a hotel in Paris a few years ago.
As I mentioned in a previous post, I did a stint of dogsitting despite the fact that I had retired. If Michael Jordan can emerge from retirement, so can I. At least I think that was my friend’s reasoning. Another friend of mine stopped by Sunday night to drink a few cocktails and to avoid festering on her couch alone. Well, not having eaten much and gulping down bourbon as we did only served to loosen out tongues hastily.
Conversation took a turn towards the prurient after Buddy, the Black Lab-Dalmatian mix, began his customary post-prandial activity – licking his penis. Buddy is 12 years old and has not had gonads for most of his life. Nonetheless, he remains cuntstruck and tries to hump Pesto, the Airedale, often. Since Pesto is a cocktease, however, he is always denied. Apparently getting blue balls transcends the actually possession of testicles so, after failing with a bitch (as well as after dinner), he heaps generous oral pleasure upon himself. And thusly we sat there drinking bourbon & sours while Buddy licked his erection.
Although human, my companion and I are still animals and sex became the topic of choice. As the night harrowingly progressed towards its climactic drunken stupor, I was complete unaware that I would be learning more than I had bargained for. In fact, it didn’t take long for me to realize that my understanding of women and relationships was distressingly more limited than I had previously imagined.
Things began innocently enough with the usual not-getting-enough/any bitching. Then came the first lesson – my friend’s knowledge of erections was a bit hazy. I made a comment to the effect of being a schoolboy again and getting hard-ons.
”What?!?” she asked incredulously.
”You know, getting an erection in the middle of class…”
This did not register with her. “What?!?
I was a bit shocked. “Don’t you remember in, like, 4th grade, the teacher would call on some boy to come up to the blackboard and diagram a sentence or write out a multiplication table and he’d be like ‘No way!’?”
”Yeah, so?” she replied. “Maybe they just didn’t know the answer.”
”OK, sure there were times when that was the case but I’ll betcha at least 75% of the time the kid had gotten a boner and didn’t want everyone to see it.”
”What the hell were you guys thinking about in the 4th grade to get a hard-on?”
”Nothing. It’s just that, when you’re a boy, you get spontaneous erections. I’d be sitting there thinking about how much I hate math and BAM! Next thing I know, I’ve pitched a tent and I’m sliding my chair further underneath my desk.”
”Really?”
”Really.”Honestly, I thought all women knew this. Granted, not when they were in grammar school necessarily, but a full-grown woman? Come on. As boys, we males sit in school during the day and get erections for no reason and then go to sleep at night and have wet dreams. I’ve always assumed that women knew this shit and that these things figured heavily into their view that men are simple pigs who just wanna eat, sleep, and fuck. Surely I can’t be the only one to have seen an infant boy touching his tiny pecker. We come out of the womb priapically inclined and we spend the majority of our lives trying to get back in. The penis is the center of our lives.
To summarize: As infants, we touch ourselves. A little time goes by and we’re pee racing with other boys when we’re not trying to get some girl to play doctor. Then erections start to appear out of thin air and usually at the most inopportune moments. Not long after that, we find our reproductive systems doing trial runs while we’re asleep. From there it’s all downhill towards jerking-off and chasing skirts until we die with our sexual peak at roughly the age of 18. How depressing.
The conversation continued. Yadda yadda yadda. Then came the next interesting bit. My friend’s ex-husband was one of those assholes that Andrea Dworkin feels characterizes the entire male gender. I knew that he was emotionally and verbally abusive towards her but I never knew that he’d grab her hair and basically force her to give him a blow job. I was mortified. While I might have gotten fellated more often in past relationships if I had done the same, I could never do that.
This revelation was followed by others equally shocking though, thankfully, less horrifying. She said that she’d never had an orgasm with a man. Then she revealed how controlling her ex was. For instance, she would have to ask permission from him (and would often be denied) to just go out with her friends.
I sat there listening in stunned silence. For my part, I’ve never required a girlfriend to ask for my permission to do something with her friends sans myself. WTF? All they had to say was, “Since we’ve got nothing planned, I’m going out with Jill and Julie.” OK. Well, I must take this concept of trust and recognition that she’s no my serf to an extreme because I’ve had more than one girlfriend tell me that she feels this attitude means that I don’t care about her. Each time this completely flummoxed me. The only conclusion I have been able to draw from this scenario is that most women want a benign dictator for a mate. If you’re too controlling, then you’re a malicious asshole. But if you’re not controlling enough, then that means you don’t love her. See, nice guys finish last.
Anyway, now that the events of that night are a few days removed, some of the details are lost to my mind. I will say that I am unable to say if some of the things I recall were part of a dream or actually transpired. I am hoping for the former. Whatever the case, I still feel a profound sense that Dworkin is perhaps not as crazy as I may have previously thought. Don’t get me wrong, I continue to take offense at her notion that romance = rape + wine. And while I don’t think she ever really said “All sex is rape”, one certainly gets the feeling that she’s dying to. She writes as if evolution was actually some patriarchal force that gave men first dibs on choosing genitalia and we knowingly made our selection. Dworkin constantly bemoans the fact that the penis
penetrates (emphasis mine) the vagina. Indeed, at some point in her life she chose not to “have intercourse” which I presume means that she is so offended by the plumbing nature has endowed us with that she refuses to allow a lover anything into her naughty bits. I personally don’t understand how this is a blow against patriarchy. If anything, it seems to be an act of self-loathing and pointless restraint.
Alright. I don’t wanna think about the crap Andrea Dworkin has written any more tonight. As for dogsitting, I did a couple more nights but have been emancipated – finally. What’s happened this week? Aside from the usual fecal matter, not a helluva lot. Been doing a fair amount of reading -
The Wealth and Poverty of Nations by David Landes. It’s one of those meta-history texts which attempts to explain why the West has come to so dominate the globe. I’m only 150 pages or so in but, so far, Landes seems to be taking a different tact than Jared Diamond did in
Guns, Germs, and Steel. Diamond seemed to put more emphasis on geography than Landes (so far). Being an historian, Landes throws the reader smack-dab into the middle of the Age of Explorers. Although I’ve read about it in several places, I still cannot understand why China encysted itself in a shell of stagnation about 600 years ago. They thought themselves so be so highly advanced that everyone else was a barbarian and not worth having relations with. Harumph.
I have been doing much of my reading over at a coffee shop. As I was sitting there one day this week, a guy walked in and ogled at the book. He came over and asked if I were taking an economics class. I told him not to mistake Landes’ tome with that of Adam Smith’s. So we struck up an all-too brief conversation. It was nice to have a midday chat with a liberal artsy-fartsy type like myself.
Oh! I got an email from an old friend of mine from Chicago. He’s spent the last 8 months in Morocco and has posted some pictures at a web site for perusal. Looks like he had a blast and some of those North African women are drop-dead gorgeous.
I made the mistake of watching a thingy called Scarborough Country on MSNBC last night. The host was a complete maroon. Let’s bash Howard Dean for weaseling out of a stint in Nam but let Bush off scot-free for the same thing. Fucking hypocrite. Not that I’m a big Dean fan or anything, mind you. I must admit that I did enjoy the host ripping into Paris Hilton and her fame or infamy or whatever you wanna call her media presence. I was just thankful that someone on TV came out and called her stupid. I don’t know if this is just because of a dislike or wealthy people or only of certain wealthy people. I mean, Ms. Hilton is not dot com rich, she’s like part of a landed gentry. There’s just something about seeing wealth as a license for hedonism that gets in my craw. With the possibility to go to the best institutions of higher learning, she decided that college was a waste of time. Rather than better herself as a person, she wants to make a life of putting her body on display. And how the fuck could her daddy call the release of her little homemade porno vid onto the Internet a “tragedy”? 9/11 was a tragedy. A spoiled blonde airhead getting fucked on tape is vulgar humor.
Christ, dumb blondes are everywhere. Jessica Simpson was given a TVs how for reasons only know to a small cabal of people bent on littering television with only the most vapid, banal crap. These same people have given Jessica’s little sister a shot at fame with her own reality TV show. Then there’s Anna Nicole Smith. And Ann Coulter.
This brings me back to that schmuck of a host on MSNBC last night. What a dickhead. He gave preference to those with whom he agreed. They got the first and last words, he’d interrupt the “liberal” guest and give the soapbox back to the “conservative” guest. And he made out every question he had to be of paramount importance. Lacing each syllable with the urgency normally reserved for people in life and death situations. Every other question for the lefty either setup a straw man or false dichotomy. He was a joke. So much, in fact, that I just burst out laughing at him at one point. I was incredulous that this shit passes for journalism or learned discourse or whatever. Why does it seem like all conservative commentators on TV today lie and/or are in need of a lesson to discern logical fallacies? Despite the fact that Bill Buckley and I have little common ground ideologically, I have tremendous respect for the way that he goes about engaging issues with people. It’s easy to find someone saying that he laid the foundation for the modern conservative movement but it seems to have gone off course. Most conservative pundits share little of Buckley’s class, reasoning skills, and vocabulary. Instead they turn to Jerry Springer for help in these areas. The discourse is not civil – it’s about wrapping oneself in the flag and yelling at the opponent. It’s the kind of shit that goes down in a schoolyard.
I’m outta here…
