Saturday, 25 August 2007
I want to play too
Ah, she sighs and thinks ‘in my next life, I want to be one of them’.
A what? What is she thinking? Give up hard fought-for and hard-won power, to have it bestowed by the power of gender?
Yes!
Trade what psychoanalysts have called a ‘veiled sex’ for a dangly bit and two gelatinous round things in a sack of skin.
Why?
They have more time to play. The world just ‘goes on’ for men. Women organise the social events of their joint life – if they have a partner. If they don’t have a partner, there is usually a sister/cousin/mother/aunt who keeps them connected to the family unit and keeps things happening.
At work, men sprout ideas like mushrooms and there’s usually (a female) office junior who will come along behind them and assist with the detail. Even if men do manual work, they usually come home from work to a community where there are women (or at least a woman) who does most of the cooking, cleaning, washing, ironing, filing/fucking etcetera (Those letters, when used as an acronym, form that evil word “WIFE”) .
This is not why I want to be a man in the next life. The reason is that men have more TIME. This is time that they use to “play”.
What do I mean by “play”? No, get your mind/s out of the gutter.
Time to read “tech-blogs”, build model toys, collect eclectic facts (factoids) in their heads. A man in a relationship, without children, usually spends more time luxuriating around the house – reading books, watching TV, playing computer games – than the female partner. She is usually organising shopping, social activities, doing extra work from home and other things.
Because of this work/leisure – brain down-time – differential, I would give up being a woman and become a man. I want to play too.
As is evident from the above: all the years of feminism and equal opportunity have not changed the ‘division of labour’ or ‘time spent doing domestic duties’.
There’s a long way to go.
A what? What is she thinking? Give up hard fought-for and hard-won power, to have it bestowed by the power of gender?
Yes!
Trade what psychoanalysts have called a ‘veiled sex’ for a dangly bit and two gelatinous round things in a sack of skin.
Why?
They have more time to play. The world just ‘goes on’ for men. Women organise the social events of their joint life – if they have a partner. If they don’t have a partner, there is usually a sister/cousin/mother/aunt who keeps them connected to the family unit and keeps things happening.
At work, men sprout ideas like mushrooms and there’s usually (a female) office junior who will come along behind them and assist with the detail. Even if men do manual work, they usually come home from work to a community where there are women (or at least a woman) who does most of the cooking, cleaning, washing, ironing, filing/fucking etcetera (Those letters, when used as an acronym, form that evil word “WIFE”) .
This is not why I want to be a man in the next life. The reason is that men have more TIME. This is time that they use to “play”.
What do I mean by “play”? No, get your mind/s out of the gutter.
Time to read “tech-blogs”, build model toys, collect eclectic facts (factoids) in their heads. A man in a relationship, without children, usually spends more time luxuriating around the house – reading books, watching TV, playing computer games – than the female partner. She is usually organising shopping, social activities, doing extra work from home and other things.
Because of this work/leisure – brain down-time – differential, I would give up being a woman and become a man. I want to play too.
As is evident from the above: all the years of feminism and equal opportunity have not changed the ‘division of labour’ or ‘time spent doing domestic duties’.
There’s a long way to go.
Monday, 6 August 2007
Don’t… Just Don’t Get Married
If you have read this blog before you will be aware that I am not in favour of marriage. This is not some theoretical opinion either, my partner and I actually got married in December 2006.
This meant that from February (when we announced our ‘intentions’) to December of 2006 almost every conversation with family revolved around the socially sanctioned ritual of transferring ‘ownership’ of, and financial responsibility for, the woman to the man. Why else do you think the bride’s (read “sacrificial woman’s) family pay for everything?
Ah sure, I forgot! We’re supposed to be living in egalitarian times where ‘his’ family share the cost. Good luck telling that to his separated parents who immigrated from England in the 1960s and lived as a pretentious, nuclear family in a major capital city.
I was aware there was a level of need and that his parents/family would need some support. For months before the event, I argued for them to have their meals provided for them whilst they were here – because I knew my family were capable and they weren’t. We didn’t only have to feed them: they had to be assisted to get here and accommodated whilst they were here.
The whole process displaces the identity and possessions of the woman. I gave up my bed and we moved into the spare room. Then, the night before the event/sacrifice, I had to leave my home and go to where my family were staying because HIS family were in OUR unit and my family could not ‘sleep-over’ so I could get up from my own place on the day of the wedding.
Everything was organised to within a second – and all of it organised by me. Yet his family have this “opinion” of me. To them – as has become obvious from conversations with them and things they have said about me: “I am the needy, ‘dependent’ woman with whom their ‘poor’ first born has fallen in love”. (Or, perhaps I am the evil, wicked disabled women who has “trapped their first born”…and they are waiting for me to die or for the spell to be broken.)
I do not imagine this!
His father asked, when I was going to meet him, if I needed “blended food” (Can’t trust those rampant spastic, potential in-laws, they might gag on the salad.). I should have lived up to his stereotypical, preconceived, view of me by drooling on him when I first met him. Instead, I calmly answered questions about “what I would ‘bring’ to the relationship” or “whether I was intending to ‘enslave’ his son as my carer”. I should have followed my instincts and dismembered him at the first meeting. Then he would not have gone on to ask “if [I] was having a colostomy bag put in?” when I had a pain relief delivery system put in for hip pain, or whether this “interfered with my ability to achieve pleasure?”.
You are not misunderstanding the text - this is what my partner’s father said!
Then I e-mailed; the rest of the family advocated; and he apologised.
But there remains this unspoken atmosphere around them and I just wait for the next member of my partner’s family to reject me because I’m “differently-abled” (Polite-speak for “use a power wheelchair”.).
I did not have to wait long. On the same visit to meet the father, we also met my partner’s sister, her partner and their two children. They were away on holidays so we had to drive two hours to see them, then have chips and water on the beach. Of course, we “couldn’t possibly go to [their] house because ‘there are steps everywhere’”.
Yet, when his sister came to see us, in the midst of our moving house, and my family cooked roast lamb, she invited them to visit and drop by for coffee in the “little coffee shop that is near by”. If this is not selective inclusion/exclusion I do not know what is?
As if two family members with their feet wedged in their throat were not enough…..??? No, no, there has to be more…until the last has fallen.
The sister overseas, who I have not met (Yeah, I escaped from one of them!) invited us to meet them in America for Christmas. The airfares alone would cost $10,000 and we have a mortgage. And, after the other incidents, from meeting/interacting with the rest of his family, I not in a hurry to meet another one. I’d rather protect myself from the “slings and arrows”.
Next it was the mother… My partner had been away for work for a week and my mother came to stay. This was partly because we had only just moved into our house and got the toilet seat to be something close to the right height. The shower still was not right and was almost dangerous for both me and my workers.
Oh, did I mention that I have workers who are funded by the Government? They do all of my personal care, cook meals, clean and do the laundry.
Yes.
So, when my partner got back from his work trip, his mother asked “How his respite was?”!!!!!!!!! OMG
No-one has ever been so rude and hurtful to me in my entire life.
This certainly brought out the family’s ‘real’ feelings about me. The brother even defended the mother and proved himself no more aware of his brother and my living situation than the rest of my partner’s family.
When challenged on her illogical thinking that her son is my carer and would need ‘respite’, his mother said that it was a logical assumption because she “does use ‘respite’!”. Let’s not forget that she and her aging husband also refuse any form of home-help that might make her life easier!
Then I tried to “build a bridge”. Now I just want dynamite!
I was chatting to her on-line and she said that I was her [wait for it] “Daughter-in-law” and that she would have never treated her “Mother-in-law” this way and that I should respect her as my “Mother-in-law”.
Aaaah! Aaaaah! Why would anyone want to get married? How horrid that people think they have a right to treat you rudely? Or that they would assume to dictate the way in which you should relate to them?
I have distanced myself from them and will not speak to his family again. But it still hurts. And they don’t see how much they are hurting my partner by utterly refusing to see me as a person – they only see my disability and construct untrue assumptions about our life together.
This is why people should not get married. If we were just “shacked up” they would not have any reason to make such invasive comments. I would not have felt compelled to relate to them and could have avoided them.
This is why we no longer tell people that we’re “m-----d” (I can’t bear to even write the word.). We just say we’re partners………..and, I’m giving the ring a rest in the drawer. The socially constructed expectations that are bound by the little jewel encrusted gold band are too odious to endure.
This meant that from February (when we announced our ‘intentions’) to December of 2006 almost every conversation with family revolved around the socially sanctioned ritual of transferring ‘ownership’ of, and financial responsibility for, the woman to the man. Why else do you think the bride’s (read “sacrificial woman’s) family pay for everything?
Ah sure, I forgot! We’re supposed to be living in egalitarian times where ‘his’ family share the cost. Good luck telling that to his separated parents who immigrated from England in the 1960s and lived as a pretentious, nuclear family in a major capital city.
I was aware there was a level of need and that his parents/family would need some support. For months before the event, I argued for them to have their meals provided for them whilst they were here – because I knew my family were capable and they weren’t. We didn’t only have to feed them: they had to be assisted to get here and accommodated whilst they were here.
The whole process displaces the identity and possessions of the woman. I gave up my bed and we moved into the spare room. Then, the night before the event/sacrifice, I had to leave my home and go to where my family were staying because HIS family were in OUR unit and my family could not ‘sleep-over’ so I could get up from my own place on the day of the wedding.
Everything was organised to within a second – and all of it organised by me. Yet his family have this “opinion” of me. To them – as has become obvious from conversations with them and things they have said about me: “I am the needy, ‘dependent’ woman with whom their ‘poor’ first born has fallen in love”. (Or, perhaps I am the evil, wicked disabled women who has “trapped their first born”…and they are waiting for me to die or for the spell to be broken.)
I do not imagine this!
His father asked, when I was going to meet him, if I needed “blended food” (Can’t trust those rampant spastic, potential in-laws, they might gag on the salad.). I should have lived up to his stereotypical, preconceived, view of me by drooling on him when I first met him. Instead, I calmly answered questions about “what I would ‘bring’ to the relationship” or “whether I was intending to ‘enslave’ his son as my carer”. I should have followed my instincts and dismembered him at the first meeting. Then he would not have gone on to ask “if [I] was having a colostomy bag put in?” when I had a pain relief delivery system put in for hip pain, or whether this “interfered with my ability to achieve pleasure?”.
You are not misunderstanding the text - this is what my partner’s father said!
Then I e-mailed; the rest of the family advocated; and he apologised.
But there remains this unspoken atmosphere around them and I just wait for the next member of my partner’s family to reject me because I’m “differently-abled” (Polite-speak for “use a power wheelchair”.).
I did not have to wait long. On the same visit to meet the father, we also met my partner’s sister, her partner and their two children. They were away on holidays so we had to drive two hours to see them, then have chips and water on the beach. Of course, we “couldn’t possibly go to [their] house because ‘there are steps everywhere’”.
Yet, when his sister came to see us, in the midst of our moving house, and my family cooked roast lamb, she invited them to visit and drop by for coffee in the “little coffee shop that is near by”. If this is not selective inclusion/exclusion I do not know what is?
As if two family members with their feet wedged in their throat were not enough…..??? No, no, there has to be more…until the last has fallen.
The sister overseas, who I have not met (Yeah, I escaped from one of them!) invited us to meet them in America for Christmas. The airfares alone would cost $10,000 and we have a mortgage. And, after the other incidents, from meeting/interacting with the rest of his family, I not in a hurry to meet another one. I’d rather protect myself from the “slings and arrows”.
Next it was the mother… My partner had been away for work for a week and my mother came to stay. This was partly because we had only just moved into our house and got the toilet seat to be something close to the right height. The shower still was not right and was almost dangerous for both me and my workers.
Oh, did I mention that I have workers who are funded by the Government? They do all of my personal care, cook meals, clean and do the laundry.
Yes.
So, when my partner got back from his work trip, his mother asked “How his respite was?”!!!!!!!!! OMG
No-one has ever been so rude and hurtful to me in my entire life.
This certainly brought out the family’s ‘real’ feelings about me. The brother even defended the mother and proved himself no more aware of his brother and my living situation than the rest of my partner’s family.
When challenged on her illogical thinking that her son is my carer and would need ‘respite’, his mother said that it was a logical assumption because she “does use ‘respite’!”. Let’s not forget that she and her aging husband also refuse any form of home-help that might make her life easier!
Then I tried to “build a bridge”. Now I just want dynamite!
I was chatting to her on-line and she said that I was her [wait for it] “Daughter-in-law” and that she would have never treated her “Mother-in-law” this way and that I should respect her as my “Mother-in-law”.
Aaaah! Aaaaah! Why would anyone want to get married? How horrid that people think they have a right to treat you rudely? Or that they would assume to dictate the way in which you should relate to them?
I have distanced myself from them and will not speak to his family again. But it still hurts. And they don’t see how much they are hurting my partner by utterly refusing to see me as a person – they only see my disability and construct untrue assumptions about our life together.
This is why people should not get married. If we were just “shacked up” they would not have any reason to make such invasive comments. I would not have felt compelled to relate to them and could have avoided them.
This is why we no longer tell people that we’re “m-----d” (I can’t bear to even write the word.). We just say we’re partners………..and, I’m giving the ring a rest in the drawer. The socially constructed expectations that are bound by the little jewel encrusted gold band are too odious to endure.
Monday, 30 July 2007
I tried
Ok, I was determined I would not follow social norms. I would be polite and use my best communication skills, diplomacy and patience in all interactions with my partner’s family.
You know how you hear stories of ‘horror in-laws’… Well, I always thought people were being precious and slightly selfish for not getting along with people. I wasn’t going to be like these people.
However, as I’m not aiming for sainthood and as displacement of my personhood has always brought out the fighter in me, I realise that I cannot do it. I cannot get on with his family.
Oh, yes! I forgot to mention: I have a disability and, as no other people I have met before, his family have become FIXATED with this “physical” characteristic of mine. They see me only through the lens or, in their cases, lenses of disability. There must be enough “lenses” between them and me to stop a nuclear war-head. (I know that “nuclear war-heads” are now a bit passé and I’m showing my age. Perhaps I could up-date the metaphor by speculating that the “lenses” might even provide insulation from “weapons of mass destruction”). Thick……..these “lenses” are multiple and super thick!
One by one they have managed to do things that can only be categorised as anti-social. We’re not just talking the odd faux pas. No, no, these are major insults ranging from the fact that I might not be able to eat solid foods to a suggestion that my partner, when away for work, was away for ‘respite’ (Although I [through my workers] actually do most of the washing, ironing {that too} etcetera.).
So I have decided to say, “I tried” and to remove myself from all communication with them.
You know how you hear stories of ‘horror in-laws’… Well, I always thought people were being precious and slightly selfish for not getting along with people. I wasn’t going to be like these people.
However, as I’m not aiming for sainthood and as displacement of my personhood has always brought out the fighter in me, I realise that I cannot do it. I cannot get on with his family.
Oh, yes! I forgot to mention: I have a disability and, as no other people I have met before, his family have become FIXATED with this “physical” characteristic of mine. They see me only through the lens or, in their cases, lenses of disability. There must be enough “lenses” between them and me to stop a nuclear war-head. (I know that “nuclear war-heads” are now a bit passé and I’m showing my age. Perhaps I could up-date the metaphor by speculating that the “lenses” might even provide insulation from “weapons of mass destruction”). Thick……..these “lenses” are multiple and super thick!
One by one they have managed to do things that can only be categorised as anti-social. We’re not just talking the odd faux pas. No, no, these are major insults ranging from the fact that I might not be able to eat solid foods to a suggestion that my partner, when away for work, was away for ‘respite’ (Although I [through my workers] actually do most of the washing, ironing {that too} etcetera.).
So I have decided to say, “I tried” and to remove myself from all communication with them.
A Real Live One……
Blog post for the week of13 July… Woow Friday the 13th and it feels like it. Having been in hospital since Tuesday, today I had my suspicions confirmed: I was being treated for pain but the cause was poorly identified. Well, you could say ‘wrongly’ as different parts of the body are “different parts of the body”.
However, my doctor is good and believes in working with other people. This is how another doctor became involved. This was a “real live one” – someone who I met many years and who has had many, many, many years of experience treating people with my disability.
This doctor performed the gentlest examination I have ever had and declared the excruciating pain to be a bilateral copying of a condition I already had on the other side. Of course, this makes perfect sense to me as when the pain and degeneration started on the other, the symptoms were exactly the same.
Later in the day, the diagnosis was confirmed by x-rays. If it is possible, the x-ray confirmation of the “real live one’s” diagnosis was almost anti-climatic as I already relieved to have a diagnosis.
Knowledge really is power because as soon as I knew what was causing the pain I understood it.
However, my doctor is good and believes in working with other people. This is how another doctor became involved. This was a “real live one” – someone who I met many years and who has had many, many, many years of experience treating people with my disability.
This doctor performed the gentlest examination I have ever had and declared the excruciating pain to be a bilateral copying of a condition I already had on the other side. Of course, this makes perfect sense to me as when the pain and degeneration started on the other, the symptoms were exactly the same.
Later in the day, the diagnosis was confirmed by x-rays. If it is possible, the x-ray confirmation of the “real live one’s” diagnosis was almost anti-climatic as I already relieved to have a diagnosis.
Knowledge really is power because as soon as I knew what was causing the pain I understood it.
Monday, 14 May 2007
Pain
Sometimes, as we age and change, our bodies betray us. First we might think it is stiffness, then soreness, then we enter the treadmill/s of doctors, tests, questions and very few answers.
For women, it’s hard. The earth and life flow, as energy, through our bodies and when the body hurts this flow is interrupted and redirected. Energy gets blocked by painful parts, or it gets diverted into trying to carry on and adjusting to the pain. The body becomes stressed as there is less energy to accomplish the tasks that women perform everyday.
If you have a body with which you have already had to make compromises, because of differing abilities, energy is already being used (and abused) at a higher rate to get through every day. This alone is exhausting. Then the body decides to add a little change to the mix and this is challenging and painful. Change demands that you surrender control of part/s of your body and what it can do. At first you fight and think, “No, this is not happening”. Then you might try ‘flight’ by taking pain treating medication. (“Pain treating” not ‘pain relieving’ because nothing really gives relief or “pain control”, as doctors like to say. And sometimes you take medication only to find that the effects it has on your mind take more energy than the ‘pain’ itself.)
Boarding the fast moving train of change is like being flung from a sling-shot towards the void of the unknown. When this void is a black hole of pain in a changing body, there are invisible sharp pins, like those used in voodoo, that come hurtling at you at great speeds. These are pins of pain. Originating within the body or joints, they leave a tearing, burning sensation that cannot be seen. It can only be felt. The pain/pins hit you and your body stops. You might want to keep going but you cannot. These invisible pins of pain feel as if they are tearing the flesh from your joints and bones.
If this pain could be seen, it would be red and bleeding torn flesh, with tight bands of sinew and muscle, stretched, sometimes broken. The thing is, it is continuous. There is no calm and healing time. There is only tearing and not tearing and you learn to live with it. You also learn to live with the fatigue it causes and, if it is not the fatigue of the body dealing with pain, there is the fatigue of the drugs you take to try to ease the pain.
This is why, when a surgeon says “we can take that joint out and replace it with metal”, you think ‘yeah, bring it on’. There is almost a sadistic pleasure in knowing that the muscles, nerves and tendons that have been cause the pain are going to be stripped from the joint and sliced and diced at the surgeon’s will.
Where surgery is an option there is the possibility of relief. But some women manage pain, change and life for the latter half of their lives. These are strong women. But then, there is a saying that “What does not kill you makes you stronger”. Sometimes I have thought I would stop breathing and die from the pain…
I haven’t died yet……….so I must be getting stronger.
For women, it’s hard. The earth and life flow, as energy, through our bodies and when the body hurts this flow is interrupted and redirected. Energy gets blocked by painful parts, or it gets diverted into trying to carry on and adjusting to the pain. The body becomes stressed as there is less energy to accomplish the tasks that women perform everyday.
If you have a body with which you have already had to make compromises, because of differing abilities, energy is already being used (and abused) at a higher rate to get through every day. This alone is exhausting. Then the body decides to add a little change to the mix and this is challenging and painful. Change demands that you surrender control of part/s of your body and what it can do. At first you fight and think, “No, this is not happening”. Then you might try ‘flight’ by taking pain treating medication. (“Pain treating” not ‘pain relieving’ because nothing really gives relief or “pain control”, as doctors like to say. And sometimes you take medication only to find that the effects it has on your mind take more energy than the ‘pain’ itself.)
Boarding the fast moving train of change is like being flung from a sling-shot towards the void of the unknown. When this void is a black hole of pain in a changing body, there are invisible sharp pins, like those used in voodoo, that come hurtling at you at great speeds. These are pins of pain. Originating within the body or joints, they leave a tearing, burning sensation that cannot be seen. It can only be felt. The pain/pins hit you and your body stops. You might want to keep going but you cannot. These invisible pins of pain feel as if they are tearing the flesh from your joints and bones.
If this pain could be seen, it would be red and bleeding torn flesh, with tight bands of sinew and muscle, stretched, sometimes broken. The thing is, it is continuous. There is no calm and healing time. There is only tearing and not tearing and you learn to live with it. You also learn to live with the fatigue it causes and, if it is not the fatigue of the body dealing with pain, there is the fatigue of the drugs you take to try to ease the pain.
This is why, when a surgeon says “we can take that joint out and replace it with metal”, you think ‘yeah, bring it on’. There is almost a sadistic pleasure in knowing that the muscles, nerves and tendons that have been cause the pain are going to be stripped from the joint and sliced and diced at the surgeon’s will.
Where surgery is an option there is the possibility of relief. But some women manage pain, change and life for the latter half of their lives. These are strong women. But then, there is a saying that “What does not kill you makes you stronger”. Sometimes I have thought I would stop breathing and die from the pain…
I haven’t died yet……….so I must be getting stronger.
Monday, 30 April 2007
Men and Laws – Women and Knowledge
As the story goes…………….ancients have it and with fiction spun
I’m not religious but this is what was written/said,
“1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was in the beginning with God. 3 All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being.” (John 1:1)
From this comes the assumption, not feast of, that laws were (are, on a percentage basis) made by men, who thought/think they might be channelling some leader (of men).
They carved these laws on stone tablets and worshipped them. Used them to make other men subservient and women goods and chattels to be “owed” and “sold” by men, as Levi-Strauss.
But the law makers grew careless and left their stone tablets lying around.
Enter women
“Yes, you could use the stone tablet to ‘club’ him while he slept……”
Those carvings had symbols that kept repeating and forming patterns. Was it code? Ah, to break the code!
There were lots of symbols for ‘good’, ‘evil’ and ‘power’.
The code seemed to relate to how people should live: rules and laws. Yet, nowhere in this code could the women find reference to their power.
As the women came to understand it more, they saw that the code inferred that the men had power over them! And this made them angry….
….all the more reason for using the stone tablets as weapons on sleeping men.
-----------------
Through the ages
Men have used these laws to abuse and enslave other men and women.
The property of women – well, they had none because it was their fathers’, brothers’, uncles’.
If women wanted to inherit any family estate, she had to marry a man and get him to do it for her.
-----------------
Time moved slowly
Women began to organise themselves and discuss how they could undermine the rules and power of men.
They got educated; took jobs; and formed secret societies.
Men became frightened and tried to write new laws ….
But the women had learned the language used to frame these statutes that the men thought mighty and fought back using the same language.
Present
Women use their knowledge to continue fighting to have the laws applied equally.
A tricky thing has happened, though.
The ideas and ways of sharing information, using the Internet – first developed by the United State Military – led people [They were originally only men.] to starting making information even more available.
Governments wanted to publish their laws and rules.
Guess what?
Women already had computers: for organising workplaces, families and social threads.
Now they could access laws!
They could read laws and know when the makers of laws – men – were breaking them.
Women, thus, found that “Knowledge is Power”
They used their knowledge of laws to form “watch-dogs” and organisations to make men follow the law.
With knowledge and change came respect from others and new laws were writ.
Aaah, the powerful combination of women and knowledge over powers thousands of years of rule by men and laws.
………if only it could occur!
References
John 1:1, “The Deity of Jesus Christ”, 2007. On-line Parallel Bible http://bible.cc/john/1-1.htm (Accessed: 16 April 2007)
I’m not religious but this is what was written/said,
“1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was in the beginning with God. 3 All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being.” (John 1:1)
From this comes the assumption, not feast of, that laws were (are, on a percentage basis) made by men, who thought/think they might be channelling some leader (of men).
They carved these laws on stone tablets and worshipped them. Used them to make other men subservient and women goods and chattels to be “owed” and “sold” by men, as Levi-Strauss.
But the law makers grew careless and left their stone tablets lying around.
Enter women
“Yes, you could use the stone tablet to ‘club’ him while he slept……”
Those carvings had symbols that kept repeating and forming patterns. Was it code? Ah, to break the code!
There were lots of symbols for ‘good’, ‘evil’ and ‘power’.
The code seemed to relate to how people should live: rules and laws. Yet, nowhere in this code could the women find reference to their power.
As the women came to understand it more, they saw that the code inferred that the men had power over them! And this made them angry….
….all the more reason for using the stone tablets as weapons on sleeping men.
-----------------
Through the ages
Men have used these laws to abuse and enslave other men and women.
The property of women – well, they had none because it was their fathers’, brothers’, uncles’.
If women wanted to inherit any family estate, she had to marry a man and get him to do it for her.
-----------------
Time moved slowly
Women began to organise themselves and discuss how they could undermine the rules and power of men.
They got educated; took jobs; and formed secret societies.
Men became frightened and tried to write new laws ….
But the women had learned the language used to frame these statutes that the men thought mighty and fought back using the same language.
Present
Women use their knowledge to continue fighting to have the laws applied equally.
A tricky thing has happened, though.
The ideas and ways of sharing information, using the Internet – first developed by the United State Military – led people [They were originally only men.] to starting making information even more available.
Governments wanted to publish their laws and rules.
Guess what?
Women already had computers: for organising workplaces, families and social threads.
Now they could access laws!
They could read laws and know when the makers of laws – men – were breaking them.
Women, thus, found that “Knowledge is Power”
They used their knowledge of laws to form “watch-dogs” and organisations to make men follow the law.
With knowledge and change came respect from others and new laws were writ.
Aaah, the powerful combination of women and knowledge over powers thousands of years of rule by men and laws.
………if only it could occur!
References
John 1:1, “The Deity of Jesus Christ”, 2007. On-line Parallel Bible http://bible.cc/john/1-1.htm (Accessed: 16 April 2007)
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