men

After that enthusiastic last paragraph of my previous post, I feel more than a little annoyed to report that the empowered feeling lasted less than 24 hours.

In an older book, Alice Schwarzer described her dream of a utopian society: one where a woman can walk by herself after dark and not shudder at every noise. I hear her on that one. We're very far away from that.

I visited friends on Saturday afternoon and took the train back at 10pm. By the time I was on my train, it was dark, and my compartment was nearly empty. I hoped it would stay that way, but was disappointed: with about 45 minutes left to go, two obviously drunk young men got on the train and sat down close to me. Their conversation was loud and though I tried to concentrate on my book, I couldn't help but listen.

It’s funny but considering how much time I’ve spent in rural and farming areas in Africa, this was the first time I had spent any time traversing rural Ohio. Of course it is easier to happen upon real rural locations in Africa, but for all I have heard and said about Ohio being a farming state I had managed to remain removed from it. Rural Ohio spoke to me only of cornfields and ignorant, racist hicks and I had had little reason to go and find out if I was wrong.

As we drove by the thousand and eleventh isolated farmhouse we noticed an older man sitting on a piece of building material. He was catching for a girl, a daughter or sister, a typical clean-cut Ohioan, clad only in a sports bra and athletic shorts.

The weekend was a whirlwind of drunk days and drunker nights, people I dont know sleeping on the floor of our apartment, someone I know even less sleeping next to me in my bed. At the time it was all a fantastic idea, who doesnt love a weekend where they can just let loose and party day and night? But come monday I was not proud of myself. I had not been sober for seventy two hours and the reality of that hit me, hard, harder than a headache and a shakey morning. I do this to myself more than I should. Its easier for me to be drunk then sober, a lot of the time, and that is something I am not proud of, but its the truth.

One thing I have noticed in the three weeks I have spent in Canada so far is that society here is much less forgiving of sexism than in my own home of New Zealand. The first night I arrived in Canada I managed to catch a bit of the news where a rapist had been released from prison and there was a huge crowd protesting his release so near to a school. At home it seems people are not so vocal about such things, especially when it is about the safety of women.

I always had a hard time explaining to friends over the internet who are from this area how hard it is for a woman to really be vocal about being a survivor at home. Reporting is hard in any case, but at home once you report, as a woman you are stirring up a whole lot of trouble that people dont want to know about. Especially in my case where the man was so close to my family.

It was my mom's second wedding a few weeks ago. I came home to see it, and although I didn't have a formal part, I was still present for all the nitty-gritty prep. Including the chit-chat among the women as they got ready for the wedding. My new stepsister is younger than me, and she's still really insecure about her appearance and how she views herself and fuctions in the world. A lot of it stems from her appearance--she doesn't see herself as pretty, even though I think she is. My mom and my aunt were talking about it, and my aunt said something that I am still having trouble fathoming/processing.

I love to wear fishnets thigh-highs and garters, corsets, pencil skirts, etc. in public. Andrea and I were discussing this the other day--when men honk at me and make obscene overtures, should this prompt me to swallow myself up in baggy clothes for a while?

I think not. I love wearing clothing that boosts my self-esteem.

But I do have to ask myself why I am wearing the clothes I wear; i.e., "Am I wearing this to be provocative?" Because if I'm trying to provoke, I'm doing a swell job, and should expect the results I am indeed receiving.

Just a thought. What do you lovely grrls/bo

Tonight at work we were even more dead than we normally are on a Tuesday night in the bar, so I found myself pretty bored after cleaning everything twice and decided to chill for a while and read our local newspaper. I don't often read the newspaper anymore simply because some of the things in it trigger me badly and because some of the other things, like today's event, just irritate me to no end.

Flicking through the first few pages of depressing news and junk advertisements, I found myself faced with the huge bolded title "Buck the trend, guys" which then read in larger letters underneath: "Men are being bombarded with images of the perfect physique, causing the same pressure to conform that women have long been used to, and bringing similar harm". Intrigued I read on... "Men spent 50,000 years advancing from bare skins and bearskins to the impeccably tailored suit... Twentieth century bloke had every reason to hope that personality and brains (or failing that, a fat wallet) would count for more in his sophisticated modern world than a caveman physique. But in the past 20 years civilisation has crashed into reverse gear". By this time, all I could think was boo effing hoo, guys. But I read on... "Not only has the modern girl become ludicrously intolerant of her mans flabby physique, and far more vocal about expressing her impertinent displeasure, but men also find themselves confronted at every turn by images of other men... godlike hunks. What has that done to the male self esteem, already reeling from the relentless advance of women in society?”

Last weekend I went up to a town called Blenheim, which is about four hour's drive from where I live (or seven hours on a damn train because our tracks s*ck so much that they bend if it's hot and the trains derail. I learned that one the hard way), to visit my big sister and brother up there for her fiancé's birthday party. It was a great weekend, and so good to see everyone up there, but a couple of things stood out to me that really bothered me about my sister’s relationship. She does everything. She does all the cooking, the cleaning, and the laundry, washes the cars, feeds the animals, takes him his lunch in her lunch break, writes to his family for him etc. Don’t get me wrong, he is a really good guy, he loves her and they have a nice relationship, but she does everything. I didn’t really know how to bring this up with my sister because I really did not want to be that member of the family who points out such things when everything seems to be going along nicely for them, but I have such strong feelings on these things that it took a lot of strength for me to sit back and watch this.

I seem to have aquired a boyfriend, who is not exactly the fairy-tale gentleman, but he is awfully sweet. I began to think, as he said all the right things the other night, that I was falling in love.

One of my more feminist friends told me that love got in the way of the fight. You'd become biased and stop seeing clearly. But I cannot agree with her. I think that I was biased already, and that being in love is simply a daily reminder that men are not inherently bad, they're just inherently ignorant.

With that, I am gaining faith in MANkind as individuals, just not as politicians.

My mom has always had the "There's no such thing as a good man. They are worthless." kind of attitude.

As my siblings and I try to get our mom to realise that the man she is with now is worthless. Jail bait. They have been together for 4 years and he can't even remember her birthday. Now, there is this really great guy that we all like that has a crush on my mom and she treats him like crap. She even admits that she is no longer in love with Ben, the guy she is with now.

But he is still in our lives.

The guy that hit her youngest daughter, me, sleeps in the room next to her.

Why does she has this kind of attitude? Just because she got married and divorced twice she thinks that guys are worthless.