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Hello Everyone,
This ezine is of women, for women, and by women, presented by a man who is tipping his hat and bowing in Honor of Women Everywhere!
A Good Mother’s Day to Us All.
As I began putting together this ezine, I realized while writing that my thoughts of motherhood had changed. Motherhood and being a Mom have altered quickly during the last twenty years, and my awe for women has certainly deepened by talking with friends and watching moms around Earth via Internet.
On Mother’s Day, many of us imagine elements of feminine energy: for every second our brains cannot comprehend, that energy creates our bodies, and has created us in the bodies of our mothers. Ponder for a moment the carrying and birthing of children. It’s an astounding, boggling, wondrous cosmic event we can instantly behold, and that alone stops me stupefied!
All we men can do is pretend to understand females’ natural capacities for intuiting the care of their own and others. The best we men have been able to do is keep the word intuition handy, and define it by our withered, hunt and grunt vocabulary.
This might be one way we males see ourselves.
I think we’re a kind of desperation. We’re sort of a maddening luxury. The basic and essential human is the woman, and all that we’re doing is trying to brighten up the place. That’s why all the birds who belong to our sex have prettier feathers—males have got to try and justify their existence.
~ Orson Welles (b 1915), American filmmaker, actor, producer
If that quote doesn’t quite fit, try this story from Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!, a hilarious, satirical (mostly tongue in cheek) news program hosted by American playwright, screenwriter, actor, Peter Sagal, NPR, April 12, 2008.
A breakthrough study from psychologists at Indiana University USA states that when it comes to women, men have a difficult time understanding them, scientifically proving that men are dense. Comedienne Paula Poundstone quipped, “There was a study?”
The study had groups of female and male undergraduates interpreting meanings of pictures of women and men making facial expressions and gestures while talking. The study reports men often misinterpret friendly gestures from women as sexual come ons. But, more surprisingly, men also often miss the real thing of women’s sexual invites, thinking women are just being friendly.
The lesson for women in this study: men are actually dumber than a stack of hammers, and you’d actually be better off with the hammers, because they would at least be occasionally useful around the house.
Female Gender Makes Two
I am fascinated with Earthlings allowing ourselves to get modernized by masculinized means, and advertised, alphabetized, analyzed, annalized, annualized, anthologized, amortized, authorized, acclimatized, allergized, alchemized, anglicized, astrologized, androgenized, armorized, and that’s only the start.
For tens of thousands of years, Earthlings’ trainings and changes have quickened. The same feelings and preoccupations have gotten humans evermore measured and complex, thusly unbalanced in favor of males. If my math is right, the male gender plus the female gender makes two genders. Most ‘civilized men’ must be reminded, even retrained, for rethinking possibilities that our species’ realities should be reconstructed to include both genders, not just hierarchies, which, by definition, are the ecclesiastical exclusivities of males, for males, and by males.
If hierarchies are the best rulers could construct for governing our unruly species, then hierarchies are not good enough in a world of all possibilities. Masculine systems of which to be wary end with the syllable ‘chy’ as monarchy, oligarchy, or patriarchy. Disappearances of kings, lords, barons, bishops, popes, godfathers, messiahs, and saviors; autocrats, aristocrats, bureaucrats, corporatocrats, cosmocrats, kleptocrats, monocrats, plutocrats, republicrats, theocrats would be a step in the right direction for balance.
Imagining women doing what they do best every day without hindrances from males, let's add our hope for the day when a critical mass occurs for the balance of genders. Say about forty percent of parliaments, governments, and all other assemblies are composed by women putting in place and sustaining their visions for balancing groups and committees. As more women feel encouraged to do the same, Earthlings would be on a very different global journey.
Imagining Too Wildly
For the moment, let’s practice the impossibility of imagining too wildly. Women could if they would throw out much of men’s war games and rules. Then, supporters of education and health care could send supporters for war and their armaments to play on dwarf planet Pluto for about a century.
Better yet, send the perpetrators of wars into deep space. We already know men of war will make errors, so they’ll probably mistakenly take a wrong turn, not risk embarrassment by asking anyone for directions, and get sucked into a black hole for a while. They can take with them all other males who think women are in any way secondary to the worth of a male. Let rulers of wars, economies, and flummery feel what it’s like to be superfluous and irrelevant as women have felt for millennia.
Then, on Planet Earth, art and music might again flourish, and left brained thinking could be tamed to appreciate right brained, creative and artistic thinkers and doers regardless of gender. All technologies, entertainments, and designs for Earthlings’ well being would not be the same. And combats wouldn’t begin, because discussions leading to beneficial and inclusive solutions would first take place around kitchen tables.
The scenarios above bring us closer to imagining too wildly a feeling of hope for humans’ new story. But a “Surprise!” highlights the moment when musing possibilities for our species’ next phase of civilization, and preparations begin at conception.
Lectures and essays by Joseph Chilton Pearce help in understanding connections of the physical heart and brain. The following is my wildly favorite transcription from a live lecture at Omega Institute, Rhinebeck, New York USA, May 2005.
The emotional state of the mother determines form, function, shape, and structure of the infant’s brain in utero, as well as through the months before the child walks.
During pregnancy, if the female feels secure, wanted, loved, cared for, the fetus develops a large forebrain and a sharply decreased hindbrain. If the female feels insecure, unwanted, unloved, uncared for, the fetus develops a large hindbrain and a sharply decreased forebrain.
An enlightened, educated, schooled, or otherwise reasonable culture, which listens to their scientists, will rally to assure every pregnant female is protected, not ignored, not neglected, and given as much care, love, and consideration as that culture can possibly provide.
Whether Earthlings remain within confines of our survival-defense brain generating conflict in families, businesses, and regenerating wars, or whether we evolve into a phase of empathic intelligence, depends on the pregnant mother’s emotional state. ¹
Women Helping Women
Women don’t remember to help others—women just do it by caring, loving, and protecting as much as they are able. Some women help women manage courage to walk streets in protest; women help women and children when lives have been upset by warring husbands, sons, and other men; some women help us think for ourselves by writing books and novels spotlighting possibilities by which compromised science could exploit the physical body.
Margaret Atwood, a woman helping women, reminds us that Pandora’s box has been opened. The biggest toy box in the world is biotechnology, a part of which is a public relations campaign for a movement called transhumanism. (Refer Wikipedia.) The movement, by short definition, assists human reproduction to overcome undesirable and unnecessary aspects of the human condition. But, what are the possibilities for pregnancies?
Ms. Atwood is a canary in the coal mine. Like anything else in science, biotech is a tool, and what it’s used for and by whom are queries for which those who carry Motherhood may care to be aware.
How might women begin conversations about biotech? Atwood alerts us to stay awake to George Orwell’s book, 1984. From the view point of a vigilant woman, she reminds women of one motif in totalitarian states: probabilities of controlling people’s sexual, private, and reproductive lives, persuaded through religious fundamentalisms.
She gets a little nervous when people say ‘it can’t happen here’ or ‘surely they wouldn’t do that here’ or ‘oh, no no no, that’s just propaganda,’ because those are denials people were saying leading into WORLD WAR TWO. Women might carefully attend what rulers say they’re intent on doing, because, if they get the chance to do it, they will. ²
On the behalf of women, Atwood quotes Wendell Phillips: Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.
Where are the places around the world where women helping women can be observed? Hear the story about Iraqi women in Abu Dsheer helping neighbors and refugees from Hawr Rajab. ³
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The Resident Speaks
What a “Surprise!” to have discovered Lori Harfenist while preparing this ezine. The Resident Lori is a thinker, a doer, a bookworm, and a researcher who speaks in good-spirited ways.
Her savvy satire helps me stay awake to the paranoia and self blame insinuated daily on our behalf by media engineering. Lori has a grasp on what we in USA are thinking, and she for sure knows the meaning of: it is not what you say, it’s how you say it.
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