Since this is the time of year when we indulge in this kind of stuff I’m going to join the fray. We are now ten years into the 21st Century (and the 3rd Millennium of the “Common Era”). As a person who has always been a big sci-fi fan and focused on the future, my anticipation of the “21st Century” (through the last forty years of the 20th) was always filled with thoughts of great forward-looking human achievements and a human race focused positively on the future and leaving behind much of the crap from the past. I must say I was disappointed as things unfolded in 2000 with Bush’s election, the events of 9/11/2001 soon after that, and much of what’s transpired in reaction to those events since. Continue reading →
Category Archives: Context
Holding Close with Open Arms
The piece’s title, at least in the most concrete physical terms, presents a contradiction. How can you hold someone close without wrapping your arms around them to secure their proximity which is bound to constrain their ability to move? Metaphorically, that contradiction is a challenge to maintain a difficult equilibrium; to have intimacy and share love and support without limiting the liberty of your partner to grow and become that unique person they can continue to become. Continue reading →
Challenging Patriarchy
So once you define the contemporary manifestation of this ancient way of being, and maybe understand how it has managed to perpetuate itself through a couple hundred generations of parents to children, how then do we address challenging and working towards ending this (what I would call) perpetuated vestige of an archaic system for organizing society?
Allan Johnson, in his book The Gender Knot, says the solution starts with acknowledging patriarchy exists as a collective system with its own internal logic, conventional wisdom and “paths of least resistance”, rather than as bad behavior by a bunch of individual men towards women. A systemic problem is not resolved by trying to identify “bad apples” and somehow weed them out or limit their influence. Most men and women participate in this system without consciously intending to oppress or be oppressed, without even being aware perhaps that the system exists. Continue reading →
Perpetuating Patriarchy
So how does a 5000 year old system of ranking and hierarchy with men inexorably at the top perpetuate itself through hundreds of generations and never get written off as archaic and crumble into the dust of history? Why was I so embarrassed in my late forties when I was deftly tossing a football with several slightly younger men (enjoying a moment of perhaps jocular camaraderie), who then threw it to my teenage son and were aghast when he threw it back to them, as it were, “like a girl”? What ancient warrior ethos had I violated in not properly training my son, an ethos that still somehow held sway somewhere in my subconscious? What gives this system its staying power, and does its longevity speak to its continuing merit? Continue reading →
Defining Patriarchy
I was introduced to the word and the concept behind it as a teen by my mentor slash “guru” and “feminist aunt” Mary Jane. She was (and still is) a brilliant and radical feminist, disguised in the muggle world as a cookie-baking mom of four kids who befriended my mother in the late 1960s through a mutual friend. I recall Mary Jane, ever the provocateur, showing up at some of my mom’s numerous and boisterous parties dressed in a maroon monk’s robe wearing a large women’s liberation medallion (the women’s symbol with a clenched fist inside the circle) hanging from her neck where one might expect to see the Christian cross on a real monk. The words she made up to convey her arguments were just as calculatingly provocative, including her term, “patriarchal pimperialism” to describe male control of women’s sexual lives and behavior. Continue reading →
Adding Value
I find this concept from the theories of economics and enterprise a very useful rule of thumb in helping me approach my life and make both big decisions on my life’s course, as well as day to day decisions while charting that course, including looking back and evaluating in hindsight what I have done or chosen not to do. I think perhaps as a society and participants in an economic system, we have lost touch with this rule of thumb along the way, which I believe has led to a large degree to our current economic turmoil. Continue reading →
An Emptying Nest
Our son Eric lives out back in our guest house and our daughter Emma still has her bedroom in our house, so they are technically still “in the nest”. But they both are now so wrapped up in their own busy lives that we only manage to sit down and have a good conversation with them about what’s up maybe once a week. Since our daughter has such a busy schedule of work, various classes, and a boyfriend, we can go for days without seeing her at all. If it were not for our current severe recession, combined with the sky-high rents on apartments here in Los Angeles, our nest would be completely empty. Continue reading →
Expletive Deleted: Post Mortem
Based on this whole provocative discussion centered around the word “fuck” and all its uses and connotations (see the version of my blog on DailyKOS), I have decided to make a public commitment to give up using this loaded term with all its patriarchal baggage. Based on all the insight shared in all your comments, I can’t see using the word in the future without doing more harm than good. I am not giving up profanity generally, just excising this one toxic word.
I’d be interested in your comments particularly on the patriarchal context of viewing the sex act as a negative thing that men typically do to women, not with women, and the implications that has for how we view the structure of our society, including the relationships between men and women generally.
Not that I will pester others to do the same, but I will certainly share with them my decision and commitment on this, and the reasons why.
Expletive Deleted
Just an initial heads up here… if you have a problem with people talking about the “F word” and actually spelling it out in their piece, then read no further…
Using those more “colorful” words in our wonderful human languages is an adventure in cultural norms, with different expectations for different segments of the community… youth versus adults, men versus women. At the top of the patriarchal pecking order, men of course are generally allowed to swear, expected to even among each other, as a sign of their privilege, but women (at least in the presence of men) and kids (at least in the presence of adults) not so much. But certainly among me and my friends (when I was young) and among my kids (when they still were youths), swearing was one way of trying on adult behavior and trying to experience the coolness and swagger of being an adult. Continue reading →
Defining Adultism
So you have probably already been “ism’d” within an inch of your life and may be ready to roll your eyes if I attempt to direct your attention to another one! Seems the 20th Century was full of positive movements and negative systems being coined as “isms”, including “feminism”, “progressivism” and “environmentalism” on the one side and “sexism”, “racism” and “militarism” on the other. Some might make a good argument that we should leave all those “isms” behind with the last century and turn our focus forward and reframe the way we look at liberating movements and the restricting systems that hinder human development.
Given those disclaimers I want to alert you to one more “ism”, “adultism”, that has been defined by and comes out of the milieu of thoughtful people, youth and adults, working in the democratic education and youth empowerment movements. One of my colleagues in the newly formed Institute for Democratic Education in America (IDEA), Adam Fletcher, has compiled information calling out this negative system on his website (freechild.org) page titled “Challenging Adultism”. Continue reading →