Searching for Logic in Our Civilized World
/Since I was a little girl, I was always attracted to big ideas. As a teenager, I thrived in the company of my friend — last name Roth — who was a Unitarian in the middle of Minnesota.
Years ago I laughed one night: “She was a Jew in a progressive Midwestern church.” There was no synagogue in my town, so the Roths did the next best thing, worshipping as Unitarians.
They may have forsaken their identity during the Holocaust, an event that really and truly did happen.
I still remember having dinner with N’s parents, discussing ideas and good books. My head was swimming with joy in these conversations, entering the Roth house to the sounds of Sevogia playing at 4pm, on a blistering-cold Minnesota winter day.
Global warming hadn’t come to Minnesota and our winters were still ferocious. Rothland was an oasis in the middle of my life blizzard, and I would have gladly slept in the attic, to have a spot at their sweet table.
The Tower of BabelIdeas weren’t very valued in my own home, where intellectualism was considered an affectation, one reflecting a lack of modesty and sense of place in the world.
Smart people had “airs” that weren’t very valued in my town and in my family. Humility meant everything and God forgot to give me a strong-enough dose to keep me on my knees, forever repentant. This unfortunate misfire in my genetic makeup may just be the curse of my life.
Raising Parents
My poor mother wasn’t prepared to cope with such a precocious child, one who spoke her mind at age three.
Standing behind a locked screen door, I explained to my speechless father that with the arrival of my baby brother, it made perfect sense that I live with my grandmother, where I was much happier.
Suggesting that we all get fundamentally pragmatic about our family reality, I said: “Look, dad, we both know that you and mom don’t love me. You never wanted me. Now you have a new baby, so let me stay here. I’ll visit you on weekends, and we’ll all be so much happier.”
There were no tears shed in this tiny life assessment. I was right about my proposed change in family structure, if only I could get my parents to see the wisdom of the arrangement.
Even at age three, I knew that traditions can kill us with claustrophobia, as often as they liberate us in a sea of good feelings and happy days.
“Unlock this door,” my father demanded quietly. I want to write that I said: “Dad, let’s be reasonable.”
In truth, I only remember making my argument and then doing as I was told by unlocking the door. It was one of those tiny hook and eyes jobs, one my dad could easily have pulled out of the door frame, but instead he took control of the absurd situation, with no bad words.
For all my young-girl courage, I always respected my parents and did as I was told, being a kiss-ass exemplary daughter in a household that turned itself inside-out on a daily basis.
There were many reasons why I was always trying to get myself adopted by some other family, but learning was a key one. In my mind, the Roth household was perfection beyond my wildest imagination, existing as a rich respite of learning and mental engagement, music and intellectual argument.
Love, too. Don’t let me forget that part. This family was in love with no simmering neuroses visible to me, in a sea of calm goodwill and happiness. Peace reigned in the Roth household, and N thrived. I joined in, too, by osmosis and unabashed admiration.
Roth was Cinderella in my playbook, living in this oasis of calm intellect and culture. There were answers to life’s most perplexing challenges here, if only I could come often enough to learn about them.
I envied not the pretty girls, but the smart ones, causing me to hover close to women who read Tolstoy.
For inexplicable reasons, I still believed that men held the answers to the big questions in life, and if I just got out of Dodge by moving to New York City, I would learn the answers. At age seven, I knew that New York was my salvation — a modern, orderly construct of smart thinking and focused, sensible behavior and Modern values.
Terms of the Debate
I was always the second negative in debate for six years, once ending a Minnesota championship match because the affirmative guys weren’t discussing the question. Under mounds of reasoning, they had changed the question ever so slightly on us and so I flew at them in a refusal to continue.
Ending the discussion, I made my argument, then joined my stunned partner, thunderstruck at our table. “You didn’t even consult me,” she hissed, with total justification.
“You would have said ‘no’,” I replied. “It was our only chance. We’re getting slaughtered because these guys have reframed the question. It’s do or die. You would say ‘no’. Our only hope is a maverick move.”
Those smarty-pants boys wiped the smiles from their smug faces, when the judge concurred with my unorthodox maneuver, awarding us a win on technical grounds.
Yinka Shonibare MBE (b. United Kingdom, 1962). The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (America), 2008. Chromogenic photograph, 72 x 48 3/4 in. Image courtesy of the artist, Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, and James Cohan Gallery, New York. © the artistChallenging authority is deeply embedded in my DNA. I’ve never hesitated to do it when necessary, and especially to bring order out of chaos.
Respecting men and male values — especially as a young woman — I bought into a preference for working well with the guys. Many of them have steadied my life course, bringing me great opportunities in business.
Sometimes it matters most when we’re critiqued by our own kind. I must say, gentlemen of the world, this growing global debate about the future of humanity — especially women — defies any intelligent thought processes.
Men are going crazy all over the world.
True, my husband once shattered the living room window, slamming it down in a fit of anger that I wasn’t home yet. Our mutual friend called me at a business engagement, telling me that I had better come home at once. B also shattered our car door window, slamming it in furor, when an aggressive New York driver cut into our lane on the FDR.
We went one Christmas to pick up my sister-in-law, who lay bruised almost beyond recognition after an encounter with B’s brother J. K hadn’t played by J’s rules and he taught her who was boss, then left for their home in Coconut Grove.
You might say that I’ve spent decades of my life, searching for the Roth household in a sea of manly, global craziness — while simultaneously fending off the alleged suspicions that it’s women who are crazy.
I eventually left my husband the night he was banging my head on the floor for overcooking the brussel sprouts. OK, OK. You want the whole story. I admit it; I told him to cook his own damn brussel sprouts next time he to eat. That did it!
Desdemona - Verdi’s Otello by Linda SuttonmLuckily we had guests, one who grabbed my head and the other him, as B then became Othello, with his hands clenched around my neck.
Understanding that I was in true danger this time, I left that night, never to return to my husband. Desdemona I am not.
Living in New York where getting a divorce was relatively easy, I was able to start all over in the endless global search for love, meaning and relevance in my life.
Living a richly independent, global, professional life for decades, my encounters with male tyrannies of varying pitches were interspersed with the reality that men and I get along very well most days of the week.
Being a deeply sensual woman and also believing that Americans do not put a high enough priority on the calming and energizing importance of sexual intimacy, I thought I had a pretty stable perspective on what’s wrong in the world.
This summer everything changed, and the weakly-constructed intellectual ceiling that has been my perception of global reality, came crashing down on my beautiful blond head. Feminism stands in my doorway, her stiletto pitched firmly into the wood floor, demanding an explanation for what the heck is going on in the world.
Decades after my own consciousness-raising, I’m pulled back into the same quest for a rational explanation for life’s gender-based mysteries, trying to comprehend that in today’s world the president of Zambia believes that childbirth is pornographic and Lubna Hussein’s gabardine trousers are “flashy pants”.
Pursuing Ms Modesty
“Artistic Cannibals by Janet KorzachekWriter Kadaria Ahmed shares her insights this morning, not only on the Lubna Hussein case and Sudan’s Article 152, but on the Indecent Dressing Bill or Indecent Exposure Bill, seeking to replicate Article 152 into Nigeria’s penal code.
If Nigerian women don’t take action, Ahmed writes, a new penal code will govern their dress, too. I’m sorry, dear readers. This need to control women’s bodies is a pathological disease, and I have the right to say so.
Proposing these laws in 2009 is going backwards, not forwards, towards a more enlightened world. What we know is that irrationality governing women’s lives is escalating, not declining, in many parts of the world.
I am stupid-woman clueless to answer her question.
Trying to understand contemporary political and social events in Africa and the Middle East, I realize that these proposed laws revert women back about 12,000 years.
In the same way that significant numbers of Americans believe that the President Obama is the antiChrist, there is little scientific logic or rational thinking at work in laws that govern man’s need to dictate women’s behavior in any part of the world — including Africa and the Middle East, where the laws are even more repressive.
Regressive, patriarchal beliefs are on the march in our world, embraced by women, too.
Botticelli’s Pallas and the CentaurA truly rational man does not rip the clothes off a woman on the street corner. Nor does he throw a burqa over her head in order to avoid her endless seductive temptations. (I speak not of women who willingly and enthusiastically wear full-coverage clothing. They have explained their own reasons for covering up in While the World Debates Burqas, Fashion Designers Show Beautiful Abayas at Paris’s George V Hotel.)
Today, there is no Roth house for me to run towards, as a dark cold settles over the planet. I am learning that women cannot sing because we are sirens. Music corrupts. Skin corrupts. Thinking corrupts.
By now you know that I was a stubborn child with a strong backbone. Refusing to give up in my search for rationality in the evolution of life, I have gone “back to the beginning” of my learning cycle. Recognizing that my case is not air tight, I’ve set off again for Ithaca, where “self” rose up out of submission and people dared to ask questions about their lives.
Last evening I was immersed in reading a series of online history lectures, beginning with “What is Civilization?” The Greeks existed in opposition to humility. True, women were oppressed but at least citizens asked questions.
True the people killed Socrates, but comparatively speaking, Athens arose as a place of enlightenment.
Decades after my first formal inquiry at New York University, I now have the Internet at my disposal, fueling one main concern: when it comes to men dictating the morality of women’s clothing, on the subject of the president of Zambia calling child birth pornography in 2009, with millions of women and girl babies snuffed out in gendercide — how in God’s name did we get to this place of being in a so-smart, modern world?
With the extraordinary faculties of the human mind, how do women live as they do in more places than they do not?
What progress have we made collectively in advancing ourselves from the advent of agriculture around 10,000 B.C., when women came under the control of men and the Code of Hammurabi governed women’s public dress.
Ancient Sumerian art was ravaged in America’s invasion of IraqIn Mesopotamian civilization, veils became the first legally enforced garments. Consistency exists around the history of veiling.
Men insist that we female vixens self-regulate, and so they govern us with oppressive laws. Our glutinous appetite for pleasure and wanton sexual behavior must be controlled, for the sake of — humanity?
Unregulated female sexuality lies at the heart of women’s alleged “irrationality”, or so they say.
Concrete Answers Please!
Considering Kadaria Ahmed’s questions about human nature — especially men’s human nature — I find myself going through another kind of psychological confrontation, one that faces the deep abyss of darkly irrational, male-centric social customs and behavior since the beginning of time.
While women have influenced the building of the world to this point in time, our planet is largely a manly creation, based on male principles.
The light bulb has gone on in my head, reminding me unpleasantly that creating order and advancing women’s lives aren’t necessarily harmonious objectives around the world.
Walking the country roads of Carversville for the last two years, my reflections were not about feminism but consumption and the sensual beauty of nature, our planet and energy supply, about women’s inner and outer selves and why American women, more than French, Italian and Brazilian, so often loathe the woman in the mirror.
I had no intention of becoming involved in a burqa debate, a revisitation of Mesopotamian culture and the impact of agriculture on women’s lives and man’s need to veil us. And yet here I am, in Fall 2009 looking for the Roth house, where decades ago I sought enlightenment in education and spirited debate.
The determination of societies to self-regulate exists as a fundamental to the evolution of humanity.
Until this summer, I assumed that women were moving forward internationally, but now I understand that the battle over women’s lives is heating up in epic proportions.
As pawns in the battle of civilization, many women remain torn among multiple attachments — children, husband, career, religion, philosophy and personal brainpower, nature and self.
Regrettably, I must also turn inward, looking at the reality of American culture when I’m also appalled at events in Africa and the Middle East. When our own headlines read that President Obama is the antiChrist, fundamentalism marches everywhere.
What’s I’ve learned again this summer is how different we are as people. It makes us feel better to say that we’re all one family with slightly different viewpoints. Rose-colored glasses inspire me to believe that we can all get along together, but I also fear not.
When it comes to women’s global emancipation, the godly battle is fierce and one that threatens far more men and conservative religions than it liberates. In President Obama’s “warm and cozy” moments, he stresses the similarities of the world’s great religions.
It seems that if women truly were ordered by God to obey men, then I have no argument — at least among true believers. We women are inferior characters.
I’m smart enough to know that most of my readers are believers in one faith or another. In fact, we are about to launch a spirituality channel run by women ministers, rabbis, Episcopal priests — virtually any woman ordained in her ministry.
Hopefully, these learned ladies can “set me straight” on the questions swimming around in my head.
With so much talk of morality and proper behavior in the world, we must bring some enlightenment to Anne of Carversville, and the sooner the better, it seems. Anne
