WE NEED BETTER NETS

With the release of the new Disney Snow White movie coming out this month, I’ve been thinking about why this movie bothers me. Partly, I’m annoyed by yet another remastering of this old fairy tale. I have the same feeling for the constant recycling of super heroes and as a semi-comic book nerd, they’ve not really ever gotten these stories right either. What has happened to the art of storytelling and imagination?!? Don’t answer that. I’m staring at it right now. Like I said; this is only part of my annoyance. I had to sit with it a couple of days to really pin it down and the thing that bothers me the most about Snow White is not this newer live action version. It is the story itself. 

The villain is a middle aged woman trying to hold onto her reign, while staying relevant and beautiful because no one wants to be ruled by an old ugly lady. Then she feels threatened by a younger prettier woman who just happens to be the rightful heir and proceeds to take the younger prettier woman out. Not on a date. Like, take out to die. The villain curses the young beauty by feeding her a “poisoned” apple and only the kiss from her true love, Prince Charming will release her from her curse. Wait…wasn’t Prince Charming the prince in Cinderella? 

Prince Charming is a fairy tale stock character who comes to the rescue of a damsel in distress and must engage in a quest to liberate her from an evil spell. -Wikipedia

Where do I even start? 

Let’s just dive right into the patriarchal bullshit of this story and most (if not all) of the fairytales all of us women were read to as little girls. We call it grooming today. These fairytales were designed to groom us into the shape of the kind of woman that would first of all, require a stock character’s rescue attempts and at the same time teach us that other girls were our competition. Take for example, the story of Cinderella. The stepmother went to great lengths to make sure the prince noticed her daughters. The stepsisters mutilated themselves to make that glass slipper fit! This was not about love. Everyone wants to marry the prince because a woman’s value was based on how well she could marry and how many babies she’d produce. Marrying a prince was a financial boon for the whole family. 

Okay, so just to recap here. Somewhere around ages three and four, girls are told stories that teach them to despise and be suspicious of other women and their value lies in the type of man she marries. Also, the man will save her. Let me get back to Snow White and the Evil Queen. Of course I don’t condone murder or the whole “I had no choice” argument unless in cases of assault. That’s not murder. That’s self defense. Though maybe that’s exactly how the queen felt; like she was acting in self defense. A large aspect of her villainy was her age. She went from “fairest of them all” to “you need to be careful to watch your elevens and stop squinting.” That’s a reference to those two little wrinkles that show up between the eyes when we squint. I would say, there are some people out there too young to get that reference, but since they’ve been marketing anti-aging wrinkle cream to us since we were babies, I would think most people get the reference. 

I just recently finished watching the series Younger where a forty year old woman fakes her age to be mid twenties so she could get a job in a publishing company. To be fair, the woman who is played by Sutton Foster, doesn’t look like what we think and have been told women in their forties should look. All she has to do is tweak her makeup, buy some clothes from RU21, and get a fake ID. The whole time I was watching it I kept thinking about how much this storyline bothered me but I also couldn’t look away. It was a fun soapy kind of show, but the whole time I kept saying to myself “Why the F@$# does it matter what age any of these people truly are unless they’re under age and doing something illegal?!” The short answer is that it doesn’t matter, but it aligns with the narrative of the story they've been pushing on us forever. Age matters. Older people are irrelevant and clinging to youth while younger people are flighty and irresponsible. 

This narrative is stupid. This narrative is designed to distract you. Worry about wrinkles and becoming irrelevant and just maybe you won’t notice that you make less money than the white dude with less experience. If you are too busy attacking the young woman you fear may be “after your man”, you won’t turn your focus and rage onto “your man” who lacks the integrity and wherewithal to not be persuaded to cheat on you with that young woman. The narrative is designed to pit you against other women and yourself. The New York Times morning newsletter last week had a list of things scientists learned culturally and anthropologically from the COVID pandemic and number three on the list was “Men do less”. If every woman in America read that newsletter at the same time I did, there would have been a collective loud bark of laughter echoing through this country. 

WE KNOW! 

What they really should have said for number three on the list of things learned from the pandemic is that women realized their self worth. Which is true, we looked around us at the endless piles of dishes and constant loads of laundry and the man sitting on the couch playing video games, while we wrangled a child (or children) for virtual learning at the same time trying to remain present in a work zoom meeting and came to our senses. We spoke up and demanded help. We may have to tell the man exactly what it is we need them to do, but (usually) they do it. We can’t have everything and it is a continuous daily practice. It is a practice made harder by “entertainment’s” continuation of the fairy tale narrative. Just stop retailing these antiquated stories that were designed to keep women in a patriarchal jail cell. It feels like they keep doing it in hopes of tricking a new generation of young girls.

Over the weekend, Michael and I got in a disagreement when he went into a rant about why we should stop telling kids they can be anything or do anything. He argued that this made kids disconnect from “their roles in society” and believe they’re going to be the next TikTok star or sportball star. I got so frustrated with him that I just completely stopped talking, which is his cue that I am angry. And when he pushed the subject, I put a hand up and said “You do not want to hear what I have to say about this right now.” Then I walked away. But this gave him time to mull over his own words and the flaws in his argument and put him in a place ready for listening. I told him that the problem is not that we tell kids they can be anything. The problem is that we don’t tell kids they can be anything without having to work for it. A number of kids are never told that they will need help from their communities to succeed and they will need to help the community in gratitude for their support. I have a strong suspicion that the kids in his class who are boasting about being the next big famous thing, are kids who have parents that never tell them they can be anything at all. Their encouragement is coming from what they see on their screen. Their impression of who they can be is coming from a screen. So when the patriarchy casts their media nets, there’s plenty to be caught. 

It is past time we started casting different media nets.  

THANKFUL FRIDAY

At the beginning of this week, I posted tales about the state of my body that many found relatable. Women friends have reached out, nodding heads in agreement and sharing their own personal experience. This was exactly my intention behind that entry. I am infuriated by the taboo of conversing above whispers in regards to our female bodies and well over the idea that I should feel shame about the normal things that happen to my female body. And because of the lack of interest from the medical industry, we (women) must come together and share, share, share in hopes of navigating our way through this highly uncertain phenomena of perimenopause/menopause.

Chad sent me a TikTok story about Rosalind Franklin and how Watson and Crick stole her research, which ended up winning them the Nobel Prize in 1962. This story is not new to me. All female scientists know this story. My first education on Watson and Crick though told a different story. They didn’t mention stealing any work or ideas from Franklin, but they made sure to talk about how disagreeable Franklin was to work with and, one would say, a bitch. The reality is that Rosalind Franklin was standing up for her research and herself. Watson and Crick would never have figured out the helical structure of DNA without Rosalind Franklin’s work. So instead of allowing a woman to get the credit for this discovery, they villainized her. They projected their fragile male egos and jealousy into writing a false narrative of a contentious woman.

Psst…this isn’t the first time in history fragile male egos and their jealousy has been projected to vilify a woman.

Some of you are probably wondering what the story of Rosalind Franklin has to do with woes of perimenopause. Trust me. This is all linked together. For far too long women have been pigeon holed into a projection of what men have wanted us to be and in doing so this has lessened us. Our bodies, our thoughts, our appearances are all gender constructed for the man. Deviations in said construct are not to be tolerated and should be ignored, thus putting our basic needs in the backseat and our contributions outside of childbearing, something to be stolen or unnoticed. I did not intend to set off to write yet another rant on the never ending reach of the patriarchy, but I can’t ignore that the lack of research and information around women’s health is directly linked to the patriarchy. Women have been relegated to barely even whispering words such as vagina or bleeding because men find those words unappealing or offensive, while there are whole industries built around glorifying the male ejaculation. A cock and balls is probably the most popular choice for graffiti artists and it is usually placed near the mouth of the model on the poster.

Where is the graffiti artist drawing vulvas in the mouths of poster models?

This is not a sermon for the choir kind of post. I wrote all of this on Wednesday and usually writing down my rage helps to dampen it. Instead, all I managed to do was pour gasoline all over my rage. I spent the day feeling prickly and stabby. But after another fitful night of sleep, I thought about what many of the women in my community had said about what they are going through. The most common phrase written in my comments is “I thought I was going crazy.” Of course we think this; we’re all tired and doctors wont listen to us. The number of comments I read that started with “my doctor didn’t believe me” or “three doctors later..” was ridiculous. Not only are we dealing with changes in our bodies that start with messing up the very foundation needed for basic living (which is sleep. sleep and rest are the most important things for our bodies), we are doing so while still, STILL, fighting to be the women we want to be and not the women men (or society) may want us to be. I want you to know that I am grateful for your voices and your continued hard work in this daily battle. We all deserve naps.

Let’s all go take naps!

WHAT IF THE PATRIARCHY DIDN'T EXIST

In 1963, three (male) anthropologists, unearthed the remains of a woman nearly 10,000 years old. They found that she had been buried with a projectile point that the men declared to be a '“scraping tool”. The male-centric consensus was that women were/are gathers while men are always the hunters. It took fifty five years and the discovery of a 9,000 year old woman buried with a hunting kit, for this narrative to change. Since then it has been concluded that hunting was/is a gender neutral activity.

This is a prime example of how men have been shaping the history of women and their roles in society for hundreds and thousands of years. I don’t even remember what started the conversation, but recently the Cabbage mentioned an old book of fiction written by some male author telling a woman’s story. I said that I “prefer to no longer read women’s stories written by male authors.” The Cabbage then replied “But what if they do it well?” My response was “Good for them, but men have been writing the story of women and thus defining the idea of what a woman should be for so long that I no longer have the energy to waste on yet another male perspective of a female story.”

This ended our conversation.

I was not completely enthralled with Barbieland. It sounds great. All woman government. A Supreme Court of only women. Women scientists. Women doctors. Women Nobel Prize winners. Every woman in Barbieland is extraordinary in some way. Extra. It is so extra that even Stereotypical Barbie questions her ‘enoughness’. This is where my thoughts get real complicated. In fact it sent me into a tailspin of research. Did you know that the original Barbie was inspired by a German doll that was based on a comic book character named Bilde Lilli, a voluptuous pin-up that was sold as a sexy trinket for World War II soldiers? Ruth Handler may have made some very slight changes, mostly in marketing and she probably did have good intentions in introducing a doll that she said was to be “aspirational”, but this “aspirational” doll’s narrative began as male driven story. Barbie was introduced as a fashion doll for dress-up play in 1961. It took several years for those dress-up clothes to resemble astronauts and doctors. Which left years of little girls aspiring to be pretty and the type of woman their daddies would like.

It is literally impossible to be a woman…

Gloria in Barbie, played by America Ferrera

This is the start of Gloria’s (played by America Ferrera) monolog on the expectations of women and all the contradictions in how we should conduct ourselves. Having to be a perfect Barbie in a perfect Barbie world is exhausting. How many times do we hear Margo Robbie’s character say “I’m just Stereotypical Barbie.”? Even this Barbie thinks she should be more. This group of male executives dreamed up a place where every woman is extraordinary. Barbieland is an expectation to be more not an aspiration for more. Expectations and aspirations do not have the same definitions. Barbieland is a product of the patriarchy. There has been criticism of Barbie’s easy forgiveness of Ken’s actions in this movie. I’d like to take a moment to remind everyone that Barbie had maybe two days of Ken’s bullshit introduction of the patriarchy. Ladies, we’ve had years of this bullshit.

This may sound like I did not like the movie. That’s not true. I thoroughly enjoyed this movie. I’m a huge fan of Greta Gerwig, the writer/director and I believe she found a fun and entertaining way to tell a story about women. Go see it. The music and dance scenes are spectacular. Just be prepared to have some thoughts.

Did you know that women have thoughts?

SIX

I think it was during the lock down when Talaura sent me a link to a soundtrack and told me to listen. It was the soundtrack for the musical Six and that soundtrack made its way into my daily listening playlist. It got played so often that the Cabbage discovered it in our shared Amazon music account and they started listening to it. So when Six was on the touring list for Kansas City this year, I bought tickets for the two of us. My first instinct is to tell you that this musical is like Spice Girls as the wives of Henry the Eighth, but that is a true simplification of the underlying fuck the patriarchy story that this musical tells.

It all starts out as a competition to decide which one of Henry’s wives had it the worst. Of the six, there were two divorces, two beheadings, one natural death and one survivor and history has not been kind when telling the stories for these six women. Because history is generally unkind when it comes to telling a woman’s story. I’ve heard a number of historical recounting in which at least three of Henry’s wives are described as manipulative and conniving. For sure, it was all of their own faults for whatever fate befell them. Even history lessons tell us that woman are asking for it, it’s the victim’s fault.

While The Cabbage and I sat waiting for the show to start, I overheard the two older ladies behind us discussing these women.

Isn’t one of them Anne Boleyn?

Yeah, well she angled for him for a while before he finally went for it.

What is not so funny about what I over heard is that it sounds very similar to an article I read with historian Hayley Nolan, author of Anne Boleyn: 500 Years of Lies. Anne Boleyn left court for at least a year to avoid Henry the Eight’s advances. Yet he still pursued her with written love letters.

The historians who do acknowledge this say it was a calculated tactic and sexual blackmail — the ultimate example of ‘when a girl says no, she really means yes. - Hayley Nolan

There’s a word we use now to describe his behavior. It’s HARASSMENT.

History has highlighted the so called faults of these six women. Temptress. Tease. Unable to produce a male heir. Didn’t look like their portrait. Conniving. Manipulative. Let me remind you. These women were Queens. Anne Boleyn was influential in passing the Poor Law which would require local officials to find work for the unemployed. Not to mention she birthed a daughter who would become one of the most powerful and longest reigning Queens in history. Catherine Parr, Henry’s last wife, was well educated and pushed forward education reform for women. Which one of them had it the worst and was asking for it?

The answer is none of them. None of those women truly wanted to marry Henry the Eighth. He treated his wives so badly that he made sure history would too. Henry the Eighth was the original Harvey Wienstein, except he was worse. Not only did he ruin reputations but he was a murderer of women. He’s the historical figure that should be forgotten. The patriarchy wants to pit us women against each other because it distracts us from the injustices they are doing to us.

You want to burn down the patriarchy? Stop falling for their bullshit distractions.