Month: May 2022

Farce

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I looked it up just to be sure and, it turns out, I’ve been using the word wrong all these years. In my online dictionary I find, “farce: mixture of ground raw chicken and mushrooms with pistachios and truffles and onions and parsley and lots of butter and bound with eggs.” The verb? “To fill with a stuffing while cooking.” Imagine my surprise to read those words! But of course that is not all. I’m told that it refers to “a comedy characterized by broad satire and improbable situation,” and was originally (1530) the “comic interlude in a mystery play,” and later, “was extended to the impromptu buffoonery among actors that was a feature of religious stage plays.” Webster says, “Such farces—which included clowning, acrobatics, reversal of social roles, and indecency—soon developed into a distinct dramatic genre and spread rapidly in various forms throughout Europe.” It is Websters list of synonyms and example usages that helps me to recognize the word again, “caricature, cartoon, joke, mockery, parody, sham, travesty.” Something so exaggerated and obviously not true, so as to be ridiculous and something one could laugh about knowing that no one would ever mistake it for a reality. Something so far fetched as saying that the bread, celery, onions, butter, and sage, which you put inside the turkey, is the turkey.

Perhaps this is just the prompt word I’ve been waiting for to get me to open up about something which I haven’t yet felt ready to talk about publicly. Something that, had you suggested to me four years ago that this was happening, or even could happen, I would have assumed you were a Christian conservative on a routine mission to smear feminists by exaggerating the impact of their efforts to distinguish between gender (sex-roles) and sex (anatomy + biology), which they did in the hope of loosening the extremely confining grip that the one has historically had on the other. I would have been baffled at the enormous cognitive-leap that person would have had to make to hold feminism’s claim, which holds that gender is a (mostly) mutable social construct and sex (our body) is an immutable reality with real world consequence, for creating a paradigm that would insist the exact opposite view. I would have assumed that tossing such an outrageous extrapolation into a discussion about the correlation between the doctrine of male headship and the violence and oppression that women face the world over was a last ditch attempt to avoid taking responsibility for an endless and suffocating list of woes that women face because of male dominance, by diverting attention instead to a non-issue.

I know I would have thought this, because four years ago just such a young, conservative, self-identifying-christian, trump supporter tried to divert my feminist arguments in exactly this way right in my very own living room, and that is precisely what I thought. With no little side dish of condescension, I dismissed his objection -that academics and a growing number of people were denying the reality of dimorphic sexed bodies- as an ignorant parroting of a straw-man argument that reeked of paranoia. I told him then that not a single person had ever made such a claim to me, which was not untrue at the time, but that, in contrast, over a lifetime that spanned more than half a century, I had been privy to, had witnessed, and had experienced first hand, a maelstrom of male violence, sexual predation, exclusion, exploitation, silencing, discrimination, stalking, lewd propositioning and voyeurism. Those were the problems that concerned me greatly, for myself, for my daughters, and for women the world over, and the reason I was, and still am, devoted to challenging this pernicious doctrine of male headship within the church.

That was four years ago.

I don’t enjoy eating my own words, especially when they were served with such a spicy sauce, but I have since had to chew and swallow at least my assumption that my young cousin’s last ditch argument was a “non-issue.” Since that day, my little Homemaker-in-Bavaria-Bubble has burst wide open, and I am… I am so many, many strong emotions that I cannot even find enough synonyms to adequately describe the tumult inside of me, and it feels dangerous even to try to express it. Dangerous not because I fear losing the favor of a whole swath of on-and-offline family and acquaintances, which I am sure to, nor, as my daughter warns me, because I will most likely ruin any chance I might have still had at a successful anything-career, though those things and worse are happening to women with more convincing Liberal track-records than myself. I have survived that kind of relational proscription before, and I will survive it again. Nor has it been a matter of incertitude, the fear of getting this one wrong, the fear I could be hoarding privileges and excluding anyone from some good thing, or of causing unnecessary harm. My eyes are wide open, my ears are listening, my heart remains empathetic, curious, and generous toward people who are truly suffering, and yet, in all the ways that we know what we know, I know the Emperor being paraded here is actually naked.

No, the danger I fear, which has kept me social-media-silent these last couple of years about the aggressive Queer Theory that has captured the institutional West, comes from my own inner storm of feelings. They are like wild and angry bulls, which once let out of their pen, will trample and buck off any living thing in their path. Even now, writing this piece feels like riding all of these bulls at once, every word an enormous effort to bridle the fury, incredulity, and bafflement I feel. Sarcasm and searing remarks are chomping at the bit, ready to tear into the inconsistencies, the hypocrisies, the cowardice, and the cognitive dissonance of those aggressively pushing and those so easily buying into this novel and, I believe, harmful Queer cult. I am afraid that this herd of emotions will stampede me headlong off the cliff and into the black abyss of online outrage. I fear I could be lost in endless caves of discourse following the hollow sound of my own echo chambers. And I fear that there is a good chance that I could be swallowed whole by the quicksand of my own self-righteousness. It is not the ire and contempt of others I fear, but my own ire and contempt. So I’ve stayed silent.

But the cauldron of emotions has not dissipated. Worse, my silence has not protected me from any of these outcomes toward which they harry me, and yet all the while, the number of those who think that this is what everyone believes grows and grows. I realize also, the longer I wait to speak out, the more the inner pressure builds to reconcile my online perception with what is actually going on inside of me. Having written long letters pleading with my conservative christian relatives to speak out against the farce of the Trump presidency, and openly chastising Evangelicals for having supported him, I can no longer say nothing about the farce of this current administration pushing the queer agenda and remain in my integrity.

I will simply have to learn to ride the bull, bridle and saddle the stallions, and do my part to steer people away from this harmful ideology: a deep pocketed agenda which is enticing an ever younger, ever greater number, and ever more female population into invasive, permanent, and detrimental medical and pharmaceutical interventions and life time care, is sowing identity confusion even among the very young, is creating an environment of egregious safe-guarding violations, is robbing women of medals, titles, platforms, their sex-based rights, and our very nomenclature, and is promoting a general culture of social-upheaval and division – all based on a premise that is both unscientific and counterintuitive. A textbook case of gaslighting.

And therein lies the fountain of this flood of negative emotions churning inside of me. Here is the source of the loud and frantic, “How Dare You!” that wells up in me when I see the New York Times and the Washington post headlines declaring Rachel Levine, a man, to be the first female four star general; when I see male athletes holding gold medals in women’s competitions; when I read about male sexual predators being housed in women’s prisons; parents being denied their duty of care; lesbians being bullied into dating “women with penises;” Doctors and therapists being bullied into “Affirmative Care” only practices, when I see that children who do not fit the extreme gender stereo types that our culture pushes (and from and into which the trans-movement, ironically enough, feeds like a parasite) are told they are in the wrong body.

IN THE WRONG BODY!!

Just say that out-loud once to shatter the myth of a benevolent ideology.

And to object to these things makes me the unkind one?

Has everyone gone completely mad?

The sheer gall of anyone at all to believe they have the right to tell me, or any of us, to discount, distrust, and outright deny what I see, hear, feel, and discern in order to cushion those with fragile identities from facing their own reality. To assume that I will so cheaply abandon almost sixty years of experience, of learning to trust my own wisdom about the world, of hard-won relational acumen, and a radar for predators that has served me well since I was a very young girl, and simply trade it in for another’s “inner-feeling” as if I were a blind, deaf, and dumb headless turkey, is the height of impudence. And to legislate and mandate that girls and the most vulnerable women (victims of sexual assault, domestic abuse survivors, the institutionalized and incarcerated) should immediately drop their guard and suppress their instinct for danger the moment some man chooses a new pronoun, is not only utterly hypocritical, but also downright misogynistic.

Four years ago, when I was presented a picture of a Liberal Dystopia that denied the reality of our sexed biology, it sounded so outrageous and exaggerated and obviously not true, that I believed only the Extreme Right could come up with something so ridiculous with which to smear the Left. I laughed it off as a farce, thinking that no one could ever mistake gender (the cultural and ever changing sex-roles) for sex (our biological bodies). That would be as far fetched as saying that the bread, celery, onions, butter, and sage, which you put inside the turkey, is the turkey.

Four years later, and I believe that Queer Theory will go down in history as the Great Gaslighting of the Twenty First Century.

(For a calmer, comprehensive, informed, and factual picture of the havoc this ideology is wreaking, please read Helen Joyce’s book, Trans, or listen to the podcast Transparency, hosted by two trans-men, who are having the conversations I wish I could be having with my trans-sibling. I so appreciate their wisdom, self-awareness, vulnerability, and courage to speak truth in such a hostile culture.)

Gecko

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Lurchi scurried along the windowsill and up the screen behind the slatted window panes until he found a spot where the sun streamed in. I liked to call our geckos after the German shoe company’s mascot, even though I knew they weren’t the same. Jonathan had a whole collection of their comic books with Lurchi the Salamander as the hero who wore leather Salamander shoes and a Fedora on his many missions to save boys and girls from all manner of perils. Giving the geckos this name made them more endearing and helped me pretend they were pets; the best kind of pets, since I didn’t have to feed them or take care of them except to protect them from the children, and yet they served us as a moderate pest control.

I paused for a moment to watch Lurchi-the-gecko-not-salamander as he clung to our fly-wire, eyes closed, heart-rate slowed, soaking in the sun like a solar panel, unperturbed by the clouds of dust that rolled our way after each Personal Motor Vehicle (PMV) roared down the dirt road, nor by the loud and gregarious groups of men, women, and children that passed by our house on the edge of town in an endless stream. Not even the loud raucous that was coming from the direction of Kama Market to our left, which was slowly but steadily drawing nearer, aroused him.

I caught a first glimpse of the excited crowd as they reached the edge of the back side of our garden. Since our living area was one flight up from ground level, I had a good vantage point and could see as far as the first 6 to 6 shacks that lined the road between our house and the neighborhood market even over our two meter high pit-pit “Banis” (fence). It wasn’t unusual to see such a large crowd. Sometimes a mob of between a hundred and two hundred people could run by our house in angry pursuit of someone that allegedly had just made off with an item that didn’t belong to him. “Stopim em! Stopim em! Em giaman, tasol! Em no gut! Kissim em now!” “Stop him! Stop him! He’s a liar and a thief and no good! Get him!” the mob would yell as they stampeded off down the road. Other times there could be a large crowd that had gathered around two women who were really going at each other in the vicious way only women do. One of the women would most likely be a wife from somewhere else who had discovered that her husband had taken another wife here in Goroka. Officially, that kind of thing was now illegal, unofficially, it happened all the time.

But this was not that kind of crowd. It was a fairly large group, but less than a hundred, of mostly men and some women, which built a kind of cosmos around an epicenter of commotion. By the time they had reached the side of our garden which was directly in front of me, Naguru’s curiosity had brought her to my side. As my haus-Meri (maid) and I stood there, we could make out what was going on. In the center of this crowd there was an angry Highlands man who had a woman strong armed in a headlock. In this way they, and the entire cosmos, moved some paces along, he yelling angrily and she wailing and pleading. Then he let her go and tried to move on, only to have her follow him, still loudly wailing and pleading in the most desperate and haunting tones, grabbing him, falling on her knees, throwing dirt on herself, and begging. We could not understand what they were saying since everyone in the crowd was loudly voicing their opinions of who should do what, and that in some mixture of Pidgin and “Tok-ples” (Talk-place, or local language). Then the Highlands man grabbed the woman again in a headlock and began punching her head with his free fist while they turned the corner and moved to a standstill directly in front of my gate.

At this point I had seen enough and moved to go out and try to stop this violence. It would not have been the first time I had intervened in the family affairs of strangers in my host country of Papua New Guinea. Already in the first week we were in Goroka, a city of about 25-30 thousand, before moving into the house designated for us by our mission, the one year old of a young family living on the grounds of our temporary housing had a severe ear infection. When I went to see what the problem was in the middle of the night after the child had been screaming for hours, the young family, who were charismatic Lutherans, told me they were trusting God to heal their child. Thankfully they were able to interpret my intervention with fever reducing pain medicine and a ride to the clinic the next day as an answer to their prayers. Often we would simply stop the car when we passed a child with an obvious ailment, like a huge abscess or an open wound, and politely insist that they let us take the family to the 2 Kina clinic (fifty cent clinic). Once it was necessary to harbor our neighbor who was being assaulted by her adult, mentally handicapped, male relative whom she helped take care of.

On these and many other occasions, my mere being caucasian and the wealth that was associated with it, was all that was necessary to gain invitation, entrance, and compliance. That and the ELC-PNG logo on the side of our car, which signaled that we were Lutheran missionaries and not business people. But I had not yet waded into a physical altercation involving men, though I had witnessed plenty, and in certain heated situations, like bumping into the PKV ahead of me one day while out shopping, I made sure to communicate an exaggerated deference and profuse apologies, so as to avoid escalation, to the driver -who was mostly play-acting at being furious. We both knew that he had hit pay-dirt and would pocket a high compensation price from us.

Now, as this scene unfolded outside of my window, it was just Naguru, myself, our older gardener, Paul, and my two young children at home for the week that my husband was away on a bush tour, but my instincts moved me toward the door anyway. I guess I thought I could slip into a pair of leather Salamander shoes and a Fedora and exorcise the authority I seemed to have as a white woman in PNG, and perhaps as one who had a closer claim on the gate they happened to be standing in front of. But before I could take a third step, Naguru grabbed hold of my arm and, without words, let me know that the color of my skin could not save this woman. I should stay put.

So I did.

The malignant crowd moved up the road toward Donald’s house, the young man who had worked in our garden, looked after Jonathan, and had been an indispensable cultural bridge for us until he started his own gardening business. He was the adopted son of the church’s District President who lived up the street, and the next day I asked him what he knew about the incident. What Naguru and I heard broke our hearts. The husband had suspected and accused the woman of being with someone else and had taken her young child away and given him to his relatives in his village where she would be unable to retrieve him.

As I was taking this all in, I hung my head, and out of the corner of my eye I could see that my daughter, Charis, had crawled across the floor and cornered Lurchi. By the time I could reach her, it was too late. The gecko had darted away along the bookcase, leaving his tail in the tight fist of my delighted one year old.

Shine

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Baskets made in Rongo, Eastern Highlands, PNG
“Basket weaving is a most important work”
I tell myself
It requires this slow deliberation
This meticulous attention to detail
This searing scrutiny
To choose just the right reeds
To pair them just so
This careful handling to bend but not break
To make the weave as tight as can be
To avoid any leakage
To protect what’s inside

I have an impressive stockpile of reeds
Collected over more than half a century
Long reeds, short reeds, 
   fat and brittle, little reeds,
   thin and sharp and pointy reeds
They were the cutting arrows of criticism 
   that once pierced my side
The dull blows of failure,
   that bruised my swollen pride
The feeble first attempts 
   that could not take the heat
And the hollow sound of footsteps 
   from my cowardly retreat

Over the years the cane has collected
   to a high and constraining pile
And though I donn the fruit of this pernicious
   craftsmanship with poise and smiles
I’m often crouched behind this makeshift screen,
   paralyzed, silent, invisible, and mean,

I want one day to let my little light shine
But on and on and on I weave
While still wearing this big basket of mine.

(Shine in 5)

Train

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With her foot up on the heater-baseboard which ran along the wall, and her elbow on her raised knee, she cupped her chin in her hand and stared out of the window. The rain was coming down in sheets now, and if it did not stop within the next two hours, she would surely be drenched by the time she got home. Not that she had forgotten an umbrella. That would never happen. But between her overly large suitcase, her bulging cosmetic bag, her laptop bag, the duffel bag with extra shoes, and the shopping bag with gifts and snacks, she would have no hand free for such a contraption. Over the decades, she had tried to constrain the amount of things she took on such trips, but no amount of inconvenience and hassle with her luggage had been able to cure her of her deeply rooted abandonment issues. “Be Prepared!” was a stain on every fiber of her being.

Now she was simply grateful for this window, literally and figuratively: the bracket of time to herself to shift into neutral and coast along for a couple of hours, as well as the cold, grey, square sheet of glass to lean her head against and be lulled by its monotonous stream of scenery. In the same way the fields and buildings and trees could be seen coming gradually toward her from the distance only to rush by and disappear behind her, so too did the events of the week pass review in her tired brain. Just as grey, just as monotonous.

It was the same old refrain. The weeks of frantic and thorough preparation hadn’t positioned her into a state of confidence, only exposed her to the infinite sea of knowledge, skills, and possibilities that she did not yet master. The closer the deadline came, the tighter the knot in her stomach grew, and the more ant-acids she took before going to bed. The migraines that plagued her on the eve of her presentations now only seemed to come when she addressed an entirely new C suit. Not knowing how high this new bar might be always left her feeling wide open to her darkest opposing line-backer with the number, “Who do you think you are?” The end-zone seemed miles away on such projects, and she felt foolish being on the field at all, let alone thinking she could run the ball, or even score.

But she always did. Though the presentations themselves felt like an out-of-body experience, afterwards, she knew she had slain it. She would hit a homer almost every time. Her clients were pleased. She would be invited back. Business was growing. And yet none of these facts managed to stick to her lapel. They ricocheted off of her like a bird flying into a window, with only a thud and a dead bird to show for it. After some polite conversation with her clients, she would excuse herself and return to her room for some rest before she began the arduous logistics of returning her entire wardrobe and kitchen sink to her place of residence. In that hour or so before she checked out, she would wilt into the hotel bed as all the tension and stress would drain out of her. Then with legs now made of rubber and arms that had become mostly useless appendages, she somehow managed to get all of her luggage into the elevator, then onto the street, down the five blocks to the station, and onto the train.

(in 5)

Hairy (in 3)

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About how I feel.

Ugh! Not this word! It is almost as bad as “moist!” But there it is, so I’ve got no choice but to spend the next 20-30 minutes writing about it. I could go the easy route and fetch up one of the many precarious situations our foster mother had gotten us into. But that would just be an avoidance tactic. I know what this has to be about. I know what needs to be said. And it won’t be pretty. It won’t be fun.

Women are HAIRY!

There! I said it! See where this is going? We grow hair. On our legs. Under our arms. We grow pubic hair. And now, at my age, we even start growing mustaches. It’s nature.

No, I am not completely liberated from the razor. I started shaving my legs and underarms long before the first hair even had a chance, so it is too late to stop now. Somehow we girls absorbed the message pre-puberty that becoming a woman wasn’t so much about the natural process of our bodies growing in certain ways, like hips, boobs, and hair, as it was about being able to use certain products, like bras, pretty underwear, and shaving cream. I cringe to think about how much of my puny allowance and baby-sitting money went to that crap… that and cigarettes!!

And it didn’t end there. Just last week, at my mother-in-law’s celebration, my 24 year old daughter told me I’d better take a tweezer to my upper lip (I had left my epilator at home), so I spent a few painful minutes in the bathroom plucking out the darker fuzz under my nose one at time until it met her approval. “Wer schön sein will, muss leiden!” “To be beautiful, one must suffer,” so the German saying.

But to what new torture has this younger generation acquiesced?! It infuriates me that the porn industry has reached so far into the main culture, that one would be hard pressed to find a woman under, what? 40? 35? Older? Younger? that has any hair at all anywhere on her body but her head. It is not enough that they are selling women string wedgies for the price of a fine bottle of wine, but now the culture is dictating that women masquerade as prepubescent girls for the rest of their lives to appease a pornography, excuse me, a child-pornography saturated male (and female?) population. Only children well under the age of consent have no pubic hair. Growing pubic hair is what happens when you grow into an ADULT. What does that say about those that are holding this up as the new bar of beauty sex-appeal for women to order their lives around?

Obviously I am not writing an expose with any facts, statistics, or personal profiles in the half hour I give myself to write my warm ups. And of course, I’ve not seen any of this for myself. But just knowing that women are going along with this is enough for me to tear my hair out!