Tag Archives: misogyny

The Road to Diamond, Day 204: Dragon Dance

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Posted by on in collaborating, distraction issues, impediments, Inner Struggles, Personal Values, Social, Spiritual, Striving

June 20, 2025- The group of eight filled the study period a lot better than I had anticipated. Guiding mature adults through what seemed, at first glance, like it might be an overly simple process actually ensued quite joyfully and meaningfully. We were studying the first sections of a book that explores the human spirit and its development in this life and the next. Despite its rather catechistic format, there is an underlying depth to the questions posed. Our discussion was slow, deliberate-and rather delightful.

Spiritual teacher and sometime politician Marianne Williamson pointed out, in an essay published this morning, that most everything resembles an iceberg: 1/3 or less is in the visible realm; the rest is below the surface. This is, essentially, the Law of Unintended Consequences. Relatively few of us think things all the way through, in the manner of the group mentioned above. We simply convince ourselves, or are convinced by others, that there is not enough time in a day for such deliberation. As mechanical tasks have become more automated, this has in many ways only gotten worse. Sooner or later, however, the tendency to engage in a mad rush leads to mishaps of one form or another.

I was in two restaurants today-one for an early lunch; the other for a small dinner. At both places, the mood was a bit tense, what I would call a Dragon Dance. The people involved were making a show of working together, but were barely tolerant of one another, and seemed a bit wary of their customers. At lunch, whilst sitting and enjoying a well-made club sandwich and side of salad greens, I heard a clatter from the work area around the corner. Something told me to stay seated, and let the process roll out as it would. A few minutes later, two workers came back out, neither looking at the other, and as I packed up half a sandwich and rose to leave, one tersely wished me a good day.

The afternoon was punctuated by the enjoyable gathering. The heat, though, would wear on others. At dinner, in an outside patio, I was served by two different workers, who were at first cheerful and pleasant. A musician who was performing 60s and 70s tunes, began making mildly misogynistic comments and chose songs that had the effect of irritating the women present, including the two servers. All service to unaccompanied men, including yours truly, then came to a screeching halt. The singer was oblivious, but the faces of the ladies had an “if looks could kill” tenor. I was due to leave for an evening meeting, and so bussed my own plate and glass. The server who took the items from me was appreciative, then remarked to her co-worker that she was feeling overwhelmed. They both continued about their work, but the stomping around and slamming things down painted a picture of people at the limits of their patience. I can only hope the manager was able to get things back under control.

Spring has now come to an end, and we must face even more heat, dance with more dragons, while maintaining equilibrium. The topic of the evening meeting, that followed the tense dinner salad and cool beverage, was “How do we see others?” I have a tendency to look at people very deeply and try to understand them from a number of angles. My only hope is that I don’t end up seeing things that aren’t there.

The Road to Diamond, Day 82: Soft Landing

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Posted by on in Assistance, collaborating, Community, impediments, Inspiration, Personal Values, Social, Spiritual, Striving, Travel

February 18, 2025, Los Angeles- The plane seemed to barely touch ground, here at Los Angeles World Airport, (as the Cathay Pacific pilot referred to this grand sprawl. It was, further, not a long wait to go through Customs and Immigration, or to find lodging here, in advance of my flight back to Phoenix early tomorrow morning.

The sometimes frenetic outpouring of “Welcome back! Now let’s do these two dozen things, in the next two days” was not seen tonight. I have a stock answer to that-“My schedule is set until Friday morning, and Saturday is already booked-by service activities”. That should take care of things for a few days.

Seriously, though, my next several months will be largely about preps for the Fire and Flood season. My friend told me, more or less, that focusing on one Big Thing at a time is really best, and it makes the most sense to me. Besides, every other thought that has come into my mind, over the past two weeks, has been about disaster mitigation.

I spent the waking portion of the trans-Pacific flight, about four hours, re-watching “Apocalypse Now” and watching the Italian film, “Familia”. The former, as many know, is about dystopia, in our time-a cautionary tale about megalomania and the hellscape of war. The second is about the inability of men, in particular, to get enough hold of their insecurities that the women in their lives be treated with the dignity due them-and about the dichotomy between the way a husband treats his wife and a son treats his mother. “Familia” also touches on the neo-Fascism of Italy, from the 1990s to the present.

We have our struggles in the United States of America, right now, but nothing like those described above-yet.

Misogyny

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Posted by on in children, collaborating, Community, Family, Inspiration, Personal goals, Personal Values, Social, Spiritual, Striving

November 17, 2024- I watched the first episode of “Lioness” this evening. It is a spy thriller, centered on women secret agents and fighters, in a Middle Eastern backdrop. Each of the women has a male advocate, if not a lover. They just don’t really need those men, day to day. One of the central characters comes to the Lioness program by way of escaping from a gang of disaffected, misogynistic men.

I thought back to how I was raised-to be a gentleman (by my father), countered by male peers who were alternately respectful of our mothers, sisters, grandmothers and aunts, while carrying a veneer of seeing other girls and women as means to an end. It was the stuff of adolescence, certainly, but subliminally was carried forward into our group psyches.

My wife became my equal, my partner, by dint of her sheer intellect and tough personality. Penny grew to become nobody’s fool. I became someone who did not need a fool. As the first true love of my maturity grew into a fully independent woman, so I began to grow into a fully independent man. From there, we both became interdependent.

In the years immediately following her passing, I found the sticky residue of my adolescence clinging to my psyche. As sheer will power and prayer had helped me shed alcohol dependency, thirty years earlier, so did they help me shed the stench of misogyny that was trying to get out. I let it out, along with the lack of self-esteem that is behind all such negative dust. True maturity had been reached.

Young men, around the world, face challenges to their self-concept that have historically been faced by posturing, adopting a dominant position towards their female peers and subscribing to a false sense of entitlement. This is the ethos of The Pack. There is an alpha male, but his “true strength” is only evident when the rest of the peer group is present, for reinforcement. The public face of misogyny is the Incel (“involuntary celibate”), who takes the stance that abstinence from sex is being forced on him by a conspiracy of women and other men.

In truth, though, focusing on one’s sexuality is dealing with only the outer trappings of insecurity. Procreation has an important place in the order of society, but it is only a place. A person, male or female, who has been raised to truly value self, who is focused on his/her totality: Intellect, variety of interests, physical stamina, dreams and goals, social skills, spirituality-will be more likely to know success, to be resilient in the face of challenges and less likely to blame others when things go wrong.

These are things I have come to fully realize, over the past fourteen years.

Leslie Van Houten

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Posted by on in Assistance, Community, Historical, impediments, Inner Struggles, Personal Values, Social, Spiritual, Striving

July 12, 2023- She was, in her youth, the sort of girl with whom I might have fallen madly in love . That long brown hair, those soulful eyes, and that longing for someone, anyone, who would see her as more than that beautiful outward appearance, made her ‘ripe for rescue’, my mates would’ve said. That was my teenage self’s ideal-a girl who needed me.

That night, though, when her pseudo-rescuer, one Tex Watson, told her to “do something” to their captive, Rosemary LaBianca, an innocent small businesswoman, in the wrong place at the wrong time-on that hot August night, she gave up that humanity, that beauty became a facade-as Leslie the Lost stabbed the frantic woman, who had just become a widow, at the hands of another Manson girl.

That night, I was a continent away, in the initial stages of becoming a man-a trainee in Echo Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Brigade-at Fort Jackson, SC. A few of my fellows spoke of hearing something about a crazy-eyed “lunatic”, named Charles Manson, who had gone on a killing spree-and that maybe he had some “hot chicks” doing his dirty work. No one was certain, though, and the talk dried up-to turn, a few days later, to an event we were all missing: The Woodstock Festival, ten hours away, in the Hudson Valley of New York. It was around then that the Drill Instructors began bantering among themselves about what they would do, if they had five minutes alone with Manson-and what they would like to do to some of those girls. Of course, they also said, Woodstock, and its women, were a whole lot closer.

Then we got back to the business of training, qualifying with our rifles and bayonets, passing our Physical Fitness tests and General Knowledge exams, marching on the parade ground-and going on with our Advanced Individual Training.

I mostly forgot about Manson, and his dastardly crew-though every so often, I would be reminded of those horrible acts of savagery-and just how shallow a person’s physical appearance can render her or him, by movies like “Helter Skelter”, and, much later, “Once Upon A Time in Hollywood”. Manson got what he deserved. Leslie Van Houten is now out of one prison, but will never get of the other. The prison of public opinion will never see the long-gone pretty teenager. It will forever see the drug-crazed monster, stabbing away at someone presented to her as “the enemy”. The most charitable among us will see an aging lost soul, who has to learn fifty years’ worth of life skills-from driving a car to installing apps on a cellular phone-and good luck in finding a job, college degrees aside. The most astute among young people will see exactly what not to become. I see an indictment of self-centered, abdicating parents, who failed their daughter, terribly.

There, but for a loving family and a decent set of opportunities, might have gone I.

Their Whole Selves

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Posted by on in children, Community, distraction issues, impediments, Personal Values, Social, Striving

July 3, 2021- The comely young woman set down her blanket, just six feet from where I sat in my foldable studio chair, and proceeded to writhe and shift herself back and forth, finally finding a relatively comfortable position. As she was wearing a fairly short skirt, I felt it seemly to look straight ahead and not make her obvious discomfort even worse. Her two children were off and running, to other parts of the park, so she had that, too, to handle-and was constantly sitting up and looking past me, until finally spotting the kids. Poor soul was definitely stressed and barely able to relax, so after the family had watched five minutes or so of “Grease”, on the outdoor screen, and mother had wrapped herself in the blanket, they stood up and left. Hopefully, she got the rest that was so obviously in order.

Men, especially of my age group, were raised, mostly by the wider society, to hold the opposite sex in a sort of special status-not quite looking at girls and women we didn’t know very well, in a less than whole human perspective. I can say, truthfully, that this was also true of how we viewed ANY stranger, but was especially so in male-female interactions. It has been a hallmark of my married life, and widowhood, that coming to view every human being in a holistic manner has replaced the old “meat market ethic”. Misogyny, and its derivatives, were quite frankly the bane of my existence-and I don’t miss them at all.

My friends, women and men alike, are people I can hug (pandemic protocol permitting) or at l least fist bump, and with whom I can share just about any insights. This, to me, is the feeling of true liberation. I look forward to the day when ANYONE can feel the same about traveling alone as I do, about being where they like to be and not feeling awkward or at risk, and being seen as complete human beings-from childhood onward.

Bobby’s “Bad Day”

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Posted by on in Community, distraction issues, impediments, Personal Values, Social

March 18,2021- So, we hear, from a law-enforcement professional, with his own set of race-related issues, that the killer of eight people in the Atlanta area was, among other things, having a “bad day”. We hear, from the accused, that it was not a racially-motivated act, but rather an attempt to deal with his own sex addiction.

Three things come to mind here. First, while three of the victims were not of Asian descent, six of them were. The owners of the two spas that were targeted, both of which engaged the accused as a customer, in prior visits, were of Asian descent. The two Caucasian victims were customers, happenstance victims-as was the Guatemalan man, who wasn’t even connected with the spa-he was a passerby, taking care of other business at a neighbouring shop. He is, at this writing, still alive. The primary targets, by all accounts at present, were people of Asian descent.

Second, when is it ever a workable strategy to deal with one’s own afflictions, real or imagined, by killing other people? We have dealt with this, on this blogsite, once before-after the Isla Vista attacks of 2014. Back then, an apologist for the accused killer tried to deflect blame by lashing out at me for defending the right of a woman to freely choose her own romantic partners. In hindsight, I had a fair amount of work to do, in cleaning up my own act-with regard to how I viewed women. That work has been done-yet it remains that my own travails had nothing to do with the actions of a madman. I have never killed, raped, attacked or manhandled anyone, much less regarded them as being responsible for my psychological well-being; end of digression. The accused, in the most recent case, is every bit responsible, in and of himself, for the mess in which he finds himself.

Finally, and this is the most potentially problematic matter- Asian women have long been hyped as being overly congenial, submissive and alluring. They are not any of those, taken as a group-any more than other people who have found themselves so hyped. Perhaps it is a necessary experience for people who stereotype others, to have to go through one painful learning curve after another-but this much is something I have always found true: Regardless of real or imagined characteristics attributed to people of a certain nation or ethnicity, not everyone fits a given mold. In fact, I have never met anyone whose personal qualities were the result of a socially-prescribed mould.

Bobby’s “bad day” was, in sum, a hoist of his own petard. Even IF one were to happen upon people engaged in acts of prostitution or other sexual conduct, it would not fall to him, or her, to act as judge, jury and executioner.

Larry Nassar

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Posted by on in children, Community, impediments, Inner Struggles, Personal Values, Striving

January 27, 2018, Prescott-

I dropped off my customary load of old newspapers, at a local charity for battered women and their children, as is routine for me, on Saturday mornings.  Next door to the thrift shop, there is a thriving donut shop, run by a young couple and their extended family.  I went in there, as is also routine, and was greeted warmly by the wife, who apologized for not having enough coffee to fill my order, but graciously gave me an extra 1/2 cup, when the brew was ready.  Shortly afterward, feeling the need for a  more substantial breakfast than a donut, I stopped in another young lady’s shop and got an open-faced bagel, with lox and cream cheese.

Both young women are gorgeous, brainy, hard-working, and very much in love with their mates.  I am there to support their dreams, and their families’ dreams, period.  In the face of the recent conviction of former sports medicine practitioner Larry Nassar, for the serial abuse of young female athletes, a few observations:

Many people have an intrinsic fear of certain among life’s features- Financial wealth, personal success, good physical health and the presence of good-looking members of the opposite gender.  I get all of this.  “I used to be among the crowd you’re in with”, to quote Bob Dylan (“Positively Fourth Street”).  Financial wealth eluded Penny and me, largely due to life happening, but also because of my own lack of financial intelligence.  I didn’t think I deserved personal success, and lo and behold- there were plenty of movers and shakers who were glad to oblige me, in that deprivation.  Physical health has been my strong suit, though the dental part of it had to be recovered, after putting my own needs on hold, during Penny’s long illness.  I was blessed with a beautiful wife, and stayed with her, long after both of us found our good looks fading- because in my family, a marriage is for life, and besides- I love her spirit, still.

Outside of my marriage, though, there was a time when I felt myself undeserving of the attentions of attractive women.  Some attribute such an attitude to misogyny.  Perhaps, but I think that criticism is way too simplistic.  No fear is about the thing that is feared.  It is about the lack of self-worth, in the beholder.  Beyond that, however, is this:  Women have always been complete human beings, with dreams and goals that are every bit as worthy as those of men.  That we men have often overlooked or discounted those dreams and goals is no fault of the dreamers.

I get that the condemned Mr. Nassar may have started off wanting to serve the population of teen women athletes.  He may even have had twinges of conscience, when he first gave in to his lower cravings.  Yet, it didn’t last.  Women who should have been able to pursue their athletic goals, without hindrance from a source that should have been trustworthy, found themselves being treated like toys.  Mr. Nassar’s reaction to their needs, and to their presence, became despicable.

I have worked with teens and young adults, pretty much continuously, since the late 1970’s.  The bottom line has ever been, honour and respect; build, not destroy.  If I inadvertently wronged anyone, to the “extent of a mustard seed”, that person got full amends.

I can only hope that the frightened, ravaged young gymnasts go on, to recover, to dream again and to live in fullness.

An Eastward Homage, Day 7: A Paris Walkabout- Part 1, Tuileries

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Posted by on in Travel

I had started Monday, June 2, intending to tour the Louvre.  Several things transpired which made that not practical for this morning, so I switched Monday’s plan with Wednesday’s.  Thus, I spent 2 1/2 hours on Monday morning, walking Tuileries, the gardens and sculpture areas which were the grounds of the Bourbon dynasty’s Paris place of residence. Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were confined here, after the Revolution of 1789.

Confinement is a relative term.  The expanse that is Tuileries fronts a greater expanse, that we know today as the Louvre.  Here are some scenes from this fine garden area.  Actually, this statue of Jeanne d’Arc is across the street from Tuileries.

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The scenes below are in the park, though.

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I thought about not including the sculpture below, after being attacked online, as a “misogynist”, earlier this evening.  You know, though, unless a WOMAN comes on here and says that’s how she sees me, I’m not going to change who I am.  A man calling me “misogynist’ is like a white person calling another white person a racist, or a straight person tripping out on another straight’s “homophobia”.  I’m saying it here, all people are beautiful in the sight of God, and using terms of endearment towards people of the opposite gender is not wrong.  Both genders admire each other’s physical features, and both genders, at least among those of good will, value the WHOLE of another person.  THAT is what I believe;  end of rant.

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This lawn evoked “Alice in Wonderland”.

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This grove is indicative of the actual forest of the Bourbons’ time.

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Next, I will share the rest of the walk, at Place de la Concorde, along the Seine and at the Tour Eiffel.