Department Of This Date In History
Yep. Twenty-five years ago.
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Department Of Yep #2: This. Yep; This.
As a longtime reader of (select) advice columns, moiself has come to think that they can open an interesting window into human motivations and behaviors. Over the years I have noticed an irritating pattern to many of the letters sent by advice-seekers: ( trigger alert: massive generalization ahead)
* A man will report his emotions sans even the slightest modicum of introspection
( “Why doesn’t she understand how she’s annoying me?!?!?” );
* A woman will report her emotions and second-guess herself ( she reports an astoundingly annoying thing – a thing that would even piss off Mr. Rogers or the Dali Llama – which was said or done to her, yet asks,
“Am I right to be annoyed by ___?” )
“Yes, you can stop second-guessing yourself, sweetie, your boss really is a flaming asshat.”
Aside from the indisputable entertainment value of kitten-bops-enormous-dog’s-nose videos, social media ‘s worth goes up a few notches when you consider how it can be an effective way of transmitting insightful observations and analyses about the politics of personal relationships. One such analysis which I recently came across online (from “The Inner Pattern” ) addressed and partially explained the roots behind the complicated advice-column-letter-dynamic moiself mentions above.
What’s the most damaging thing patriarchy ever pulled off? Convincing everyone that male anger counts as objective reality, but female emotions get filed under subjective instability.
Watch how differently the same emotion gets treated depending on who’s feeling it. He slams a door and it’s “he had a rough day.” She raises her voice once and it’s “she needs to calm down.”
His frustration gets a cause. Hers gets a diagnosis.
We grew up watching men’s reactions get treated as data — something to analyze, respond to, take seriously. Meanwhile women’s reactions got treated as noise — something to soothe, dismiss, or wait out. So, we learned early to run our own feelings through a filter before anyone else even heard them. Is this reasonable enough? Am I being too sensitive? Will this get taken seriously or will it just get me labeled?
That filter isn’t caution. It’s conditioning. It’s decades of being taught that our inner world needs to justify itself before it’s allowed to exist.
Your anger was never irrational. It was just never given the same benefit of the doubt his got by default.
(my emphases, FB, first seen by moiself on 9-5-26)
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Department Of There Goes The Neighborhood
Dateline: The morning of August 5; SeaTac airport; Alaska Airline’s first-class lounge; waiting to board our flight to Iceland. Checking out the massive, multi-buffet table breakfast spread set out for the lounge passengers I see that, on the end buffet table, there is a contraption that look like a 3-D printer. This machine is labeled, “pancake printer,” and moiself alerts my family to its presence. None of us actually want a pancake, but we have to see how it works, and so I press its start button.
Five seconds after I start the pancake printer a woman walks past the side of the buffet table and eyes my family with confusion. She is dressed in that casual money style [1] and holds a plate of pastries which looked like they’d have French-sounding names. Meanwhile, my family – MH in his tie-dye tee, son K in his black leather jacket /death metal band shirt, daughter Belle in her in Pacific NW/Columbia lumberjack gear, and me in my CatZilla t-shirt – is crowded around the pancake printer.
I remain standing while the rest of my family bends forward, practically down on their knees, as they watch a blob of (ostensibly) pancake batter make its way down a series of the printer’s criss-crossing cooking treadmills. I make eye contact with the woman, and with widened eyes and a knowing nod of my head, I project (or so I intend) an amiable, joking, yeah right – like we’ve never seen a pancake before vibe. In return, her facial expression and body language…
Oh, how can I put it? So much attitude is succinctly and clearly expressed in the rolling/stink eye stare she flings toward me and mine:
“OMG, who let the Beverly Hillbillies into the first class lounge !?!”
Y’all come back now for the pancake breakfast, y’ hear?
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Department Of Yeah, The Date…
September 11 Memories
Twenty-five years ago, since those horrific ( and/yet mesmerizingly cinematic [2] ) terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. So much has changed in our nation; so much of that change is not for the better, and so much of this not-for-better change has been and is attributed to needing to Get Tough On Terrorism®.
I remember the unscripted eloquence of British PM Tony Blair, who interrupted his planned speech on a domestic issue to express his profound shock and sympathy for the American people and pledge his and his country’s full support for his allies.
I remember the stark contrast of Blair’s heartfelt articulateness with the glassy-eyed, aardvark-caught-in-the-headlights expression of the clearly-not-up-to-the-gravity-of-what-lies-ahead “leader” which was George W. Bush. The only solace I had been able to take from GWB’s mistaken ascendency to the presidency was that, up until 9-11, he had seemed destined to be a one-term president.
“Uh, Dad? Dick Cheney? Somebody, tell me what to do…”
But I’ll let the pundits and historians elaborate on that. After all these years, moiself is more interested in the personal stories – select memories, from those at Ground Zero and those of us across the country and out of the country [3] – of we who were affected by the attacks. It is the stories of our reactions, the memories of that impactful, holy-shit-am-I-watching-a-movie-or-is-this-real ?!?!?! day, which we will impart to our children who were too young to remember (or who were born after) the 9-11 attacks.
Moiself will always know that September 11, 2001 was on a Tuesday, because I was in my home office that morning, getting ready to leave for my Tuesday 7 am book club. I gathered my book club items – coffee mug, [4] purse, jacket, the book the group was currently discussing – and stepped out of the office. Before I could head down the hallway to the garage, I looked up at the sound of MH’s voice.
MH was standing in the upstairs hallway, leading against the stairway railing, a confused look on his face. He said he’d been listening to NPR’s Morning Edition, [5] which had just reported that an airplane had hit one of New York City’s World Trade Center Twin Towers. I replied that I remembered reading, several years ago, that a small/private plane had collided with a large sky scraper in some big city – I found that to be an odd and accident, as you’d think the pilot could see such an enormous building in his path…
MH, still confused, said, no, this was a commercial-sized jet, and the report was that less than a half hour later another jet hit the second tower, and “…what kind of air traffic control mixup or other accident could account for…”
I gasped as I interrupted him: “TWO jets? That’s no accident.”
After listening to a few news reports I grimly drove to book group, which met in the pastor’s office of our local UCC church. [6] Every member of the book group showed up, despite or because of having heard the news. We all had the same feeling: we wanted to be together. I was one of the last to arrive, and made my entrance feelings-first:
“Well, we are ALL FUCKED. This is how wars start.”
I forget the name of the book we were discussing. The leader of the group, the pastor, obviously felt some obligation to try to steer us toward the book, even as she was glassy eyed with shock and worry (her beloved sister-in-law was a flight attendant who often worked the American Airlines route from Boston to LAX) . [7] But (of course) we spent most of the morning discussing the attacks, speculating about all that we knew and did not know, and what might happen in the days to come.
Two weeks later, when details of the terrorist plot were being revealed, the book group again set aside our book for the day and mostly discussed the attacks. One of the group members brought in an article he’d been reading, written by a foreign correspondent who’d been researching the recruiting process for Islamist terrorist groups. The article addressed a seemingly unfathomable question: given the human instinct for preserving one’s own life, how do you recruit young men for a suicide mission? The book club member began reading the article’s list of commonalities found among the terrorist recruits:
“…strong ties to hard-core religious beliefs; weak ties to their own families; political idealism; religious and cultural conservatism – and while not necessarily virgins themselves, the young men were attracted by the enticement that their martyrdom would be a righteous deed which would earn them a shortcut to heaven, where they would enjoy the sexual attentions of 72 dark-eyed virgins….”
I heard my own snorting-with-ridicule interruption as if it were coming from somewhere other than my own mouth:
“Yeah, right – that shows you what kind of mindset fanaticism appeals to. What kind of sexually ignorant, inexperienced idiots want – I mean, seventy-two *virgins*? That’s an enticement? Give them just one middle-aged woman who knows what she’s doing…”
I looked around the circle at my book comrades’ wide-eyed, Is that so? expressions, and thought, maybe middle-aged moiself should have kept that to moiself?
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Department Of Not One Damn Recipe
I recently got a new cookbook, which is one of my favorite things to get. Cookbooks – moiself tends to read livres de cuisine like novels, as in, getting inspiration from more than actually following a recipe step by step. After reading through this new book I found moiself wondering, Why did I order this?
The book’s recipes concentrate on a culture whose cuisine is mostly unfamiliar to me – as do several cookbooks in my collection, so it’s not that. Sourcing many of the key ingredients would be difficult, but…see previous comment. It’s just that there was not one recipe that stood out, not one recipe that made me think, I’d like to try that, or work up a variant moiself. My get a new one get rid of an old one policy, [8] has kept my cookbook supply steady at seventy-four. And it will remain at 74 as this new book goes into the list of sixty cookbooks I have recycled. [9]
Woe to anyone who recycles one of my cookbooks.
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Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week [10]
A cigarette pack is one of the few consumer products…that practically insults its own customer. Buy a pack and you are greeted by…blunt declarations that your habit may kill you. Governments force tobacco companies to confess the danger directly on the packaging because the evidence is overwhelming: smoking causes cancer, cardiovascular disease, respiratory illness, and millions of deaths annually….
Yet the satirical image asks a deeply uncomfortable question: if cigarettes require warning labels because they can harm human beings, why do religions—whose histories include crusades, inquisitions, sectarian wars, terrorism, witch hunts, executions for heresy, honor killings, forced conversions, and systematic oppression—escape similar scrutiny?
The meme…exposes an asymmetry in moral outrage.
Society treats physical harm as measurable and ideological harm as sacred.
The irony is brutal. A cigarette company cannot advertise without legal constraints, but a preacher can tell children they deserve eternal torture for doubting a doctrine and still be called a moral authority. Tobacco executives are condemned for manipulating fear and addiction, while some religious institutions have built entire civilizations around fear of invisible punishment….
Imagine if holy books carried labels modeled after cigarette warnings:
WARNING: This ideology has been linked to violence, intolerance, and persecution when interpreted literally.
WARNING: Excessive exposure may impair critical thinking and increase susceptibility to authoritarianism.
( excerpts, Religion: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly )
(from my supply of stickers I carry with me when I travel, in case the hotel room has a Gideon bible or other religious book in the dresser drawer.)
* * *
May you see your emotional reactions as data, not noise;
May you practice the get a new one get rid of an old one policy;
May you benefit from the experience of even one middle-aged woman who knows what she’s doing;
…and may the hijinks ensue.
Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!
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[1] Like pornography, I know it when I see it, even if I can’t describe it…and so can you.
[2] I watched footage of the two places crashing into the towers, over and over, in a way trying to convince myself that it was real – it seemed like something out of a movie…but CGI was in its infancy then, and a Hollywood special effects crew couldn’t possibly have pulled off such an epic job.
[3] LS, in the Netherlands, are you there?
[4] That was the one day a week that I drank coffee in the morning.
[5] Which was his Monday – Friday morning routine, before he got out of bed and we got our kids breakfast and ready for school.
[6] The church MH and I were members of for years, until we came out of the Happy Heathens® closet.
[7] She had no news about her SIL at that time, but later that day was assured that her SIL was not working that day.
[8] Which I apply to most “things,” from cookbooks to household items to clothing….
[9] As in given away to friends and/or family and/or Goodwill.
[10] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists. No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.” Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org
