The Truth About Men

Journal Entry: Oct. 19, 2008, 1:19AM


[Names Changed to Protect from Torts]


My letter tonight, like most of my letters in recent years, worked its usual magic...scared him like a giant lemming straight over the cliff, albeit the real Henry stood up and left the building about a week ago. Since then the robot Henry has dutifully made his appointed phone calls and kept his scheduled meetings with me, in body sans heart or soul. I think he was hoping I wouldn't notice that I had become a chore...or a scary demanding woman. I think he was hoping he wouldn't notice either.


But I, at any rate, am true to form. I haven't changed my ways, no matter the number of years of therapy. I went straight for another strong, silent, totally self-contained man who had a strong, mean, demanding mother and a weak, passive father and who does not, by first nature, love or trust women. It got to the point that giving me a compliment felt to me as if it would actually extract some visceral piece of himself. For my part, I fell into waiting...spending my life waiting for him to come back to me. And the only times he ever did were when we made love. The very worst times were when we were together and something else took his attention: he seemed to just forget I was there. [But I wrote the poem about that on the other blog.] I turned into a client...a business appointment. He said he would call tomorrow night, and he would call tomorrow night. I wished so often that he would wake up and want to hear my voice first thing in the morning. He always said he wanted to "touch base"...sounds like a business term to me. Called me "Kiddo" like I was his daughter; that is what he called his daughter. There was nothing familiar, nothing in the second person singular intimate voice, nothing that seems to distinguish me as the person he is in love with, but he seemed so surprised that somehow I didn't automatically know that he was in love with me.


Journal Entry: Oct. 19, 2008, 6:41AM


I've been distracting myself with "The New Yorker" and games on my Blackberry in order not to see the big picture...how every single human being's neuroses just exactly, precisely, perfectly keep their just exactly, precisely, perfectly [unconsciously] chosen relationships from working out; and how, God bless me, I see men [all men] as being hobbled by their missing leg on that Y chromosome, enslaved by their piteously selfish, narcissistic myopia [the little Sun Gods!] thinking their tiny penises are almighty when, in fact, they themselves are biologically inferior beings because: 1) their reproductive organs aren't even protected; 2) they have no hormonal protections against cancers, heart disease, osteoporosis, etc; 3) their role in reproduction of the species is minuscule; 4) their general stamina is sorely lacking over the course of a lifetime; and 5) genetically they're missing an entire leg...born amputees, as it were. NO WONDER they've had to take dominion. They're scared shitless of us!
What is the GREAT SADNESS is that we, the Strong Ones of the species, bought into it. The joke is on us. Obviously we can use them any way we like. As a group they are pitifully mindless--and are proud of it! They are ripe for manipulating. We really should take charge, be mindful as a group, and stop them from destroying the planet...family by family, tribe by tribe, race by race, country by country, armed conflict by armed conflict. They have just about done us all in with their incessant need to prove their power. If they had ever truly felt their power, they would have no longer been crazed by the need to display it.


Unfortunately, biologically, they have no power--and they know it. The truth is so simple. It is the dead elephant lying in the middle of every living room, conference room, war room in every country in the world: men run the show because they can't; they are driven to prove they have the control, the power they know they don't. They work as a group to keep out the other half of the tribe who does have the control, the power, the natural prowess, the longevity, the clear-headedness that prevails when rage does not dominate, the ability to reason over time. Men call that natural cycle something abominable while they simply dump their memory of their testosterone-fueled rage episodes into the void of collective male unconsciousness, or rather female consciousness, while they go about their plotting and pondering and exercising their powers of paranoia and grandiosity.


Meanwhile the women nurture the little people and the older people and the sick people and even the the men and make sure the planet holds itself together even as the men plot to destroy it.


No wonder the men come home at night, pour a tall one, and go off somewhere by themselves. As a group, they think they are in charge. Individually, they have trouble looking us in the eye.

Good-bye, Henry.

reaction formation...to recent leaching of serious emotion

Boogie on, Chilren,
Boogie on...

How the Cabbage Ate the Cow

Listen up! This is gospel. Until I see you experience your own anger, you don't get to:

1. judge my anger
2. tell me you fear my anger
3. provoke my anger
   

You just get to start dealing with whatever it is in you that reroutes your anger into something else. You get to yank the knots out of it, so you can quit pulling my rope.

I have been this family's anger whipping child since I was born.
I was the Big Man's alter-anger [she made me do it].
I was the Lady's Righteous Indignation [we don't do anger here].
I was the Rising Sun's Answer to Sadistic Wishes [look at this, qudeery].
And I was your maiden on the alter of medical inspection, remember?

I officially quit.

You don't get to use me anymore even unconsciously. And you just have to listen to me tell you what you're doing. I paid for the right with those eight years on my feet working through the night for pitance pay.

What you're doing is using me: you're posing as the victim of my anger, my hostility, my aggresion, whatever, until...that perfect pregnant moment, the timing exquisitely set up for the punchline, when you metamorphose into my predator, out to draw blood with whatever verbal barbs you can flail at me...in all that expensive habiliment of unconsiousness you get in, within which you can watch your anger work its msyterious sadistic magic and not have to take credit for any of it.

No more! I see the game and I refuse to play any longer.

About the other side of the cycle: no more pity, no more empathy for the victim. There is no sad and pitiful victim; only an angry woman who has not/will not emerge from her deflated self. The anger would bring out the energy, and the energy, the life. Leave it all there on the cold floor by the fireplace if you like. Drift you way toward a cold death. I will no longer wait by your side and try to comfort you.

So. It is said and done. Fini.

NOW:
Will you come out to play a different game with me?
I would so very much like to play at life with you...