That Time Is Now

Josh Wheadon's recent post asking, "What's wrong with women?" has gotten quite a bit of well-deserved attention across the blogsphere. Reflecting upon a recently-recorded stoning to death of a young woman for being suspected of allowing a "wrong" man access to her vagina, or, at least her heart, Wheadon wrote:

Last month seventeen year old Dua Khalil was pulled into a crowd of young men, some of them (the instigators) family, who then kicked and stoned her to death. This is an example of the breath-taking oxymoron “honor killing”, in which a family member (almost always female) is murdered for some religious or ethical transgression. Dua Khalil, who was of the Yazidi faith, had been seen in the company of a Sunni Muslim, and possibly suspected of having married him or converted. That she was torturously murdered for this is not, in fact, a particularly uncommon story. But now you can watch the action up close on CNN. Because as the girl was on the ground trying to get up, her face nothing but red, the few in the group of more than twenty men who were not busy kicking her and hurling stones at her were filming the event with their camera-phones.

There were security officers standing outside the area doing nothing, but the footage of the murder was taken – by more than one phone – from the front row. Which means whoever shot it did so not to record the horror of the event, but to commemorate it. To share it. Because it was cool.
. . . I like to think that in America this would be considered unbearably appalling, that Kitty Genovese is still remembered, that we are more evolved. But coincidentally, right before I stumbled on this vid I watched the trailer for “Captivity”.

A few of you may know that I took public exception to the billboard campaign for this film, which showed a concise narrative of the kidnapping, torture[,] and murder of a sexy young woman. I wanted to see if the film was perhaps more substantial (especially given the fact that it was directed by “The Killing Fields” Roland Joffe) than the exploitive ad campaign had painted it. The trailer resembles nothing so much as the CNN story on Dua Khalil. Pretty much all you learn is that Elisha Cuthbert is beautiful, then kidnapped, inventively, repeatedly and horrifically tortured, and that the first thing she screams is “I’m sorry”.

“I’m sorry.”

What is wrong with women?

I mean wrong. Physically. Spiritually. Something unnatural, something destructive, something that needs to be corrected.

How did more than half the people in the world come out incorrectly? I have spent a good part of my life trying to do that math, and I’m no closer to a viable equation. And I have yet to find a culture that doesn’t buy into it. Women’s inferiority –- in fact, their malevolence -- is as ingrained in American popular culture as it is anywhere they’re sporting burkhas. I find it in movies, I hear it in the jokes of colleagues, I see it plastered on billboards, and not just the ones for horror movies. Women are weak. Women are manipulative. Women are somehow morally unfinished. (Objectification: another tangential rant avoided.) And the logical extension of this line of thinking is that women are, at the very least, expendable.

I try to think how we got here. The theory I developed in college (shared by many I’m sure) is one I have yet to beat: Womb Envy.

Ever since I read it, I've felt something tugging at my consciousness, telling me that Wheadon's post reminded me of somthing, although I couldn't remember what. Then, I thought that I remembered what it reminded me of, but I couldn't find it anywhere. Then, yesterday, sitting and knitting and listening to the blessed rain, "Eureka!" I ran and grabbed one of the seminal books of my life: The Politics of Women's Spirituality, edited by Charlene Spretnak. There, sure enough, was the essay, "Metaphysical Feminism" by, whom else?,Robin Morgan. It's a bit long (the laughter of the Goddess at me for chastizing Robin Artisson for his over-long posts), but you should bear with me and read the whole thing:

"The sea organisms crawled up onto the land to commit ecstatic suicide, to escape triumphantly from existing, to return to infinite pure energy, motionless.

But life forced itself to flow through even the gasps they drank in what they assumed was death: air. Despite themselves, they became air-breathing organisms. Every step taken toward nonexisting brings us closer toward existing.

It is the fault of something female.

Nature, we have heard, abhors a vacuum. Speaking then through male anguish at his own womb envy, nature discovered existential despair. But male anguish expressed this despair as misogny. What else to feel when faced with this female endless birthing, this repeated insistence on life and life-giving and life-re-creation? What is this maddening tendency to bear and bear and bear, as if each woman were somehow somewhere in herself singing 'I never met a universe I didn't like'?

He only wants her to understand his wretchednes. He persecutes her to make her understand why death is the answer, he tortures her to raise her consciousness to the suicidal, to make her as truly aware as he is. She won't despair. She won't die. She creates agriculture, domesticates animals. Culture is born.

He appropriates her gods, her whole cosmic space, to the merciless, negative, bleak, terror-filed void in which he is trapped. She curses his gods -- but does not die. She calls to him. She sees his beauty writhing, contorted in pain. He sobs with longing to share what she is, sees, owns, the whole Earth as female, the solar system female, the universe female, all that he smells and touches and which holds him and bore him and will outlive him -- female, eternally rutting and conceiving and laughing and producing.

For what? What is there to celebrate here, in this dimension? Is there no way to kill her out of this gross procreation? Can none of his entropy conquer her energy? If he cannot stop her, can he at least successfully pretend that he insists [that] she do precisely what she is doing? Can he tell himself [that] he demands [that] she conceive? Rape is born, his own parthogenetic child. Laws are written controlling her body's freedom. She creates pottery, baskets, songs. She investigates the power of herbs. Art and science are born.

Is there no way to stop her? Is there no way to evade this inexhaustible deathless pursuing consciousness? He devises nirvanas of escape. Oriental philosophies which pretend she is illusion. Occidental philosophies which pretend she is existentially meaningless. And all the while she smiles and conceives. Children. Grapefruits. The thimble. Barnacles. The printing press. City squirrels.

He is more and more trapped into his system. He invents new and efficient ways of murdering what she produces -- wars, chemicals, political systems which destroy her creations or treat them as products. He is consumed with self-loathing for having become the weapon of himself and never the victim in his global attempt to commit suicide. She weeps for him and gives birth to a new star, hoping its nova will divert him from his misery.

He invents names for her creatures, deliberately mixed around. He calls the human ones insects, vermin, pigs, cows. Then he kills them and their animal namesakes, too. He forgets what and who and why he is killing. He knows only where he came from -- that womb of Earth, and where he is going -- that same insatiable womb with its infinite capacity for orgasm and for creation as it sucks him in and spews him out and laughs lovingly at him as if he were her plaything.

Only when he has totally forgotten who he is and why he hates her so, only when she herself has almost forgotten herself, only when his pain has at last infected her so that she has almost begun to to listen, almost understand his message of nonexistence, his longing for peace and death and the silence of a collapsed nonwomb whose energy and matter are once and for all time separated -- only then does she slowly rouse herself to remind him.

That time is now."

Wheadon's a smart guy. I wonder if he ever read any Robin Morgan?