Angelina Jolie: Notes from my Travels

This week I took a break from my celeb-rag addiction and decided to read about Angelina Jolie in her own words. Notes from my Travels take pages right out of her notebooks penned in the beginning of her work with refugees and human rights.

Jolie’s young adulthood was just as self-absorbed as any other North American’s, uniquely obsessed with all manner of selfishness. I cut my wrists so you can see my pain! I starve myself so I will be as invisible as I feel! I shock the world by wearing black! I experiment with drugs and sex to show I don’t do boundaries! I’m not belittling those with these afflictions, not by a long shot: but I recognize the contribution of abject self-indulgence to North American spiritual sickness.

In a way, the book captures the transition from that uniquely North American type of tragedy, a woman desperate for attention and furious at the world, to ambassador of the world. Jolie’s the first to admit that the cure for self-absorption is to look outside the window. And look she did: straight into refugee camps in Africa, Cambodia, Pakistan, Ecuador and more. The indomitable spirit of people who had absolutely nothing and for whom illness, death, decay, starvation, and mourning were everyday life humbled Jolie. These travels inspired her to re-evaluate her contribution to the world, and she felt acting was only one of many gifts she was given.

This is not an academic assessment of the world’s poverty problems and the solutions. But it is incredibly inspiring to hear how reality turned a starlet’s world upside down, and how she answered that call, devoting her life from then on to the world. While celebrities can often afford to be generous, their donations of millions are still integral to many charities and organizations.

But Angelina doesn’t just sign the checks: that’s too easy. She is a brave and courageous lady who took inspiration from the late goddess Diana, who did not fear the land mines. Angelina Jolie goes into the scariest parts of the world and meets the amazing people there. It’s amazing to read along as this incredible young woman blossoms into a world ambassador and goddess, fulfilling her obvious fate. It’s clear that the cure for depression is to get out there and get our hands dirty outside of our sheltered bubble of abundance. Perhaps we can start by being grateful for what we have, even when we feel it isn’t much, instead of feeling ripped off by the new stuff we haven’t yet acquired.

Notes from my Travels by Angelina Jolie
Simon and Schuster, New York, 2003
all of the author’s proceeds from the sale of this book go to charity.

Say Goodbye to Hollywood

Addicts we know and love: Amy Winehouse, Lindsay Lohan, John Belushi, Kurt Cobain, Courtney Love, Elton John, Michael Jackson, Eminem, Drew Barrymore, Johnny Cash, Elvis, Judy Garland, Stephen King, Sigmund Freud, Billie Holliday, Robert Louis Stevenson, Charlie Parker, River Phoenix, Ernest Hemingway, Sir Winston Churchill, Jerry Garcia, Etta James, Wynonna Judd, Whitney Houston, Chris Penn, Ray Charles, Dionne Warwick, Fergie, Bo Bice, Ozzy OSbourne, Boy George, Anna Nicole Smith, Mary Kate Olsen, Samuel L. Jackson, Anthony Bourdain,Little Esther, etc etc etc etc etc.

While all eyes this week were on Amy Winehouse smoking crack, giving Britney’s train wreck a rare moment of relief from our scrutiny, Heath Ledger’s overdose news came out of left field. Details won’t surface for days, but rumours of a secret heroin addiction are already flying. Whether Heath was a sleeping pill popper or a junkie doesn’t matter: it goes to show that the consequences of drug use can happen to anyone at all, even bright stars with umpteen award nominations under their belt. Ledger was an absolute hottie who took risks in his craft and shone in the controversial blockbuster Brokeback Mountain. My heart goes out to his family and friends.

Though I can’t and won’t deny that once I was a party girl who might have thought Amy’s whining about rehab refusal was ‘wry and cavalier’, when the beehive-headed eccentric came out with that hit, it made me sick to my stomach. Sure, the timing was not all that wry- everyone around me was dying and going mad. I thought it tasteless to even joke about addiction like that. I’ll never be the anti-drug mafia: we’re going to do what we’re going to do, and we are wired to seek pleasure. But acting careless about it instead of reverent seemed a slap in the face to the millions of people who are in trouble because of acting carelessly once upon a time. I didn’t know much about Amy’s personal life, but she seemed robust and healthy and I couldn’t blame a sister for trying to make a giant hit. The days of celeb-rehab were raging, so the timing was right even if I felt her commentary should have been “I wanna go to rehab, too.”

Now that I actually saw with my own eyes a once-beautiful young woman sketching around her apartment smoking something sinisterly from a glass pipe, skeletal and tight-faced, I am deeply saddened. I’ve seen people straight out of that scenario, and they were smoking crystal meth, not crack, though with either it is very possibly too late. I hope not. I’d like to see a few more survivors than just the amazing Fergalicious, who once was so paranoid from the meth that she thought spies were in her laundry hamper.

I think that was the worst part, watching a video that brought back memories that seemed normal at the time. I made a painting once that said, “My life was a nightmare of spies and hospitals.” And so it was. Just for the record, I was not on meth: have you ever seen a fat meth user? And so what if I wasn’t? I have my own stories that would make your skin crawl, and so do you. It’s not a game of who’s on what. It’s a game of life and death. And I watched the life pour out of a whole handful of beautiful people with so much promise, then I buried them.

Last week I attended yet another heartbreaking funeral for the beautiful Miss Emily: after several years of meth-induced psychoses, she died alone on her birthday. She essentially starved and exhausted her body and brain. No one chooses this, folks. This is not about the choice to defy God or the family. It’s not about sin or evil. It’s called addiction because the person can’t stop even if they want to. And by the time you’re an addict, you want to. It’s not a joke. Do you think Miss Winehouse WANTS to look like that? Get off your high horse and get your hand out of the Dorito bag. We are wired to alter ourselves, via anything we put in our body, whether cigarettes or chips or crack. Then we get poisoned. Somewhere between the putting in and the dying is a fine line, and I’m still looking for it, quite frankly.

Growing up, my church was vehemently anti-Hollywood and anti-rock music because of the vast amount of ‘sin.’ It’s true that the entertainment industry is filled with drugs and alcohol, but there are two good reasons for that. One is the stress that comes with so much freedom, the emptiness that comes from a superficial society and its demands on your looks and your lifestyle. It’s obvious to me that a poor girl like Drew Barrymore is no more a ‘sinner’ than you or I. No eleven year old girl can be called evil for being a drug addict. Fuck off, right wing religious mafia. Grow up and get with the program. Try reading a few science manuals, and then read your Bible again so you can try acting like Jesus and show a little compassion. The other reason is that it’s visible. We all see that Lindsay Lohan chugged champagne from the bottle on New Years, then called her sponsor. No one saw me and my mom getting loaded on good Niagara wine after Emily’s funeral.

Why the church didn’t use the opportunity to teach different ways of stress relief and exploration, or to teach the facts about drugs and alcohol and compassion, I don’t know. I can tell you all right now, there is no difference between the ‘evil drug addict’ and you. It’s always blamed on ‘bad company’ as if there are a few ‘bad apples.’ Until we see that those bad apples are just the same ones that got bruised or fell of the truck along the way, we can’t even hope to relate to each other and help each other. I’m guilty myself of that ultimatum: it’s me or the drugs, sailor, sister, brother, husband. And boy did I feel bad when they chose the drugs. Now I know there was no choice. It was nothing personal. It was not about me.

The answer? If you thought I’d have one, I’m sorry, I don’t. It’s easy to yell ‘get help.’ But ‘help’ is still floundering and drowning in well-meaning counselors, judges, doctors who have no idea what they are doing. Miss Emily had help. Her helpful shrink prescribed Dex to help her cope while they discussed her issues. That’s almost the same drug as meth! Britney Spears’ drug tests seem to turn up normal, leading to the notion that she is buying clean piss. Thanks to invasive photographers and my own gossip gluttony, I’ve looked right into Miss Spears’ purse and seen the Adderall she’s likely been taking since postpartum depression. And Adderall is also a meth-similar stimulant that causes extreme paranoia and may explain why Britney is going crazy and thinks her walls are bugged. No one ever talks about the help she’s already had, they just keep yapping at her to ‘go for help’ again and again. “Help’ used to be a lobotomy. It often still is prison. So where can help be found?

I don’t know, but the only starting point I know of is love instead of admonishment. And hope.

Hope might be the most dangerous drug, but not so lethal as its absence.

www.thegirlcanwrite.net

The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos
by Lorette C. Luzajic
order at indigo dot ca or amazon dot com.

Helpless by Barbara Gowdy

Kenneth Whyte, an editor of McLean’s Magazine, asked Barbara Gowdy if her new novel, Helpless, implies that it’s normal for grown men to have sexual fantasies about little girls. Gowdy says she thinks it’s more widespread than we know. True, surely every one with this burdensome fantasy has not acted on it, and maybe it’s not something I thought about much before. The thought makes me uncomfortable, as did much of her novel, which is exactly where she wants the reader to be.

Gowdy has created a story of a moral dilemma, a man who ‘loves’ children, a man who wants his feelings for young girls to remain pure and fatherly, but struggles against his dark desires. Like others in love, all sorts of delusions develop within him, surrounding the object of his amour. One delusion is that he is the protector of a 9-year old girl he has kidnapped, and that all other men in her life desire her in the way he denies. He uses these illusions to justify her capture, as well as demonizing her single mother, convincing himself that Rachel is better off in his ‘care.’

Ron struggles with self-loathing, but he is not overly analytical of his motivations. Gowdy has painted him carefully, showing his inability to engage in mature relationships and his awkwardness at mapping the world together, a difficulty in processing his emotions in any meaningful way. His sexuality seems stuck, puerile, immobilized within his own childhood.

Gowdy said she was careful not to make her pedophile a monster- he has not yet engaged in his desires, you see- and in his mind, if not the reader’s mind, the kidnapping itself was more of a rescue mission. Ron, an oafish, chubby, and scrubbed sort of appliance repair person is ordinary and recognizable. Any efforts Gowdy made to have a somewhat sympathetic character actually succeed in making him even more repugnant. The truth is, with so much outrageous, lurid details of killing and torture and child molesting in the papers, it is the quietness and absence of gore that makes Ron even more disquieting. But the success of the story is that Gowdy does not point at every guy- while Ron really could be the man next door, he is not every man next door, and the storytelling reflects this as the plot unfolds. It’s almost as if she’s revealing something: that it could be anyone, but it is not everyone.

And while Ron’s icky yet mild dreams of kissing his captive or his trembling next to her during Everybody Loves Raymond ekes us out, it’s his cruelty and neglect of the grown woman, Nancy, who loves him, that really illustrates the sick immaturity of his sexuality. Nancy, an ex-addict who went and found herself a ‘nice’ man, one who is hardworking and clean from drugs, finds herself in the middle of a hostage situation. A victim herself of the classic granddad maneuver, and a survivor of methamphetamine addiction, she is slow on the uptake to figure out just what is going on at Ron’s place. You want to shake her and send her off to the cop station, but as soon as Nancy knows for sure, she’s on her way there, despite what it may cost her.

Perhaps too much is made of the girl’s astonishing beauty, but creating Rachel’s character in this way, and keeping her in a carefully made room with objects she will like makes Helpless a modern-day Collector story. The parallels between John Fowles’ stunning 1963 novel and Gowdy’s are many- the ‘collector’ of specimens wants to believe he won’t harm her, that she is being treated like a queen, that she is captive but he has no intent to kill her. Both Rachel and Miranda, deprived of outside contact, come to enjoy the company of their captor, and that is all Ron thinks he wants until his desires start to leave his control.

Like The Collector, there is no gratuitous violence and the text, for the most part, is squeaky clean, leaving the barren darkness of the confused human condition exposed without veils on the page. And in case enough ghosts didn’t haunt my ten years of formerly living on Parliament Street, Gowdy uses Toronto’s Cabbagetown District as her stomping ground, detailing quirky neighbourhood characters and venues with a sharp ear and sharper eye.

Helpless
Barbara Gowdy
Harper Collins, 2007

Take a Chance on Me

One reason to read The Girl’s book of poetry is because the cover art by Canadian artist Iaian Greenson is just so cool. The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos explores the chaos, beauty, small kindnesses, and tragedies of her everyday life. Along the way on these adventures, you sometimes have to say goodbye.

“Imaginative, witty, blessedly free of normal logic, surprising, profound, very human, touching, sassy.”
Thomas Moore, bestselling author of Care of the Soul.

You can learn order The Astronaut’s Wife by Lorette C. Luzajic through indigo or amazon online, or see more reviews and order info on her site at thegirlcanwrite.net.

There’s Something in the Meth

Ever hear a paranoid meth freak tell you that there’s something in the methamphetamine? I heard this time and time again. Dude, yes, there is. There’s meth in your meth.

Of course, there must be someone manipulating the stock for mind control purposes, for alien abductions, for attic laboratories. One roommate felt ‘violated’ by the recording devices hidden in stuffed animals. One user was sure that there was ‘something poisonous” in the meth he was using.

If you’ve watched a friend, roommate, parent, or child go mad from methamphetamine, you know there’s no hysteria in the meth hysteria today. It’s not reefer madness, it’s real. And help is hard to find once those neurons that let you hope and think and feel are destroyed. There’s a generation of human shells walking around. Dead men walking.

Sure, you can blame it all on people stupid enough to try the stuff, but cut some slack for those who made an impulsive choice. Have you tried alcohol? Good thing it’s not quite as lethal, at least not as quickly. I tried it twice, way back before Marko died, always up to try another good time. I didn’t have one, so I didn’t revisit it. I’m lucky.

Today another 25-year old girl was found dead, one of the few survivors from the old circle of friends ‘upstairs on Parliament Street.’ Five years of intensive psychiatric care, and a shrink stupid enough to prescribe Adderall for her addiction problem! Adderall, like Ritalin but worse, hardwires the mind to need speed. It’s nearly the same thing as methamphetamine, just not quite as strong or fast acting. The poor girl, once a vivacious, beautiful dreamer spent five years as a mere skeleton, checking the walls for bugs (both kinds), refusing to eat, scratching holes in her face. She died alone after one last hurrah. I’m speechless, but sadly, I’ve been in this place before. Marry, then bury. What can stop this? I’m not sure.

In all the recent press about poor little crazy girl Britney Spears, my heart has gone out for a pop icon I didn’t really care for before. With the immense pressures of fame, her impulsivity which I among many share, her disastrous marriage, and her serious postpartum depression, there’s only the money to assuage the emptiness. I always joked that I would like to ‘try’ and see if money could help my instabilities. All I am saying, is give cash a chance. Well, my dear Ms. Spears has illustrated its helplessness in restoring self-esteem or happiness. Her latest irrational incident holding her son hostage allegedly was a nightmare scenario of her losing her mind, muttering that K-Fed had planted the bugs in her home. DOES THIS SOUND FAMILIAR? Not one person, including her medical spokespeople, has ever pointed out the paranoia and madness that comes from the Adderall. COULD HAVE BEEN THE METH IN THE METH. While her alcohol and Ecstasy use have been greatly examined, has anyone thought that the treatment might be the cause?

I researched so many treatments, police and psychiatric programs, medical and naturopathic care, and drew a big blank. Even the seasoned psychiatric staff at Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, and the judges in drug court, had no bleeding idea how to talk to, care for, or protect the meth addict. The drug-induced rage you hear about in zombie flicks is science fiction for the most part, but not when it comes to the meth in your meth. It’s terrifying for the few who are able to put the drug down and go on, they may or may not be better off. Many effects of the instantaneous brain damage are permanent. Which means you may always be convinced your wife is part of a CIA plot. Or you may always be unable to feel an emotion because you have no more dopamine wiring.

I likely wouldn’t be so reactionary if I weren’t still doing the body count. And it’s not about ‘my circle.’ Truck drivers, ministers, and dieting housewives are constantly making the news for their descent into meth. Apparently, it feels so good at first, and then after your first three-day bender, you’re already certifiably insane and you’re just waiting it out until the end. You might starve to death before you overdose.

In some ways it’s the Government Liars’ fault for being so hysterical about other drugs and not arming people with reasonable facts and choices. Everyone who grew up in the Just Say No generation can’t trust the information they were given. Obviously, marijuana didn’t cause murderous rampages, so the info about meth must also be outlandish. It makes you feel terrific and thin and able to complete two double shifts, a bonus if you need the money, as most blue collar North Americans do. In fact, job efficiency and productivity is the main reason the drug is becoming an epidemic in Thailand and other Asian countries. Life’s a bitch, then you work, then you die.

Please pray for E. and her family and friends. If you have any strategies or information or an inspirational story that might help, please share it. I feel incredibly hopeless today. The madness is not just far away in the hills of Hollywood, safe for a greedy gossip gorge. It’s close to home, mine and yours, too. Let’s pray for each other and share any answers or hope that we can.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adderall

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17808933/#storyContinued

http://todaystoronto.com/content/view/100/88/

My review of Toronto author’s book about meth.

http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/Astronauts-Wife-Poems-Eros-Thanatos-Lorette-C-Luzajic/9781847287335-item.html

The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos.

Causing a Commotion

Once again, to raise up your pen against the murder of women is cause for uproar.

Seems there’s a big discussion and furor over my review of Jack Holland (a man), who wrote an amazing history of the war against women.

Doodlebugjim begrudged suffering through “the tide of tired old feminist meanderings that constitutes most of this article by Lorette C. Luzajic.”

He went on to point out how I exaggerate the death toll. “Is misogyny exaggerated? Yes, massively so by people like you and Lorette Luzajic. Flyingh*rse: if this is your view of men you really are stuck in another country, another century, or maybe another planet.”

Ummmmmmm, yeah.

My dear Doodlebugjim, the book I reviewed is quite clearly, from the title forward, a HISTORY. That means it’s about those other countries and centuries. The title of my piece couldn’t have been clearer on that. Misogyny: a History of the World’s Oldest Prejudice, by Jack Holland. (http://literaryaddict.wordpress.com/2008/01/10/misogyny-the-world’s-oldest-prejudice-by-jack-holland/)

Apparently I live in my own little world, being the only one who doesn’t think women should be raped or murdered. I hate to break it Doodlebugjim, but a great many men and women share my views in abhorring the sexist history of the church and state, and many also share my stated horror on misandry- man-hating, also mentioned in my story!

While I did rail out against the gang rape and murder of a girlfriend when we were both teens, I did say “I want to make it clear that I don’t take for granted the phenomenal freedom we have. I live on my own and work as a writer and painter. In other times, I would be stoned as a witch for my cheesy Tarot and tea gab sessions. I would have to disguise myself as a man to paint.”

I guess dude also missed this gem: “truth is, I don’t mind helping a man with his laundry and I love cooking.”

And this one: “Men. I love men.”

Or this: “I learned about respecting women (and men) from my father.”

Ah, there’s the rub: “But we can’t ignore, boys and girls, of the ancient and modern reality that hatred of women is barbaric.”

I guess that’s contestable. I guess the historical data I culled from Jack’s book about the holocaust of Jewesses, mass murders of women who copulated with demons, and then in current local events, the high-school girl murdered by her father for refusing to wear the hijab right here in Toronto are all ‘exaggerated’.

Oh, well, I can’t help it if dude missed some of the above. As my friend Rozzie pointed out, I can’t expect him to be able to read ALL the words.

Another who goes by I’m Not Sexy Again –Bwaaaa, commented “Exaggerated… massively exaggerated. Women are far more adored than scorned, yet feminism only looks at the bad – never the good. And then, when guys do this, and put a site up to highlight the hatred feminism bestows upon them, they’re met with further hatred & hostilities, such as trying to claim it to be a ‘hate site’… At least you won’t find pages glorifying the likes of Mark Lepine unlike NOW.org which idolizes the likes of Andrea Dworkin & co.”

Dude, you WILL find pages glorifying Marc Lepine. How about December 6 as “St. Marc’s Day?” Yep, that’s right. Join in celebrating this hero who fought back by slaughtering innocent women because he felt disempowered by them.

“Females don’t even belong in technical schools. They will never have the mental capacity, imagination, and will to return the cost of their education to the society. Females occupy chairs that ought to go to men who will contribute to the society.” Yeah, that’s a gem from Bob online. Here’s more:

“ He went to the technical college and stood up against the war on men and began firing back. Feminists argue that the feminists who were killed on December 6 by Marc Lepine were just innocent females in school. Nonsense. Each of them was a foot soldier in the feminist war on men. Each of them was pretending to be a man, taking a man’s space in a limited number of technical school enrollments. None of them were working toward a decent life as a wife and mother. All of them were practicing the hate and destruction of feminism. Marc Lepine didn’t just shoot everyone at the technical school. He carefully selected only the feminists and gave the others time to get out of the way. Feminists are afraid of being targeted by men of courage.” Bob is a proponent of International Marc Lepine Day.

And in case men or women would like to comment negatively or perhaps point out the millions of men who do get into their chosen field of study because they qualify, he says: “To the feminazi who read Bob’s truth, I’m glad you are pissed off. I expect that you don’t have the mental capacity to offer any comment other than the usual feminazi attack on the person. Too bad, toots. I get a laugh from your hisssy fit, and then it gets deleted.”

And just in case anyone may rightfully conclude that this is hate literature, Bob slithers from his ‘courageous stand’ by claiming: “All posts of Bob are rhetorical in nature only, and should not be construed in any other manner. Bob does not advocate insurrection, sedition, murder, violence, assault, or any other criminal or illegal acts. All opinions on this site are protected political speech under the 1st Amendment of the US Constitution.”

Some comments on Bob’s story included this one by anonymous: “there is something visionary about what Marc Lepine did almost 2 decades ago. He committed a bold, radical political act specifically against modern women in contemporary western society. No man before had ever committed such an act with purpose and vision against the great, monstrous evil of feminism.”

And then, “It was this combination of raw male instinct, with a self-conscious, intellectual understanding of society, that produced his far-sighted, visionary act. Men: you must understand that there can be no such nonsense as “gender equality” or “women’s rights” in a healthy society. Women simply cannot be free, independent individuals – not to the same extent as men, and definitely not outside the framework of a strong patriarchal system. Women must be under tight controls and discipline by men. Otherwise, they will not be decent, good human beings respectful and loving towards men.”

It’s upsetting that ‘anonymous’ is too frightened to put his name up. Guess he lacks his hero’s courage.

To I’m Not Sexy Again- Bwaaa: I’m not going to say much more than that. Faithful readers know how much Andrea Dworkin irks me: this sour, dour, whining victim mythologist is NOT my hero. I’ve written many pro-sex papers critiquing her warped agenda. Camille Paglia, who champions good men and plucky women, and all the interesting sex she can write about, has always been my mentor. But forgive me if I don’t make it to Bob’s party.

Myths of the World: a Thematic Encyclopedia by Michael Jordan

Myths of the World by Michael Jordan was disarming, if only because it made me recall a nerdy youth, when I took to bed ill for the sheer luxury of reading encyclopedias. I like books I don’t necessarily have to read back to back, start to finish. Here, I could crawl under the blanket and learn more about the Ganesh statue a friend blessed me with, or read the important highlights of the Epic of Gilgamesh. Myths of the World: a Thematic Encyclopedia groups global stories, as the title states, in themes. It makes for fascinating reading in clusters, comparing lore of different cultures, on the big questions of humanity like love, apocalypse, childhood, morality, and creation.

While it certainly is not exhaustive, this nifty collection of stories does span diverse continent, and does not get stuck in that proverbial pit where the fascinating Greco-Roman mythology is the only interesting kind, so we do actually encounter a whole world. Spanning Japan, Polynesia, early America, Nordic, Celtic, African, Siberian, and more.

Blessedly, the writing never gets that cheesy new-agey lilt to it, and sounds pragmatically and curiously anthropological, without sternly erasing any enchanted beliefs we do have. And amazingly we find humour in all eras and places on earth. There’s even a myth from Siberia about The Diarrhea Man.

Myths of the World: A Thematic Encyclopedia by Michael Jordan,
Kyle Cathie Ltd, London, England, 1993

Lorette C. Luzajic
www.thegirlcanwrite.net
Visit my other blog: thegirlcanwrite.wordpress.com

Misogyny: the World’s Oldest Prejudice by Jack Holland

Twice recently I’ve stumbled upon magazine articles about how women are dissing their husbands in public. I was having a pedi and I’m guessing it was Flare or Chatelaine. The articles were relatively generic, and the mundane claims that a woman shouldn’t bring up her man’s bad habits at a cocktail party were not particularly rousing reading. It briefly went through my mind that a wave of ‘poor men’ was about to hit our culture, and if that is true, I hoped it would point clearly at some of the true misandry out there, not focus on petty trifles like whether a wife mentions his laundry on the floor during dinner. The point there is loud and clear, boys. Pick up your effing socks and your tired wife won’t have to say a word about it. By true misandry, or man-hating, I’m referring to big guns like war, not to some minor nagging by the tired wife.

Nor am I one to sob about the petty bullshit from this end. I’m not heading home to write a memoir on how violated I was after the construction workers catcalled. I’m well read enough (and simply observant enough) to know that the old ‘blank slate’ fem-philosophy is tripe. We ARE nurture, but we are very much nature as well. Men and women are not the same. Whoever said so, long before the simplistic revelations of Men are From Mars Women are From Venus, was from Jupiter.

Now there’s a site called antimisandry.com, “the cure for feminist indoctrination.” I’m all for information sharing, and I have a wide range of disagreements as well as accordance with feminist thinking. It’s been years since I thought I shouldn’t shave my legs and spelled ‘women’ with a ‘y’, or worse, ‘wimmin.’ There was a time I tried to censor sexist music from my tape collection, and books from my library. I was left with nearly zero culture at all. Yes, that makes clear a huge deficit that I hope to fill by participating in culture-making. Nonetheless, I think it’s wimpy at best to use fearsome terms like ‘feminist indoctrination.’ Lady’s philosophy may not be as inclusive as it should be, but considering how much mire it is trying to break through, we need to cut some slack. Maybe dudes are sick of hearing us bitch about their porn collection, their infidelities, and their socks, and I don’t mind if they present me with their case. But women are bitching about important stuff, too, not just frivolous grievances. I recall with absolute revulsion stumbling upon a book in the church library years ago. I must have been ten or twelve, and I was reading a bit ahead of myself as little girls tend to. The selection on being a woman or wife was rather sparse, and the one book I found was in my mind written by the devil. Her name was Beverly LaHaye – she said women had better stop grumbling when they stoop to pick up the dirty socks of their husbands, for in parallel symbol, they are picking up the dirty laundry of our Saviour Christ the Lord.

Lord Almighty. Thing is, boys, Jesus had far too much self-respect, in addition to respect for women, to feel like the kind of big shot that thinks it’s okay to be a slob. Men may think women blow it out of proportion- truth is, I don’t mind helping a man with his laundry and I love cooking- if I notice his eagerness to help with the dishes without asking, or if he asks me lovingly and would do the same for me. But once, ladies and gentlemen, I kid you not, a man I was dating reamed me out for not coming to the opposite end of town to scrub his bathroom and do his dishes. When I complained that I could barely use his washroom because it was filthier that the toilets at The Barn nightclub, it was after all, my fault. I don’t mind picking up your socks one bit, if you also help with my laundry. Now that’s equality!

As usual, I digress. I want to make it clear that I don’t take for granted the phenomenal freedom we have. I live on my own and work as a writer and painter. In other times, I would be stoned as a witch for my cheesy Tarot and tea gab sessions. I would have to disguise myself as a man to paint. I would not have been able to study and get my degree, and I may have had to set myself on fire after my husband died, depending on my geography. I can’t complain just because some guy I will never know can buy Juggs at the corner store. I will not scrutinize my neighbour’s fidelity because his wife wasn’t skinned alive when her turn came.

There’s also the extraordinary freedom I have in simple things: I can look a man in the eye, something forbidden in many countries. I have to look men in the eye fairly often, because most of my friends are men. Gay and straight. I see a lot of men. I date men, and when I say I’m chilling with the girls, it usually refers to one or two girls and a stack of gay men. Men. I love men. There are flaws I can and will ignore because I love them.

But we can’t ignore, boys and girls, of the ancient and modern reality that hatred of women is barbaric, and it’s persistence and severity has been grossly underestimated, not exaggerated as sites like antimisandry.com might assume. I have to apologize for the extreme trauma and rage I had against men for the first decade of my adult life, but after my friend Elaine Bown, age 17, was gang-raped, mutilated, strangled, and burned to death for not fucking a guy, it was hard for me to fill in the blanks of my virginity with exciting, mutually adoring heated groping with farm boys in pick up trucks, as should have been the case. It’s called post-traumatic stress disorder, and coming from a sheltered home where sex was taught to be loving, God-given, marriage only, I was broadsided by the brutal reality of sexual violence. It scarred and coloured the way I saw things, and through no fault of my own. I was only observing my world. It’s been 20 years now and my shock is beginning to fade, and thankfully I’ve enjoyed the love of men in the most imaginative of ways possible, the only true healing for scars like these.

Indeed, it is a deeply reverent, wise and brilliant man who wrote Misogyny: The World’s Oldest Prejudice. I’d forgotten too much that I learned in those unshaven vegan days. It’s easy to lose sight of grim reality when you live the life you want to without too much recourse. The magnitude of misogyny is astonishing and disgusting and it does persist. Just a month ago, a 16-year old Toronto girl was strangled by her father because she didn’t wear her hijab at school. Guess I got off lucky when I wore those fluorescent yellow zipper earrings out roller-skating at age 14- my dad said they were ‘fishing lures’ for men, and I wore them anyways and lived to tell the tale. He did not murder me because of my disobedience and whoring ways.

Lest we forget:

In addition to the facts that women own less than one percent of the world’s property, that they are now and have been always been punishable by death and torture for sins like being raped, that historically women who didn’t want to marry or bear children, or couldn’t, had to work as prostitutes, and much more:

-in East Africa, from Egypt to Somalia, between 80 and 100 percent of women have been genitally mutilated
- it’s not just a foreign thing: clitoridectomy was a popular treatment for the ‘moral leprosy’ of masturbation in women and children in England and the United States. Dr. Isaac Baker Brown performed such surgeries by “sawing motion of the hot iron. After the clitoris and nymphae were got rid of, the operation was brought to a close by taking the back of the iron and sawing the surfaces of the labia and other parts of the vulva which had escaped the cautery.”
-such massacres as above were endorsed by the Anglican Church
-King James authorized a translation of the Bible that is now most famous. He also ordered a woman burned alive, Euphanie McCalyane, because she asked for painkillers during labour.
-the early Catholic church called women’s genitalia the ‘gateway of the devil’ and came up with that Virgin Birth stuff, which wasn’t in great emphasis in early Christianity, seeing as virgin births were a routine part of goddess cults, always heralding a special delivery, not necessarily a mother who was a literal virgin
-the Malleus Maleficarum, a court document of the Middle Ages, reads like torture pornography more lurid than exorcism films from the 70s. The writers, supported by Pope ‘Innocent’ the 8th, who fathered several bastard children personally, outlined their evidence and the tortures that must be used to punish women for crimes like these: eating children, fucking demons, collecting castrated cocks and hiding nests full of them in trees, killing cattle, and more…of course, they also made men impotent, because how could a regular guy measure up to demons or the devil himself in the boudoir? It’s not a joke- this kind of embarrassing rhetoric is responsible for millions of murders.
-but good Protestants (hi, dad!) shouldn’t sleep easily, either. For all I learned about respecting women (and men) from my father, he didn’t learn it from his heroes John Calvin or John Knox. The Calvinist church spread word on the evils of helping women suffer childbirth with chloroform, calling the pain-easer ‘a decoy of Satan.’ Knox wrote that lovely treatise called The Monstrous Regiment of Women about our inherent filth.
-not that long ago the Serbs and Bosnians and Croatians were raping their opponent’s women en masse. While rape in war is a common tactic (the Japanese called Korean women ‘toilets’), the reason for this particular wave of atrocity was that women are incubators of men’s seed, and impregnating the opposite team meant your kind would be born from them. Ummmmmmm, yeah…..Now there’s a zillion baby monsters without love in orphanages all over Eastern Europe.
-Hitler said he wanted to emancipate ‘women from emancipation’ and a great part of his ‘cleansing’ was of women, not just the evil Jew. Before the microwave, the Jewess was the original Devil’s Oven, because she kept bringing more Jews into the world. The whole holocaust may quite possibly boil down to a ridiculous and sick man who couldn’t get it up. In addition to the horrifying tactics of creating a nonsensical racial purity, in Hitler’s personal life he was just as vile. In his own words, women should be ‘cute, cuddly naïve little things’. (Many sources have speculated, with some evidence for probability, that Hitler was doing his mother.) Jack Holland points out that in addition to Eva Braun, his wife, four other women who had a relationship with him committed suicide, including his niece.

I really can’t handle hearing about women’s insatiable sexuality, their bottomless pit of desire, when on the other hand, men are always complaining that women don’t like sex enough, don’t like it often enough, and don’t like it weird enough. It’s so transparent that instead of reconciling their desires into healthy channels and acknowledging that women and men lust differently, men of all cultures lash out at women.

It would be a drag to constantly be intruded upon by my sexual impulse, rising up, pardon the pun, at the most inopportune times. Instead of raping and killing the objects of the inappropriate desire, the whole human drama would be better served by a sense of humour. How about ‘oops’ and a quick trip into the bathroom for privacy if need be, then continuing on with the hockey game/eye surgery/bus driving/dinner with the children? Unbridled desire may be an inconvenient force to be reckoned with, but I will surely trade it in any day for what women get from nature: we’re the ones who get pregnant, and for the lucky ones who aren’t preggers, we’re going through monthly labour pains, nausea, and depression. I’ll take the hard-on.

It seems to me a wise man said “If thy left eye offends thee, pluck it out.” If it’s going to cause so much trouble, boys, get rid of it. If you can’t just enjoy it for the wonderful and ridiculous thing it is, without raping and murdering because of it, like many men are able to do no problem, then there’s the solution.

As always, I’ve plunged right into the drama. If I were a more prim and proper type of writer, I would have given this a carefully laid out review, mentioning the well-rounded scope of history that Holland traverses effortlessly. I would have praised his ability to speak out against corruption without accusing the many, many men who are innocent and work tirelessly for a world where we can enjoy each other’s differences, great sex, and mutual support. I would point his ability to condense information from various and often difficult sources, so that the average person can follow, while not insulting the intelligence of scholars. But I am not that writer, and so in my typical weakness, I have rambled on and on.

By the end of Holland’s text, however, which is much longer and more thorough and less reactionary than mine, you’ll be enraged and sickened. Holland uses the last portion to list a few theories on the why and the how. He makes no excuse for the state, the army, the husband, the individual, the church, that allows this kind of shit to go on, but he doesn’t slam men’s sexuality, intelligence, or cultures outside of their actions against women.

Still, when he mentioned his project to some men, “there came a nod and a wink in an unspoken assumption that I was engaged in justifying it…misogyny is not seen by many men as a prejudice but as something almost inevitable.”

With astute insight, Holland says the problem with this particular prejudice is that it is impossible for men to avoid the other. You can hate the Germans or the Jews or the Blacks or the Rednecks or the Latinos. But if it’s women you hate, you can’t simply live in another country or another street. At some point, you will be helpless against your dependency on her for sexual fulfillment and procreation. Even a monk cannot necessarily escape his thoughts.

While Holland makes no mention of this here, I finally understand for the first time why men hate homosexuals so much. They are free to their sexual natures apart from women, and it is that lack of dependency that makes men so jealous that the homosexual is even lower than women are to him. On top of that, without women saying no, no, no to stuff men like, for example, anonymous encounters and no offspring from the encounter, gay men get more with less headache. To make it even worse to the Neanderthal still raging within many a straight guy, the gay guy gets all the women anyway. Women love gay men- they can carry a conversation, they get pedicures, they don’t fart in front of you and then expect sex, they don’t think you are too fat or your boobs aren’t the right shape, and they don’t think it’s a crime to do dishes.

It seems clear to me that instead of feeling helpless and dependent, you should just embrace your women. And many do. But many men hold to ridiculous and embarrassing bouts of blustering, unreasoned machismo that impresses no one, not even themselves, and this insecurity cuts deep against the amazing, sultry, bloody life and death giving power, the nature of the goddess.

www.thegirlcanwrite.net
Lorette C. Luzajic