Thoughts on gender stuff these days

Gender gender gender

It’s in the news

The current awkward stumbling

Dance of Venus and Mars

In the sky, both are planets

Neither one better that the other

Nor more powerful

Yet on earth, we speak of men

And wo-men, a noun whose very structure

Suggests one group is a subset of the other

Maybe you can see why I would want

To share some of my observations

About male and female principles and energies

Currently at work in our world

Simply put, things are out of balance

They are so out of balance

That coming back into balance

Is going to feel very destabilizing

We’ve been standing on one foot for a long time

The Mars foot

(Which surely is tired by now)

And when we put down the Venus foot

And can stand, for once, with both feet together

Both feet doing their jobs of holding us up

How easy walking will then seem

We can barely imagine it now but

How delightful it will be when we can run

Wait, I get ahead of myself

First there are some things to figure out

For the imbalance is everywhere

Why, have you ever considered,

Is there an Oscar for Best Actor and Best Actress?

Why categorize by gender

And not, say, race or age?

Or other more arbitrary attributes, like size, as boxing does

(Best Middleweight Actor, anyone?)

Or hair color: Best Performance by a Blonde

We can see that is patently ludicrous

Seems like it makes more sense to say

Lead performer, supporting performer, character performer

In a comedic, dramatic, music, voice-over role and so on

Wouldn’t categories like that be more reflective

Of actual acting accomplishments?

And then…

I bought sheets the other day

Queen size, which are smaller than king, of course

Because queens are less than kings

(I’m not saying we have to change our sheets

I am pointing out how deep this shit goes)

Even the cultural phrase used to discuss this imbalance

Is “Me Too”

As in, “I’ve also been harassed, discriminated against

Unwantedly touched, assaulted and so on”

I understand the power of this movement

How some people were surprised by the all the stories

How some people were surprised that others were surprised

Let’s hope we all learned more about each other

And that it started a conversation that has the potential

To heal some great disconnections

And I am all for healing

But really?

We identify the welcoming back of balance with Venus

By referencing the record of abuse she has withstood?

Not so inspiring as it could be

Even using “man” to mean “everyone”

Well…what is the big deal

It’s just a word, why be picky

We all know that saying “mankind”

Includes women, naturally

But then, try this experiment

Replace that one word

And the fundamental funky imbalance

Becomes immediately obvious

This is a JFK quote (updated):

“Womenkind must put an end to war

Before war puts an end to womenkind”

Now, even if you ignore the additional oddity of  

So closely linking wars with womenkind

The new phrase rings peculiar, right?

It doesn’t sound like a mere variation

It seems like a wholly different thing

Here’s a well-known one, from the moon landing

And by the way, Neil Armstrong insists

He’s been famously misquoted

And really said “That’s one small step for *a* man”

That’s fine, either way works to illustrate the point

Which is if you imagine something like this:

“That’s one small step for a man,

One giant leap for womenkind”?

It sounds incredibly weird

But if things were in balance

If the substitution were mere semantics

Shouldn’t it sound normal?

Maybe it’s not really about the words

(Though I’m a big fan of communication

And better words tend to move that along)

It’s about noticing how embedded these ideas are

Concepts flawed and misleading

Supporting divisions that doesn’t truly exist

How about another thought experiment:

I am 5’1” which

For a female American is considered short

If I were 6’1,” I’d be considered tall

By almost anyone’s definition

So…when do I go from short to tall?

At 5’8”? 5’10”? Who knows?

It’s hard to pick that specific height

The precise measure we can all agree on

My height is not a coin with heads and tails

No definitive flip from short to tall

Only a spectrum of story and opinion and idea

In the same way, no matter how much Mars or Venus

Any one particular person embodies

There is no flip

Everyone has both

Admittedly in widely varying degrees

If I want, I can say it like this:

I am a woman who likes men

I can narrow that down more and say

I am a pink-head who likes redheads

I can also zoom out and say

I am a person who likes other people

That last one, I keep coming back to

I try to take the widest view

The one that includes the most humans

It seems to be a start in bringing together

A people falsely divided and divided and divided

We are suffering from it

So many symptoms I don’t even need to list them

Are you as tired as I am?

I bet you are

All the more reason to thank you for reading

You made the world better by

Taking a few minutes to reflect

On this funky imbalance we got going on

And maybe thereby reducing the funk a bit