I was an uncomfortable child. I didn’t like the
world much, and it didn’t like me. The world was confusing - disturbing,
jarring, and alarming. I was frightened most of the time and most everything
frightened me. Within my mind I was adventuresome and fearless, but people and
their invasive habits and their intrusive rules and demands, scared the shit out
of me. I didn’t know it, I instincted it.
They wanted to keep me from adventure, from thought, and from truth. I hid. I
still hide, because I was right. Social people confine and limit each other in
terrible ways.
Women are confident that the man they live with is a
nice guy and a good father. He’s just an average man, not a leader. Leaders
know how to bring out the killer in every man. That’s
why they are leaders. Men were a giant intellectual obstacle when I was a
child. In their estimation of how things work, I was an insatiable little
monster whose curiosity, hidden passion, obstinacy, questions, and rational
seeking would be fine…if only I had been born
a boy. How I learned to hate that pejorative and final indictment.
Unbelievably, it was adult women who were most often
the delivers of this life sentence of inferiority; women whose natural grace was replaced by restrictive clothing, rock hard hairstyles and icing-like make
up, until nothing original remained. It was the 1950s and rigid sex rules
demanded rigid bodies. Underwear was compiled in layers of girdles, brassieres,
slips and garter belts, and stockings with seams that must be straight. Our mothers were Virgin priestesses who had
been ceremoniously demoted by marriage, shamed and gagged by the function of
their sex. I horrified my mother. I was not what she wanted in a child. My very existence challenged her acceptance of
marriage as a woman’s inevitable defeat. My lively mind was a reminder of a
dark female presence that she had murdered within herself.
The game unfolded: little girls were soon tamed. Female
society ground on like a glacier that rolled over and pulverized every female that
resisted its relentless power.
My father was a traitor to his gender. In matters of
the mind he never slighted me. He was a mechanical engineer with wide
interests, but his knowledge had one boundary, the artificial gulf between
the priestly triumvirate of science, technology, and mathematics, the intellectual activities that divided the real world from everything else. He had
an eidetic memory (he claimed) and rather than deflect my questions as
unladylike annoyances, he fed me information about astronomy, geology, physics,
chemistry, history, exploration and industry. He was not a creative person, but
populated his mind with wonderful facts and figures in order to keep the world
and his unhappy childhood at bay. He told me this, and let me know, without
providing details, that he had idolized his father, a strict man who had used
corporal punishment to toughen him up.
Inexplicably, he hated
his mother, whose sole flaw, as far as I could understand, was being a woman.
His sister was also an object of his rage. He refused to provide any cause for
his extreme feelings, and if my questions ventured to close to his wall of
secrecy, he would turn on me. The experience was like that of trying to retrieve
a bone from an ill-tempered dog that growls menacingly, curls its lip and
commits a warning bite. Warning given: warning taken. I had to set aside this
mystery concerning his female family members as a contradiction to the father I
knew.
