| Viva Votes and Voices
Too Nice Women
Watch for my latest e-book, Cinderella’s Coffin:
How to stop men from shaping the fate of women and girls.
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I asked one of my dearest friends to review the final draft of my new book, knowing that she would be totally honest with me when giving her over-all opinion. She’s a technical editor for a big company, and a linguist extraordinaire. She vowed to stay within the guidelines of editorship rather than re-writing what she thought I should say. Although apprehensive of my reactions if she gave negative feedback, I could hardly wait to meet with her when she’d completed her volunteer task.
About an eternity (it seemed) into her verbal critique, she finally said what I was hoping she would say: “It made me angry—so angry I had to stop reading for awhile, and I didn’t want to pick it up again. But I did…I had to, because I said I would do the job.” I literally yelped with glee and clapped my hands. “Yes! Yes! Yes! I love it,” I exclaimed over and over—just like Niecy Nash on Clean House when her clients begin to understand how and why clutter and attachment rule, even sometimes ruin, their lives.
I had been angry for the three or so years it had taken me to write, research, re-write, research, and re-write each draft, as the world around me changed, merciless and unconcerned about the effects of time upon my thinking and the words I had already committed to paper. It seemed that every day something new came into my consciousness that made everything I had written obsolete. Perhaps the anger, although dissipating with each jab at the computer’s keyboard, actually spurred me on to the finish line, the ‘save as’ command, the final ‘empty trash’ and ‘close document’ buttons.
When she left my house that day, I breathed a huge sigh of relief, release, and rejoicing. I wasn’t crazy after all my doubts, even though she had suggested some grammatical and placement changes to make. The ‘what’s this?’ and the ‘change thats’ were minor after sweating over the bigger, more important issues I had felt compelled to present and challenge.
Back to Biology
Throughout the writing of the book, I observed myself and my own reactions to what I was typing into the electronic brain of my computer. The black box with one big eye was totally impersonal, except for a few glitches beyond its control—occasional burps at the whims of electrical grids beyond my office window.
As days turned into weeks and months, I began to realize that one of the reasons the world out there is in such a mess is that women are just too nice. Or as my web designer David Moorhead recently wrote in his Staying Awake newsletter, “More times than not, women are simply more intuitive while continuing to suffer unethical men too much.” Damn! Did he have to wake me so completely?
Almost every day someone innocently sends me a reminder of the day’s dose of injustices making our cumulative global history less and less palatable. Sometimes it’s an e-joke, or a story, or a factual account, or a photo that’s worth a thousand words and a few buckets of tears. How can humanity—more specifically men, the his-story writers—continue to make then mock the rules, mount crusades, feed us lies, rob our purses, kill our children, and pooh-pooh the ones who care so deeply. They don’t know when to quit. Unfortunately, women quit too soon.
Males Hate Emotions
Emotions outside the feminine and infant domains are usually quarantined as if emoting were the bubonic plague. Long ago, screaming, pouting, laughing, crying or raging become particularly annoying beyond acceptable perimeters. The older I get, the less I can stand children in public places like restaurants and airplanes; not to mention the unconscious parents who allow their little darlings to inflict mini-torture tactics on those around them. Perhaps women should take some lessons from these miniature teachers and re-learn how to get what we want or demand.
Males of most any age are easily distracted by emotional outbursts—especially if subjected to prolonged exposure. If possible, they will remove themselves immediately from the upsetting scene; or they will quickly attempt to solve whatever is causing the affected one to succumb to emotional demonstrations. Flee or fix, shall we say.
If unsuccessful, the male will compromise or acquiesce to the faintest whimpered requests, and even more certainly, to shrill, authoritative orders. Someone is out of control, and it’s his job, for his own sake, to return control to normalcy. Obviously, gunshots all around him are not as threatening to his reality as the prolonged shrieks of someone next to his ear. He can do something physical to stop the shooting, but is powerless to stop the screams of a stranger or someone he loves.
Emote and Encore
Emotions, generally, are described as feminine and are known to be a function of the hormonal roller coaster on which women ride throughout their lifetimes. Females have therefore been taught, trained, tempered, threatened, and sometimes tethered to be nice, noiseless, nebbish, non-invasive, negated, and necrotic. And that’s just the words starting with ‘n’ by which we’ve been silenced!
The old saying that the squeaky wheel gets greased needs to be resurrected by today’s females and for the benefit of those yet to inhabit this man’s world. We must be heard, but being heard first requires action on our part. If we want the killing of our children to stop, we must start—and not stop—demanding vociferously that it be so.
Make note, tune up, accentuate and amplify, pitch a fit, add verses as needed, repeat the chorus ad infinitum, and sustain the sound of female solidarity. If necessary, resort to castrato until ‘not nice no more’ makes our voices heard around the globe. No auditions required—just be the maestro of your and your children’s destinies—al fine!
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