Perceived Higher Need

One of the primary things that keeps people in relationships with each other is need for unconditional love and need for physical comfort and safety.

By believing in the theory that men are driven by a primary need to “spread seed” and women to “protect nest,” we aren’t just subscribing to some abstract theory of evolution. We are also subscribing to a much broader set of ideas and beliefs that effect our day-to-day lives, which have nothing to do with evolution. They are ideas that keep power structures stable.

This idea of evolutionary urges insists that there are wide, gaping differences in the needs of men and women sexually, and that those needs are the most powerful of all needs. That women need men to “stick around,” and so are neurotic or otherwise not good enough if they are single or can “catch” a mate. This has implications on women’s self-image and worth, and implications that the sexual identity of women is completely contingent on a man’s sexual desire for her.

For men this theory tells them that they don’t need emotional and physical comfort and unconditional love and attention from a stable community. That if they don’t think about and desire sex 24/7 that there is something “wrong” with them. And it gives monuments of excuse for a “boys will be boys” attitude that not only allows sexist and misogynist men to continue their sexual harassment and prejudice, but encourages new generations that this is the way to gaining acceptance, it’s a right of passage.

As individual groups, men and women both suffer from this extremely simplistic theory, which excludes many factors of culture and not-biological conditioning that influence behaviors.

And then there is the need thing again. In relationship, this dynamic causes women to have more percieved needs from men in day-to-day life than visa versa. And therein lies the emotional support structures for a power differential that keeps men “needing less” and having more power over women who “need more.”

Change

There is some sort of point at which change happens. The stories we are reading in my lit. class are by Middle Eastern women about Middle Eastern women, and are mostly subtle expressions of transformation. We are left at the end of almost all of them feeling the emotions behind power struggles of a woman and her home life, a woman and her culture, a woman and her own self-placement. We are also left feeling her loneliness and her sorrow.

Our professor has told us that most of the literature published by women in Middle East is not the most uplifting stuff–most of it is sad, frustrating, fraught with abuse and control, and lonely. It is vastly different from the American literature that I have studied in the past–full of hope and intrigue and life, along with some of the sorrow of course.

The transformative parts of these stories, though, is what our questions have been directed at as of late. In all of the stories, the protagonist is coming to an intersection in her mind and soul about her life. Some event, taken place over two days or two months or even just an hour, is telling us, the reader, that this woman is no longer participating in old dynamics–she has become fed up, she has had a realization of some sort.

But then, in most of them, that’s where we are left. We don’t know what she is going to do next, now that she has found out her husband wants to take another wife, once she finds out that her husband has had an affair, once she has realized that the lower-class day laborer working for her treats her infant as tenderly as she wishes a lover would treat her, once she finds out that the lies she is telling herself in order to keep quietly sedated in “happinees” won’t really work anymore.

In our last class we read a story that had the ending we all cheered for: an abused wife finally walks out on her husband after five years. The woman in this story had run into an old friend who was happy, healthy, pretty, and owned her own apartment and raised her child on her own–she was happy and independent. And BAM, just like that our protagonist understood that her life was not her own.

And BAM, my classmates and I had the second piece of the puzzle, according to our professor: vision for something different and the hope and belief that it could be acquired.

I’m still mulling over this concept–the idea that change happens when 1) people simply can’t do “it” anymore; and 2) a creative idea for something different is believed in and hoped for.

I keep coming back to: Yeah, but 1) Even if women are fed up with patriarchy and misogyny, we don’t have the power so what does it matter? Doesn’t it also require the men to be fed up? OR 2) Say women can make the change themselves (being that you can’t keep the same dynamic if one-half of the interaction simply changes their part in it), how many of us does it take? Per community/per country/in the world altogether?

More on Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints Compound

This week all of the over 400 children (all but 24 of whom are female) will be getting DNA testing, and are being held in the court’s custody until further notice. I won’t go further into the case because you can find info. about it just about anywhere.

But I do want to point out the video below, which is just one installment of Larry King Live’s exclusive with some women of the compound. My heart cries out to these women, they are obviously terrified, and are being fed lines. However incapable of speaking truthfully about their own condition, I am SO SO pleased that this story is getting so much coverage, and that these women are being asked to talk to the press. Women are so often silenced. I think in this case, though, the men of the compound know that the public will be kinder to the women, while they keep out of sight.

But while lot’s of outcry and press is good—fuck if the press so damned insensitive? These women keep their eyes down and cower like beaten dogs, and yet the press for the most part (especially Larry King, who doesn’t transition his tone or approach at all) treat them as though they ought to be capable of sitting in front of a gazillion hounding questioners and not pee their dresses.

These women should be treated more tenderly, just like so many female victims of sexual and other violence. Now’s the time for them to get out.

Is anyone out there advocating freedom or help for these women? If so, please let us know via a comment or an e-mail to me.

Little Ultimate World

While I sat on the sidelines of todays co-ed ultimate games, Dan’s team in particular, I realized that a co-ed ultimate game is actually a good microcosm for how our world works.

Each team plays with seven players on the field, and at least two have to be female. And 99 percent of the time it is exactly that number, because there are less women playing co-ed than men. The women also tend to be shorter and not as strong physically than the men.

But the women are just as competitive, and the ratio of good skills players is about the same for men and women. So you’ve got these people running around, and the women aren’t thrown to as much, but they’re trying just as hard if not harder to receive and pass and score, and yet they still don’t control the game or the flow nearly as much as the men do. . . they are reduced to second-class players in a lot of ways because the men are dominating the field.

Just some observations..