When I got off the 7 train in Queens last night around 11:45 PM, damp and chill after a wintry weather day (I’d gone into the city to see Harry Potter and the Cursed Child on Broadway last evening with a friend visiting from out of town, and all I could think during a scene showing Death Eaters, was “Oh, look, ICE,” but everyone else was just super excited that the grown up Draco Malfoy was being reprised by the movies’ Tom Felton—he was delightful), I crossed the boulevard to a bodega to pick up pita chips and hummus for a late night snack (the show was three hours long, dinner was five hours before). Inside the bodega were an assortment of loud males: one older white guy, very Queens working class; two Black guys around 30-40 years old; and a younger Hispanic guy. They were guys, if you know what I mean—you rarely see guys on television or in movies anymore, and I think this is a shame. Gym-cut, professionally groomed, and models of the self-care craze, actors today really have a hard time being interesting, but they do attract some chicks and the agents, and it’s all about the bucks.
Behind the counter was a young Middle Eastern cashier/manager (not really a guy type, more composed and elegant) staring at this one talkative Black guy standing by the white guy. I found my chips, my hummus, and when I went up to pay for them in this cramped deli area, I was barely noticed by the cashier; you could see that the talkative guy was either on something or off meds, was too-calmly ranting about something, and would not be talked down or moved off topic. I put my purchases up on the raised counter, but the cashier/manager kept his eyes fixed on the talkative guy; the old white guy was trying to be a casual peacemaker, but the cashier/manager said, “I don’t want to talk to that guy anymore,” his eyes wide, a little frightened, because that talkative guy was clearly this close to exploding, and the other two customers were really confused; they all seemed to know each other but it didn’t matter. I managed to get the purchase acknowledged, paid cash, tried to say, “I don’t need a bag,” but the stuff was being bagged on autopilot, eyes never on me, and I simply took it and my long-coming (but correct) change and booked it out the door and up the street.
By the way, for the men reading this, this is what it’s like for women to live in the world all the time: because there is never not a threat of imminent violence, we have to stay vigilant; if we aren’t the targets of violence at a certain moment, it’s because we simply don’t exist (I can promise you not one of those men saw the old lady buying hummus) or there are other women experiencing violence somewhere in the vicinity. Even when women aren’t consciously thinking, “I’m about to raped,” we can’t walk down any street by day or night, or enter or leave our cars or homes, without knowing “this could be the day.” Renee Good’s murder is one of a string of these inevitable events; the officer will face no consequences (unfortunately for us the decent, the martyr role won’t stick, as Good was not only a woman but a liberal activist and a lesbian, and so America on the whole is okay with her murder).
Back to the bodega: if there’s an emotionally charged dispute of some kind going on, not even with yelling—and not one of these men registered the imminent threat except the cashier/manager, who has seen this too many times, no doubt, and me—all any woman would want to do is escape this. Guys (straight, I’d qualify) are, unfortunately, almost universally unteachable when it comes to these situations if they don’t have high level empathy already (in my limited life experience).
These males in the bodega were at once too blind, too self-involved, and too emotional to figure a way out of whatever this situation was, a situation which suggested at worst drug-addled paranoia, at best bruised ego, rather than any actual injustice. Petty stuff.
This morning, I happened on a post by a woman whose voice I’ve come to value deeply, a fabric artist named Orsola de Castro, who speaks sense on all matters of patriarchy, and today’s post seemed to dovetail with my late-night Queens bodega experience, by way of a totally different subject: AI. This has to do with temperament not just of “guys” up there but of educated “men” in suits. Patriarchy has a common thread of blind ego.
Male inventors, de Castro notes, have pushed women to the margins in the AI field, thinking (dubious word) that they can just throw money and ideas and tech at AI and it will naturally sort itself out, which is beyond stupid. Women are natural teachers; men are not. I’ll let Ms. de Castro explain:
(Meanwhile, as I type this, Microsoft Word keeps popping up to offer to “rewrite” my creative work for me, figuring some male tech guy’s coding can read and render my thinking better than I could. It’s not only tragic; it may in fact prove our annihilation as a species on this planet. This is not a digression.)
And women’s safety as well as freedom comes down to bodily autonomy and human (male) respect for that. In another post, Ms. de Castro uses pop music woo songs to discuss a view on ballad writing to bed women, that all that came about because patriarchy—not women, but patriarchy—put women in towers, in chastity belts, valued virginity over sensuality and then tied themselves, the men, into knots because they had no access to us women. And who’s fault is that?
By extension, as we sit by and watch these out-of-control U.S. patriarchs with no imagination or empathy or real intelligence whatsoever make scorched earth of our geopolitical alliances, we know the women were and have been right about everything—Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris the most recent big examples: men on the whole are too emotional, too limited, too narcissistic, too greedy, too short-sighted to be in power. And the women, as leaders, would have acted with thoughtful decision, which is not to say perfection. No one is that. But women don’t fight the system, they dismantle it and rebuild it. See Jessie Cae on Instagram:
Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D-VA), the most recent example, was no sooner sworn in than she acted for the good of all, as per her office.
Something there is that doesn’t love the thought of a woman in power, even from other women, until they see a woman in power and she’s good at it. (Note: Kristi Noem is MAGA’s fantasy of a woman in power, in that she has none, but does the whole sexy swagger fantasy thing for the public at the altar of the Top Dog.)
Another post I saw on Instagram today had to do with what happens when a clueless patriarchal institution reaches out to take a pulse and is freaked by the response, their own work coming back to smite them:
Here’s real power, and power to the purpose: The key is providing what is sustainable. “Sustenance is the root of sustainability.” We have to stop “the eighty men in the one bus” with all the world’s money and return to the politics of caring. According to Vandana Shiva:
“Non-sustainability is violence against the earth,” Shiva says, and when the men’s only response is, “We’ll move to Mars instead,” I want to send them NOW.
Sending love on a rainy cold Sunday in New York during the revolution,
Miss O’
The Miss O' Show (Teacher's Edition) 