Notes from the Patriarchy – Excerpts

There are no secrets. It’s just that many do not see the obvious.

I hate it when people deny the obvious. Sometimes I hate the obvious, too.

And here I am with my flashlight. Not flood lights. Not even a torch.

Day after day we stumble around cloaked in insignificance, haunted by men who notice mainly our backsides or our breasts. And we disappointedly ask ourselves: is that all?

Women suicide bombers, unlike men, do not get promised seventy-two virgins to attend to them in paradise. They are promised they will become the most beautiful angelic beings.

The idea of men searching in space for intelligent life when they could just look across the dinner table and admire the women.

So long as “fuck” is a cuss word, it will not be easy for many women to enjoy sex. Who wants to be insulted in the process?

Men appear the same the world over. A brotherhood of disdain. In many corners of the world men still pray: Thank you, God, for not having made me a woman.

At this time in our fragile patriarchal world, politicians are a bunch of angry men, disparaging each other at best; at worst, they annihilate each other, and everyone else in the process.

I’ve jumped the ship of patriarchy long ago, and yet I paddle alongside it with my little lifeboat just in case.

We have had enough of war, the endless masculine tussling.

Helen and her beauty that allegedly launched a thousand ships: I don’t know who launched the first ship, or the one thousandth ship. It wasn’t Helen, though. It was one or more Greek warriors itching for a fight.

Thing is—old men will still routinely sacrifice young men while they cleverly walk around unscathed, often protected by some Secret Service or other. God Himself sacrificed his own son. Couldn’t He have sacrificed Himself? Wotan in Nordic mythology did.

News item circa 2010: A 13-year-old got stoned because she wanted to report her rape. This was unacceptable.

I ponder selkie fairy tales. A man forces a selkie to stay, treats her well and all. She longs for the sea where she belongs. Then she becomes ambivalent because he’s so nice.

When I argue against patriarchy, I am not biting the hand that feeds me, because it hasn’t fed me.

In fact, for a woman, the scenario is more often than not feeding the mouth that bites her.

If you can convince women that they are wrong, you can make a lot of profit.

For example, women pay higher rent in order to feel safe in more expensive living quarters, yet they earn less money.

Proof that women love: Men are still alive and not poisoned, one and all, gullibly relying on women’s cooking and judging it as not as significant as their own endless money shuffle.

Of course, in some parts of the world, there are laws that would even take care of any poisoning issue. Women are burned with their husbands on his funeral pyre. The reason given is a sacred story. The prosaic effect is that it’s in the women’s best interest to keep their husbands alive as long as possible.

Sometimes, after war, for example, men rape women simply to insult each other.

We don’t respect women when they volunteer. We don’t respect them when they sell themselves either.

When a man has many lovers, we consider him a stud.

When a woman has many lovers, we consider her a slut.

We never needed men telling us what women think, but they told us anyway. It’s become a long-standing tradition. After thousands of years of being told what we think, if reality doesn’t line up with what we have been told we think, we naturally end up doubting ourselves.

When women are sentimental, no one ends up on a cross or in flames.

When all else fails, they’ll ask: “Are you having your period?”

We’re supposed to think like men, look like children, and not take it personally.

Many feminists are out of print. Already? It hasn’t even been that long.

Just thirty, forty years after women’s studies, we’ve capitulated to our inclusive nature. It’s gender studies now. We’ve studied men for approximately ten thousand years. Apparently, women can be studied in thirty or forty years flat.

I’m told I can’t communicate with the muse because the muse is a woman and only speaks to men. As, incidentally, does God.

I am the daughter of daughters of daughters who were not burned as witches.

Whenever we tell the truth, we’re afraid of hurting the liar’s feelings.

Patriarchal religions care about life before birth and after death.

In some quarters, birth control is still considered a crime. Fertility clinics are not. Sometimes God needs all the help He can get.

China stopped its limit on one child per couple—because of the infanticide it provoked. Everybody wanted a boy child.

You want me to take an anti-depressant so you don’t have to make an effort?

Some male misogynist writers make poison sound good.

The Adam syndrome: There’s always a woman to blame.

An unwritten beatitude: The weak shall inherit the men.

Men in elegant suits discuss whether women shall be allowed to have legal abortions and when and how it is appropriate to kill other human beings.

The harshest thing to know is that women who are oppressed can become oppressors.

Freud still gets to me. If too many women get molested by their fathers, then we’ll just have to come up with a theory how that’s all in their imagination or even wishful thinking.

Men will be loyal to other men they do not even know. Men are, above all, in love with each other.

None of this explains why men hate women. And many of them do.

If I had lived a different life, I would tell a different story. Meanwhile this story continues.

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