The Furious Spinner

Hot, stale, restless week. Waiting for rain or a break in the weather.
Monday Mario and I watched the documentary Anonymously Yours, about sex-trafficking in Burma (now called Myanmar). Four women tell horrifying stories of prostitution and sex-slavery. One of the women was sold into slavery by her aunt and shipped to China. A couple of men helped her escape but only after she had sex with them. Then she had to have sex with a bus driver so she and her friend could get on the bus. (They didn’t have any money.) At the end of her story, she said she would be glad to be sold to someone in the United States.

The filmmaker used the women’s stories, she said, to “reveal an institution that enslaves as many as forty million women worldwide. From the backrooms of teashops and restaurants, to five star hotels, the Far East sex trade thrives on the routine merchandising of women for the sexual escape and pleasure of men from all cultures.”

40,000,000 women and girls.

When the movie was over, Mario and I sat in silence. Finally, he said, “It doesn’t give you much hope for humankind, does it?”

“What right did those men have to force her or anyone to have sex with them?” I said. “Why would anyone want to have sex with someone who didn’t want sex with them? I always wonder that. It’s just so perverted. I don’t understand it.”

Afterward, I watched another documentary, Veils Uncovered, about Syrian women who must be completely covered in public, but they also shop at the market for “sexy” lingerie—the kind of underwear an American would most likely order online or go to a porn or S&M shop to purchase. They buy these items out in public from men, by the way, who display panties proudly, explaining how they work and showing all the various “entry” points.

The director also filmed the women through the day at their homes as they “worked” to become sexually attractive to their husbands, competing with his other wives so they wouldn’t be sent back to their parents’ homes. We see pieces of these women when the director films them waxing their legs, armpits, and pubic area (to remove the hair).

Power, power, down the drain.

By the time I finished watching both of these films, I was speechless and depressed as hell. Time and time again throughout my life I come back to this same subject and realization: the treatment of women on this planet sucks. It is not a subject many people will discuss. They often roll their eyes or say, “More important things are going on in the world.”

What could be more important? The treatment of women is at the heart—at the deep decaying empty core—of what is wrong with most cultures. Show me a country where women and men are equal (equally respected, equal under the law, their roles in society equally honored), and I will show you a culture where the children are well-cared for, Nature is cherished, sex is sacred, and war is obsolete.

At one pointed in Veil Uncovered a woman took off her veil. She was hesitant and had difficulty looking at the camera once the veil was removed. She was absolutely beautiful, just as any human being who is allowed to shine is. She was clearly uncomfortable being unveiled so the filmmaker (a woman) said, “It’s OK. You can put it back on.” And she did, and we could only see her eyes. When she appeared in the film later, she was unveiled and defiant about it. But her husband found out, and the filmmaker never saw her again.

This part of the world—where women are subservient to men and must cover themselves—is the region where the Amazons once roamed, some scholars not believe. Were the men so fearful of the power of women they conquered that they forced each woman to cover up every part of her being, dampening all her energy and magic?

Now that Saddam is gone and a religious government has taken over in Iraq, women are losing more and more freedom and autonomy. (No, I’m not implying Saddam was a great guy.) Of course even here in the U.S. of A. polygamy continues in some enclaves. Our own political institutions are far from equal, percentage-wise. And millions of children and women are abused sexually, physically, and emotionally every day.

Which brings me back to pornography. This is another topic where people get monumentally uncomfortable. I’ve said here before that I believe pornography is bad. I think it is part of the dehumanizing of women and the sexualization of violence. It ain’t got nothing to do with healthy wonderful sexuality. (I’m not talking about home movies/photos created with mutual consent; that’s your beeswax. I’m talking about pornography, and we all know what that is.)

Nowadays it seems to be standard practice for men (particularly younger men) to go online and look at pornography. I’ve talked with many women about this activity and I have yet to find one woman who is comfortable with it—granted, I don’t know every woman on the planet. Many of these men have daughters. I always wonder what these fathers would say if their daughters saw what they were looking at. Or what would they do if they were looking at porno and found their daughter, wife, sister, mother there? Do men just disconnect from this reality when they look at pornography?

Mario and I subscribed to TV again recently, and we got HBO for the first time. The way women are treated on many of these shows is appalling. It’s as though they are just these things to be fucked (and sometimes rescued). I keep wondering, “Is this how men feel about women in real life?” It certainly is not how women are treated in my real life. Are Mario and I so out of the mainstream? Are these shows portraying reality or is everyone in Hollywood misogynist?

Last night as Mario and I lay in bed trying to sleep in the heat, we started talking about how men view women and how real men talk about women.

“It is difficult to articulate how awful it feels to know that men talk about women and regard women in such violent and hateful ways,” I said. “I’ve never in my life been with a group of women where they talk like that about men: as pieces of ass, bitches, using words like that–there are no equivalent words for men. We don’t talk about men as bits and pieces. Even if we’re angry, it’s not the same—there is not the implicit violence that there is in so many of these conversations we hear in movies and on television.”

And then I asked the question I always ask Mario when I don’t understand male behavior.

“Do men really talk about women that way? Sexually? Obscenely? Hatefully?”

“I don’t know. I don’t hang around with men much.”

“Why?”

“Because they’re pigs,” he said.

“Come on,” I said. “Kevin’s not a pig.”

“He’s in Hawaii.”

“Charles isn’t a pig.”

“He’s in Ottawa.”

And so it went as I named men I knew and loved.

“So the gist of this conversation is that there are no good men here in this area?”

“I just don’t know any.”

“OK. So when you were a kid, boys said terrible things about girls?”

“Yes.”

“Did you participate? You can tell me. I’ll still love you.”

“No,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Because it was disgusting. Appalling.”

“Did you call them on it?”

“I would tell them they were just plain wrong about some things,” he said. Like the time one boy tried to explain what sex was like with a woman, and he said a woman’s vagina grabbed a hold of the man’s penis and wouldn’t let it go when they were having sex.

“So do you think men who won’t tolerate racist or other bigoted comments just sit by while other men talked about women as being whores and things like that?”

“I don’t really know.”

I sighed.

“Good men would be valiant,” I said. “They would see women as whole beings separate from male sexual desires.” I tried to think of a group of valiant men. It was past one a.m. and my mind wandered to King Arthur for some bizarre reason.

“For instance I bet the knights of the round table wouldn’t have talked about women being bitches and whores.” But then, where were the female knights of the round table? That was the true problem with the wounded king: he needed some female blood. They needed the holy grail. If they had had themselves some good ol’ women by their sides, the king and the land would have been all healed up.

“Well,” said Mario, “we don’t really know how the knights behaved in private. We just have the legends, which wouldn’t include stuff that would make them look bad. They could do chivalrous work and still be piggish at other times. Remember that Matt Dillon character in ‘Crash.’ He risked his life to save a woman, and yet earlier he assaulted that same women in a sick power display. I think that sort of thing is very common.”

“Maybe all these shitty men are just out looking for the holy grail,” I said. “Little do they know that it’s right next to them. We’re the freaking holy grails. But we need to be treated right.”

Naw. That wasn’t right either. Too symbolic. That was like saying women existed so that men had a reason. That wasn’t the way it was. Men and women. Different. Equal. Lovely.

Mario and I were silent, waiting for sleep.

“I want to hear a coyote howl,” I said. “I haven’t heard a coyote since we left Arizona.”

Mario held out his arm and I curled up next to him, my head on his shoulder. A breeze came in through the window. Finally! But no coyote howls. No answers in the dark. Just each other. 1 comments

1 Comments:

40 million women and girls. That is truly mind-numbing. We have a LONG way to go...

By  kevin, at 4:25 PM  

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