In passing

I pray for your soul every night.
Liar.

From a Women’s History Month Poetry Reading

The error is to think we have a soul,
as we can have a car or an umbrella.
The soul has us. We mustn’t take
our life personally.

– By Oriana, from her poem C.G. Jung to Eurydice

Poolside, 65ºF water

Kate: OK, I’m going in, now.
Splash!
Mama: You know, that’s a form of shock therapy.
Kate: I’m feeling better already.

Read more Fallbrookisms…

Women of Granite … 2000

Like ancient stones
We have directed
Destiny’s course.

Silently stoically
Standing firmly
We have founded and formed

Every executive
Each executioner
Every Senator
Each cellmate

All owe their identity
To our wombs…

As we enter
This rapid movement
With scars of silence
We carry grace and wisdom
Into the echoing corridors
And hurl the earth’s core
At the glass ceilings

Our ungrateful fetuses foolishly formed.

– Lisa Albright Ratnavira

Daughters of Clay … 2008

Like unpolished pebbles
We are tumbled
Along the fates of men

We play with dolls
we bake and cut cookie dough
we are praised for our dresses

Every father’s knee
Every Pastor’s benediction
Every teacher’s gold star
Every playmate’s secret

Our identity is formed before
our ripened wombs release us

we repeat
we regurgitate
with silent assent
we carry our young
into the empty rivers
biting our tongues
we offer them
Promises of change

Our forebears foolishly fought for

– Lisa Albright Ratnavira

About the author:

Lisa Albright Ratnavira’s work has appeared in a variety of literary journals, including Poet, Bereavement, Lucidity and Limestone Circle. She has published two chapbooks: Maiden, Mother and Crone, with Rachel Harding and Kate Harding, and Traveling with Pen and Brush. Lisa directs the Hidden Forest Art Gallery in Fallbrook, California, with her husband, Gamini, a renowned wildlife artist, and their children. Their work appears on www.gaminiratnavira.com. Lisa can be reached at lratnavira@yahoo.com.

(Photo by Gamini Ratnavira, Sri Lanka 2009)

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

National Women’s History Month is upon us. Again. Every March, it has been, since Congress made it so in 1987.

Frankly, I wish we were over and done with it. I wish I could be over and done with Women’s History Month, but I cannot. Because the women in my life — two-thirds of my siblings, half of my friends, all of my maternal unit and my most precious and only offspring — and all the women far beyond my life, exist in a world still dominated by male leaders whose decisions are, well, lacking to say the least. Even a superficial skim of the last decade — the last week! — reveals some stunningly low-hanging idiots.

From Osama Bin Laden’s schizophrenic decision to conquer the infidels by flying planes into symbolic buildings full of people to George W. Bush’s decision to punish Saddam Hussein for deciding to dis George’s daddy to the Taliban’s decision to maim and murder Afghan girls for attending school to presidential wannabe John Edwards’ decision to repeatedly lie to the entire world about his fruitful extramarital affair to Vladimir Putin’s decision to add his prime ministerial whine to Russian skater Yevgeny Plushenko’s ungracious failure to win Olympic gold to Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi’s decision to declare a jihad against Switzerland for banning the building of minarets to the primary advocates of the ban who decided a bigoted national ballot initiative would take care of scary Muslims to AIG CEO Robert Benmosche’s decision to let it slip to the Securities and Exchange Commission that AIG might need more bailout bucks; idiots, every single male one of them.

Of course, women make bad decisions, too. But wouldn’t it be interesting to see what errors women make were we to demand access to the same decision-making powers men have enjoyed since priestesses fell out of favor. But we don’t, and therein lies the problem.

In a nation where the published history of women is so sparse as to require special curricular materials and a designated month during which schools might choose to teach women’s accomplishments and influences, women are not up in arms en masse demanding equal anything. In fact, that women’s history is recognized with a token month is testament to the inclination of too many of us to quietly acquiesce to the token nature of the positions we hold in our textbooks, our politics, our boardrooms and our religions. Even in our families, where it is sometimes worse: I think of the men I know who treat women like nothing more than warm watermelons — and who have fathered daughters. What, oh what, are they teaching their girls? Can they possibly believe their daughters are not privy to the misogyny they spew into the world?

My own daughter is a multi-ethnic creature of olive skin, wildly spiraled hair and black eyes that shift from playful adoration to demonic fire in the flash of a mood swing. She is an amalgam of the women who came before her and those who influence her today. She is the unconventional grandmother wordsmith who deflects life’s frustrations with naughty limericks; the brilliant teacher cum older sister who reads a fabulous future in my daughter’s stars; the Puerto Rican abuela who wrapped fitful fingers around the heartbroken prayer beads of a forsaking God; the mother of ignorance who ignites at the sight of books she’s too frightened to read; the persistent smile of youth staring from obituaries and imagined in heaven taking a happy toke; the girlfriends who love her even when she first wakes up and when she’s down; the domineering Southern Baptist matriarch who went to her properly understated grave firing foreign epithets dredged from an exotic adolescence; the anxious mother who rails at the thought of her daughter thwarted for her gender, stymied by an idiot male-centric system simply by virtue of her body parts.

From these women, my daughter will glean all she is able, the vast and colorful textures of the women whose paths led to hers — and the men who’ve unselfishly loved her. And whom she ends up will perhaps be celebrated during National Women’s History Month in years to come, although that would indeed be sorrowful.

Far better that my daughter — our daughters — would be recognized year-round in standard issue textbooks.

©2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

My high school English teacher was an expansive man, ensnared by the vagaries of a congenital defect. The first class that watched him thrash across the room, dragging his clubfoot behind him, dubbed him “The Galloping Guinea,” effectively vilifying his ethnicity and his physique in one cruel gesture.

But in the privacy of his office, he claimed the intimacy he could not find in the unforgiving mass of the classroom. Each year, amid stacks of classic tomes and contemporary teenage drivel, he approached a favored student, she seated tentatively before his literate desk, he standing behind her. With his hands on her shoulders, he leaned into the back of her head and quoted Walt Whitman’s narcissistic celebration of self.

This is the press of a bashful hand, this is the float and odor of hair,
This is the touch of my lips on yours, this is the murmur of yearning,

Then he directed her performance. “So what does Whitman mean? How would you feel if I put my lips on yours, if I pressed my bashful hand to your breast? Would you guess I have some intricate purpose?”

Lodgings to Let

Back then, we didn’t have words for such murky behavior, other than “yuck-o,” and I opted for an equivalency diploma.

Some years later, I had a boss, quite confident in his prowess with female subordinates in the field. After a presumable business dinner, I found myself pressed to the door of his rental car, with his tongue and thigh in places they didn’t belong. I declined his offer of glory and grind, and suggested an alternate placement for that promotion.

By then, the first sexual harassment cases had been heard; the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission had issued guidelines prohibiting sexual harassment; the thing had been named. But still, just what specific behaviors were we now allowed to challenge?

Absent a clear understanding, sexual harassment law was an unplumbed resource for resolving bad-boy behavior in the workplace and school. Subsequent efforts to refine the definition have produced mixed results, and fear of retaliation has squelched reporting, although the incidence of cases tends upward with increased awareness and mandated training.

Mary Ann Ellis, a California-based human resources consultant, says of the confusion, “People have different levels of sensitivity and different interpretations of what sexual harassment is.” Unlike pornography, we don’t necessarily know it when we see it.

Today, harassers come in all genders and orientations, but women remain the most common targets, and fear of retaliation remains an effective deterrent to reporting, although the consequences of reporting can be as ambiguous as the harassment.

Ellis says, “There can be no retaliation, but there are always consequences for exercising your rights.” She relays the case of a young waitress who was harassed by a cook to the point of reporting his abuse. The cook was properly dealt with, but the waitress’ orders no longer received the attention they previously had and the other cooks shunned her. Neither an ideal outcome nor an uncommon one.

In fact, I once reported a colleague’s crowing about pumping his wife’s various orifices, not because I felt harassed by his idiocy but because I knew the inevitable retaliation would accelerate my exit from an unpleasant company with some severance in hand. Still, the offender and I knew his favored topic was unseemly, and I had told him so, so what was he trying to achieve? What is it harassers actually want?

Ellis describes two categories of harassment. “The nastiest kind is quid pro quo: you have to grant me sexual favors or you won’t receive a promotion. Is that really more about power than it is about sex? The ultimate sexual harassment is rape and rape is about power, not about sex. … The other type is hostile environment, and that sometimes isn’t so much about power as it is about people just being oblivious to what is offensive to other people. On the other hand, sometimes it is about power — men wanting to dominate, intimidate the women in [what the men perceive as] their environment. Maybe it’s all about power!”

OK, maybe it is all about power. To one extreme, harassers are indeed akin to rapists and should be treated as such. But other offenders, maybe they’re just oblivious nincompoops, driven by unevolved biology and insecurities, trying to prove themselves the alpha dogs by marking as many women in their territories as possible.

No reasonable person wants to be the recipient of that mark, but formal complaints don’t always solve the problem. So imagine teaching girls this: When an idiot at work tries to cop a feel or talk trash about his significant other, just whop him upside the head and tell him to bug off.

That is power, without ambiguity.

Love,
K-B

Note: Mary Ann Ellis can be reached 760-994-9718.

©2009 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

(Lodgings to Let by C. Williams, 1814, from the U.S. Library of Congress.)

March is Women’s History Month, which opens the proverbial door to a smorgasbord of juicy topics.

To begin, there’s the scarcity of content about women’s contributions to our nation in public school curricula; hence the designated month and the Women’s History Project. While some folks debate the need for February as Black American’s month of note, I’m not so eager to give up March. Consider the ongoing disregard — or is it disdain? — of the women’s rights movement that created fertile territory for our accomplishments of the last century. Although, tallying what we have achieved, what we haven’t and where we’re losing ground is a painful calculation.

Perhaps most illustrative of the need to better educate school children — and some adults — about women’s contributions, abilities and pursuit of equal rights is the level of histrionic misogyny that has become accepted in our media. Bill O’Reilly was at it again recently, referring to White House correspondent Helen Thomas as the Wicked Witch of the East. In defense of his bad boy behavior, he compared his Fox News television program to a Saturday Night Live comedy routine and demanded they be held to the same standards of commentary. This is, actually, a nice little aspiration for O’Reilly.

But women’s history and the intrinsically linked women’s rights movement encompass much more than teaching misogynists to speak with their big heads; they are a focal point for the rights and responsibilities for which women have advocated long and hard — and which men have long enjoyed.

For instance, the right to vote: Women achieved suffrage in 1920, interestingly 50 years after Black men were enfranchised during the Reconstruction era. The white landed gentry were more comfortable giving their former male slaves the vote than they were their own wives. Some men went so far as to toss their brides in asylums or jail to keep them off the suffragette trail. Do you suppose the discomfort with women’s power persists even today — you know, that Barack Obama-Hillary Clinton thing?

Then there’s pay equity, which we tried to resolve with the Equal Pay Act of 1963, but it didn’t do the trick. So President Obama joined the battle in January when he signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. The new law allows women greater ability to challenge pay discrimination, but, sadly, does not put an end to it. Women in the United States are now earning a whopping 78 cents for each dollar earned by men. Woo-ooo. Or not.

Credit discrimination was tackled in 1974, with the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, which has improved access to credit for women — unless they fall victim to the common scenarios about which the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) cautions: they can lose their credit histories when they marry and change their surnames and when creditors report married couples’ accounts in the husbands’ names only — yes it’s common. Oh, and there’s that other scenario the FTC mentions: “If you suspect discrimination… Complain to the creditor. Make it known you’re aware of the law. The creditor may find an error or reverse the decision.” Isn’t that tactful!

One of the most significant rights won by women in the last century is control of our own bodies through access to contraception. If that strikes you as not such a big deal, just think about it: no pills, no patches, no IUDs, no diaphragms, no rings — no condoms, fellows! — and lots and lots and lots of unwanted pregnancies.

The Comstock Act of 1873, a federal anti-obscenity law, effectively prohibited the distribution of contraceptives because they were considered lewd and lascivious. To win women the right to medically prevent conception, it took: the 1936 Federal Appeals Court decision in United States v. One Package (of Japanese pessaries!), excluding contraceptives from the Comstock Law; the American Medical Association’s 1937 reversal of its earlier declaration that contraception was not “physiologically, psychologically and biologically sound”; family planning activist Margaret Sanger’s persistent machinations; and a whole lot of subsequent legislation. And still, there are those who consider contraception tantamount to abortion, pharmacists who refuse to dispense contraceptives, and insurers who refuse to cover them. And the battle rages on.

So, our successes are varied. Although, from the early suffragists to supposed bra-burning feminists of the 1960s (bra-burning is a myth even Snopes.com has debunked, despite using the term “militant feminist,” as though advocating for ourselves is somehow unacceptable) to young women of the 21st century who don’t know enough about women’s history to appreciate the rights they so blithely take for granted, we have had some delicious moments. But as for me, I’m still hungry for equality.

Love,
K-B

©2009 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

(Undated cartoon from the U.S. Library of Congress.)