“Women and Children”

I think it is beyond time that we stop using “women and children” in the same sentence.

I want us to examine how that came to be, and how it persists in our psyche and expressions today.

I have been mulling around this topic for months now. It first came to mind when seeing the coverage of the genocide in Palestine. They are really becoming more outright about wanting to clear Palestine so they can have it all to themselves from the river to the sea. What projection, but I may leave that to another blog for another day. There are enough people talking about that right now, and I have addressed it in many other venues over the forty years it’s been part of my awareness. Back to the subject at hand, the white mainstream media has been talking about how many “women and children” are being killed, or that “women and children” are killed. An initial thought that I had was that it’s not okay to kill the men of a marginalized community either. I am a proponent of self-defense, but more so a proponent of “an eye for an eye leaves people blind.” Yes, one day we stop experiencing hegemony, but I would be pleasantly surprised to see it in my lifetime.

Then, last Wednesday I sent myself this reminder note to make sure I blogged about it:

In this moment, I can’t exactly recall what came to mind on Wednesday that prompted me to send that note. I am sure that it became a blog idea days before Wednesday though. I do have so many blog ideas I haven’t formulated to share here. Of course, the irony of that man’s commencement address at a catholic college in the face of his mother being a physicist was part of the fuel for this.

After that lengthy preamble there is this even in light of the fact that many people continue to leave or are increasingly unaffiliated to the church (catholic, or otherwise), many of us have a church informed context for our values. Before leaving the church myself because I fundamentally disagree with the business model, I had MANY issues with how women were represented from the pulpit that left me wanting to stand up and shout, “Ain’t I a woman?!” I was keenly aware that many of my other concerns existed outside of the church because of its influence on society, I could not continue to volunteer my labor furthering those values. Also, there has been a growing deluded movement of what is now referred to as being a “TradWife (a traditional wife)” - deluded for too many reasons to discuss in this entry.

Because of the church’s influence on the subordination of women, men have been ill-equipped to partner with grown women, both socially and romantically. The third big topic I will not tackle here is the box called “femininity” and how that is defined and the impact it has on natural human expression and mobility. In my vocation alone, there is the example of “tech skills (hard skills)” and “soft skills” – presumably skills that women have more naturally. One of my many unofficial campaigns is to use the term “power skills” or “human skills” instead of 👎🏽 “soft skills.”

Because women are subordinated, even in some spaces of supposed progressive thought, women are still objectified, discounted and joked about where I should expect a level of safety. The fourth/fifth bigger topic I will not touch on here are the challenges around romantic relationships. Recently, I have been addressing some heterosexual friends around their complaints about the opposite sex. They definitely seem to believe their complaints are germane to the person's gender versus the emotional condition of a human coupled with gender conditioning. I have read a lot of books on love and relationships over the years, the best one I have read recently is Monsters in Love by Resmaa Menakem. The premise is that we all bring stuff into relationships. And I have always said, the only place it surfaces is in committed relationships/marriage as Resmaa points to, when we close the door on other possibilities, choosing "the one."

I have heard men I care about like family or potential love interests reference a role of women as handmaids of their daily maintenance, dreams and goals. Not quite the TradWife, because they still expect her to contribute financially to the household or to her own wants/dreams, but to still keep the house, him and potentially children whether she births them or not, for no “hold something” payment. As a close friend once advised me, at my age I can expect “to be a nurse or a purse.” As I have recently realized and adopted a phrase about the fact that I have been avoiding the “capture” of the status quo. I have been avoiding this capture since I graduated college, and maybe I was born to challenge the status quo. I am not settling for being “a nurse or a purse.” If I do, there are many relationships I could have accepted and money spent on inner work I could have saved.

Then I lost my mind on Thursday when I saw a story about a 63-year-old pastor who married an 18-year-old congregant! This is one of the contexts where this ideology and mental model leads! I understand that in some cultures young people are prepared and socialized to marry earlier than here in the States, but I even question those practices in my mind for other reasons. I always believe that love is undeniable, but I ask people to examine in what is the attraction rooted. Is it rooted in a stereotype or a toxic mental model? I’ve even observed the pairing of Winter and Summer, although typically with a 15-20 year difference rather than the extreme 63 and 18. Some suggest that this age gap represents a meeting point for maturity levels, but personally, it’s not my preference. As I think about it further, I am not surprised at the number of sexual predators that seem to be around the church and other spaces where children are presumed to be safe. Speaking of safety, I can see why many put “women and children” in the same sentence. Women are socialized to be damsels in distress. Even the many women I know who are raised to do things like change their own tires, they still seem to be waiting for it to be “their man’s” job once they get one. I wish for a more egalitarian execution of labor as happens in real life, not arguments predicated on made up gender roles. 🤦🏽‍♀️

Real grown women are not at all like children, none of us real grown people are (see Monsters in Love). And I refuse to relate to men as the children I keep hearing women reference in their rants. There are many ways that women interact men that are abhorrent to my values and I reject that status quo as well.

I also hope that we all develop a healthy inner child that allows us to relate to, and love children and better understand our childhoods, but to grow the f’ up as I have written about before. As with the solutioning of many of our planet’s ills, the gateway to realizing healthy solutions comes through doing one’s inner work that will positively redound to our society.

I am clear that we have far to go in solving a lot of issues I raise on this blog site, and the implementing of solutions are not going to be the best until it is. Until then, we will have to traverse the ugliness of progress. Like in the case of how we will be when we’ve long solved the effects of worldwide white body supremacy and people love and marry whoever they find themselves aligning to without fetish. Until then, we will continue to experience discomfort with ‘interracial’ couplings due to social power dynamics, unprocessed bias, and the challenge of effectively raising Black children when one doesn’t relate to or possess knowledge of their culture. These unresolved issues persist because race, like time, is a made-up construct.

We often interact and even solution and vision based on a limited context. As a man who denied his wife credit in the development of the theory of relativity once said,

So let’s stop putting “women and children” in the same sentence. Either women are accountable as adults, or they are part of the lives that are all worth preserving since “thou shall not kill” is supposed to be one of our core values. One day I will write about how murder of all kinds is the only thing we need to outlaw. The rest we can solve with policy and healthy social constructs as the unsustainable world we currently have has been built and maintained by the shadow version of that.