Apology to all men

Headline: Thousands of Canadian salmon are going to be airlifted to safety after getting trapped by a landslide.

photo above: Firefighter saving a cat from a power pole, a lucky shot by Chris Briggs on Unsplash.

To Men,

First a big thank you for being in the majority when it comes to saving the lives of fish, cats and sundry beings in distress, no doubt including a few of us damosels.

Next a big sorry for all the encounters Women have with Other Women. I think they are to blame for promoting your insecurities which mess up the entire world you keep on having to rescue.

It cannot help how we set ourselves apart as a species in our own right: the Distributer of Wise Advice. We are full of it. We are compelled to share it. We think it does a load of good. But it doesn’t. It puts other women down and gives good cause for men to feel excluded. It can’t be a secret to you, that we hate you most of the time. It still is under wraps that we only hate women more. It's always self-hate, you see, really.

We find you mean and cruel and brute. Your sensitivity-levels on a scale from one to ten score three in regards to us and go up to a whopping ten when flu hits you. Still, I'll admit, I think we’d be out-shouting ourselves anyway if it wasn’t you who were intimidating us and oppressing us. It’s a human-nature thing. There’s no great unbridgeable divide between us. Just something like that little neural cord between the right and left hemispheres of our brain. One snip and we’d never meet eye to eye on anything again. With constant and disciplined training and we could be quite symbiotic.

What nobody really gets is that it never was and never is a gender issue to start with but a love-hate thing.

It's all proportionate to how much we really care and hope and fight for harmony, and not against disaster.

Okay, so once upon a time, we were pushed to gather while you went off to hunt. No amount of androgenous males will change that now. You parked the nomad on the farm and turned us into repetitive machines: you made us grind grain and erode our bodies in a way your light walking around the savannah looking for springbock never did. This was an anthropological fact I was told, yesterday evening.

But soon it got nasty, with she said and he never said anything, and we believe and they never even bother. And we had Florence Nightingale while you had Napoleon not to mention others. But we forgot about Mary Seacole! Or was that your doing, too. Who took the photos? Who made the statues? Who wrote the annals? Virginia Woolf barely had a room of her own back then.

More on "the other Nightingale", the forgotten Mary Seacole, who recently had a statue erected in her memory of presence on the frontlines in the Crimean War here. The photos featured here are also in an article by the Independent on her - still somewhat debated role.

We became strident in response to this brushing to one side and putting us in our place. We weren't toys!
We devised slogans and ways of being unvincible. We declared war and invented rights.

Keep your mountain of money, we huff, gleaning behind the reapers instead. Here is the debt you won’t forgive us, we puff. And at seventy, and fifty maybe already, we are done with wanting a man (in our life); as if we even have a choice. Or fie on us for ever having considered the choice? Is it not wisdom to overcome our natural programme, as we so hope to defy DNA and not become obese, alcoholic, or get cancer and remain autism free?

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But people. Listen up. Cut the abstractions back a bit. Anthropology chases after the facts. Maths calculates what already is. Predictions and preventitive measures are inventions which lend employment to most of mankind in the Knowledge Economy, from weathermen to insurance companies. They won't save the day.

Kings and queens (and too many prime ministers) come and go all the time, but it's the impulse, the very long line behind them all as very momentary individuals that points us in a single direction. This path does not belong to them or anyone but is the elusive future. It is the walkway of the soul, a sexless unit of conscious energy. It pools in you and me, and speaks as man and woman or something that experiments with disregarding the punctuation of the body to find new run-on lines. Different parts of the humanstory with equal weight.

The inequality lies between child and adult or more irredeemably so between the authentically self-developed and those enslaved by second hand thoughts. We are to guard such inequalities as precious definitions on the map of an otherwise fairly white-out world (thinking of "Arctic" again!) by which to steer ourselves as spiritual beings. If you don't fancy a future as a spirit being, would you rather be a robot? If you hadn't already noticed: the real and definitive war is already on between those two options.

Men you are not our problem. If we cannot get along with you too well, it's us. Not you. Us as a human race. Not the executive function you happen to find yourself in.

What we can't take, of course, will kill us. What we don't leave, will be assimilated (and so women become more manly and men more effeminate; not a big deal). Still, sorry to say, stop up your ears all you equalitarians while I do: it IS going to stay a dick thing as long as it is a progenerative spiel we have to work with. The male sexual organ alone makes for a dominance over woman that will keep on causing hurt and humiliation. And so more men are likely to have to suffer this fact, too, if we are ever to remember ourselves as ONE cojoined human race. The laws of spirit are forever correcting our over-drive.

If you have never wondered why Christ is still a man when he is resurrected none of the above can be read without one indignant comment or another. If you have noted that he is seldom depicted androgenous enough to doubt it, you may even have wondered if ALL his bits and bobs have been reassembled (beneath his tunic). Why would he bother to append the sexual organ? The Osiris myth might help you place it in a different light and deepen your ponderings on why, indeed, would he need to append a part that is meant to reproduce, or possibly more superflous yet, excrete in the Heavenly Realm? Why did he not (do we all not, in his likeness) reinvent ourselves like a Ken/Barbie doll? Maybe we do, but on this side we cannot go that far as to depict what that might look like in a world without plastic and limbs with which to reassemble anything....

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photo of disassembled mannequin by Hello I'm Nik