Little Weirds(25)

You are holding my dog. I can’t tell if you are nice or gross yet. We’ll see.

This is what I think as my insides burn to bits, as my guts curl up into cracklins for a goblin to chomp in hell.

Every morning I call my best friend and we have coffee on separate sides of the city and we talk about how Patriarchy is killing us. She told me that this documentary was one to watch, and so here I am, watching this documentary on my TV that I basically keep in a big giant basket. The narrator is a British woman who seems borderline horny to tell me what she is about to tell me, and her documentary series is called The Ascent of Woman, which actually makes me “emotionally horny” as well.

The woman is a smarty and she is very earnest. She also wears lipstick.

This is what the British woman tells me in her documentary TV show, or at least this is what I can summarize:

Patriarchy is not something that was inevitable. It is not what a God wants or ever wanted, even though that has been said by many men. It is also not what Nature intended (and now that must be clearer than ever, because look at what Patriarchy has done to our Planet Earth). Nature does not want to be tortured and raped and murdered. Nature does not want to be wholly exploited. Patriarchy is not ever going to be for Nature’s own good. Nature belongs to Nature, first and foremost. Nature wants to give to us, but that does not mean we should take more than we need. Nature wants to engage, but not fully submit.

The British woman says: Patriarchy is not a human-biological inevitability. Patriarchy is not here because it “just makes sense” or is the product of a thoughtful rationale.

There was a time before Patriarchy.

We have a better origin story and it is not widely spoken about but it is the truth.

This lady on my TV tells me that Patriarchy was constructed and implemented, and explains that humans originally lived as a community, in a group, and everyone used the tools and everyone took care of each other’s babies, and shared their foods and prayed to gods and goddesses that were equally powerful and holy.

As the communities got larger and created more people, these people were able to accomplish more, to store food and make better shelters from the wildness out there, to live longer and have more children. And they did this for a very long time. It was natural. And it became bigger and bigger and there was especially one good spot, between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, and this was called the Fertile Crescent. It was called the “cradle of civilization” and you might have learned about it in the fourth grade and you might have become obsessed with it, like I did.

You might have overfocused on the cosmic significance of this one spot that sort of seems like it is the Earth’s Vagina. And the civilization of people, in that spot between the two rivers, broke the banks and led the water out into the land. The people led the water far out and they created irrigation. They trained water to come farther and to new places. This allowed the people to have more crops. Then there was a surplus of crops.

I did learn about this, in fourth grade, from the best teacher I have ever had, Mrs. Damp, who never shamed me and was teeny tiny and had a necklace that said her name in hieroglyphics.

I would love to have a beer, and so I do get up and get one and my mind wanders into spots where these questions are shimmying: Would Teddy Roosevelt be a feminist? Would he like me or think I am a wimp? Were the Kennedys just really gross, like, with women? Yes, they were. It’s not great, when you think about it, what they were like with all of the actresses. It’s gross. Why are so many men so gross but still we say that they are heroes? And if we try to even talk about it with these men, they get incredibly upset and defensive and call us cruel or insecure, but really, you can’t have it both ways.

You can’t do the thing but then not want to ever discuss it. If you want to hide it, maybe it’s not just because “it is private” but because you know, you really do know, that it is gross.

This is what I think about as I crack a Miller High Life and vaguely decide that I should not continue to have cyclical relationships with gross men, and that I will be sort of an “aunt to the world” and begin to collect sex toys made by other feminists.

Or maybe I will meet and fall in love with an actually good man, I think, as my stomach lurches with curry-fire and my nipples are randomly hard from the amount of spice in my body.



In the room with the TV, the dog is sniffing for curry, but it is only a memory. I have removed the bowls. The TV goes right back on because I press the buttons and I’m the boss, and here’s my British gal, now wearing a headscarf while touring an archeological dig. Her mouth has a daytime lipstick on it and she wants me to know this:

Civilizations (Sumer, Mesopotamia, etc.) flourished in the Fertile Crescent between the Tigris and the Euphrates. Some people must have ended up with more than other people, because of the surplus of crops after they invented irrigation, and so then there was not only a class system but also greed, a new toothy, fast-breathing, slick-thinking, not-sorry greed.

This woman reminds me of this sequence of events that for some reason I have always been fascinated by ever since Mrs. Damp told us about it—that there was a surplus and the world changed.

Where there should have simply been an equal distribution of goods and general dedication toward community satisfaction and safety, instead greed came in and took ahold of a few key players. And these key players who were cold enough to look past questions of whether or not what they were doing was humane were Men.