imbalance

What triggers anger? Fear? Arrogance? Impotence? My anger is a rich blend of all three and something deeper and more primal. No, it's more about my inner child. My history.

Many smart, capable female friends have been posting on Facebook about getting old. And fat. And not being pretty. I see decades of creativity sucked dry by bullshit. And I got angry.

"Why do you waste your energy puling about aging? All you have is time and you're pissing it away. There's a million more fascinating, enriching and amusing things to do out there than moan than something you can't change. I am 53. I don't give a rat's ass about getting older. Get on with your lives and stop this ridiculous, first-world whiny shit.
You are smart and I love you but you are wasting your precious time. The End."

It probably won't make a bit of difference and I'll offend people and make them defensive. I should just block them so I don't have to read it. 

Who do I think I am, telling people that they're full of shit? 
Who do I think I am, telling them I know better than they do? 

This goes back to power. And balance and imbalance. 

Do I have the right? 
Do I have the obligation? 
Do I see clearly?

Well, I guess I think I do. I think I have the right and obligation to say that the Emperor is stark naked. I am pretty sure, however, that it falls on deaf ears and I want to be okay with exorcising cultural demons even if it seems I'm the only one witnessing the act.

pink dispair

dailykos
There's a blog I really like called the dailykos.com. Markos Moulitsas Zúniga began the blog in 2002. For me, he has all the progressive credibility credentials: ex-military, fled El Salvador as a child with his family, educated, informed, intelligent and articulate. Yes, it's liberal and so am I and of course, I don't take every word as canonized truth–it's just more information than I'm ever going to get from corporate media. He has a bunch of contributing editors to his site and I generally find the writing and links very informative.

pink pinko baby
And I love that bloggers can periodically include bits of their personal lives. Someone once said that all politics are personal and that simple cliche bears repeating. The human element can be as strong a bond as philosophical agreement.

I read with mixed feelings this entry about his two-month old daughter which features a picture of the beautiful baby. I am as big a fan of infants as some of my sisteren are of puppies and kittens and the like. Even wrinkly red, vernix-caseosa-coated, meconium-extruding newborns are irresistible to me. Which is why my feelings are mixed. She is a lovely child. But as I looked at the photo I was dismayed at the pink, puffy-sleeved, sweet-sweet-sweet embroidered dress/blouse she was wearing for this special photo.

Ach. I love pink. But when we dress our babies in hyper-gendered outfits we handle them differently. We place exagerrated emphasis on gender importance. We handle the spun-cotton-candy-sugar like spun glass. We handle the navy blue-clad more...firmly. I can't seem to make many inroads on this issue with even my most progressive acquaintances. I get their "oh, she's on her feminist rant again" tolerantly amused faces.

There's nothing wrong with the delicate or the rough-and-tumble. However, let's seriously question the one-or-the-other approach that saturates gender perception.

get a gun, daddy
In addition to the traditional portrayal of femininitude, were the predictable comments about having a daughter:

When you have a boy, you only have to worry about 1 penis.
When you have a girl, you have to worry about five million penises.

It's always amusing to see my friends have to pull out the daddy card and be that scary man that scares off the boyfriends. A buddy of mine is already talking about getting a rifle, and his daughter's only a year old.

Well, shit. These are supposedly non-conservative, untraditional commenters. These are the liberals, feminists and progressives. And while some add disclaimers to their references about "sugar & spice," there is wistful attachment to these traditional descriptions.

When you begin with the premise that the world is chock-full of penis-wielding intruders and little girls must be protected by their daddies, you strip away the potential survival power that a female might have and replace it with fear and helplessness.

This isn't just about pink dresses.