Sustained by the Tears of the Patriarchy

I really liked the reading from Mary Daly's "Beyond God the Father," and it made me really interested to learn more about primitive religions before such mythologies as the Fall of Man existed. There was Lilith, of course, willful and refusing to be subservient to Adam. Was she his first wife? She predated Eve, but I don't remember her history as well, because her story didn't make the cut into the Christian bible. There was Inanna, a complete and total superhero, but her story too was told through the lens of the patriarch. But there were hundreds of goddesses, spanning the globe, that predated any of these women, but I can't think of one who didn't exist, even in her own story, independent from her usefulness to or detriment of a man.

Somewhere along our evolutionary timeline this idea of male supremacy must have started. Did it start with sex? When did the switch happen between sex for reproductive purposes and sex for power? When did woman, creator of life, become less than? How did we let this happen? I would appreciate any recommended reading or perspective on this. I may be grasping at straws here but there must be some way to make sense of it all. And if I can point to a single event or cause for this disharmony between the sexes, surely I can do something about it?????


I was once engaged in a discussion about the harmful effects of internalized misogyny as seen in young girls and as evidenced by anti-feminism rhetoric in youtube videos with titles that claim such feats as "Girl DESTROYS Feminism in 5 Minutes!" I was speaking to how hard it is to see young girls and women putting each other down in what can only be understood as an effort to subconsciously please their male peers, when my male cousin announced "Yeah, it's terrible, but like, we male feminists have it the worst because we have to deal with these girls in relationships."

I want so badly to know what to do about all of this. Where do we go from here? I am fortunate to have a good group of strong feminist friends who make efforts in our daily lives to call out injustices and fight for equality, and it's a continuous process to identify our own internalized biases. But knowing how fucked up everything is doesn't always help in navigating the fucked-upedness. I need a drink.

Freedom to Ramble

This week has been a tough one.

There is a tenseness in the air that seems to drown some cripplingly, while others go about their day unfazed. I'm so tired in my heart and in my brain and in whatever secular equivalent exists for the metaphysical "soul," in which I've never truly believed, but that apparently exists just to bare the wounds of violence. I feel an unrelenting heaviness, like hauling bricks in my invisible knapsack, which I keep trying to unpack but it still feels somehow dutiful to carry that weight.

The issue of free speech has been coming up a lot for me in light of the recent national debates and movements and thinkpieces and op-eds being released regarding the militarization of police and the epidemic of police brutality and the need to endlessly explain that all lives can't matter until black and brown lives do...

On Facebook and other social media I am often tempted to delete anyone who shares articles that I find offensive or ignorant or that perpetuate aspects of our culture that I consider to be shameful. But after this week it feels important to fight that urge, to burst that bubble, to stop isolating myself from challenging conversations. I have the freedom to curse my President (not that I do, or would), to criticize my professors (as if), to march through the Wednesday Night Market with cardboard signs criticizing the gang-like mentality of the police force. Because I have the freedom to do these things, I must also allow others the airtime to speak their minds as well. And if I don't like what they have to say, I want to learn to be better about telling them so, and opening that dialogue.

It has not been an easy path for me to get to where I am today, but I decided very young that my education was something that I valued over everything else. I take it seriously, and appreciate that I have been able to utilize what SRJC makes accessible to me - but not everyone operates that way. A lot of people right now are operating out of what looks like hatred, but is a deep fear. And we can all understand fear.

Week 1

As I embark on what has become my seventh year at Santa Rosa Junior College, I am super stoked to be taking the last class I need to complete my AA in Religious Studies. That's not to say that I'm done here - I've just switched majors so many times since I began my college career that by the time I finish the transfer requirements for SSU (fingers crossed for Fall 2018) I'll have completed AA's in Religious Studies, Philosophy, Humanities, and Child Development. One of these things is not like the other, I know. I began my time at SRJC in the ECE Department, and over the Spring 2016 semester I FINALLY completed my student teaching requirement, so now I'm creeping ever closer to being a legal and bonafide preschool teacher. It's really easy to become distracted from your educational goals when you have to work two jobs to make rent in a shitty two bedroom apartment where termite mounds appear each morning atop the kitchen linoleum and your landlord asks you to pay him in cash and leave the money in the washing machine so he can send someone to pick it up... but we're paying to live in beautiful Sonoma County and that makes it worth it, right?

Anyway, I'm glad to be back in a religion course. I wish I could say I will pursue the study of my passion from here onward, but I was hit hard with the cold reality that if I'm going to continue living in California and try to pay my own way and make it through a Bachelors and then Masters program and avoid getting fucked with/by student loans I needed to give up my dream of living forever in academia, collecting globes and bibles, and pursue a secondary passion that will provide a sufficient salary. So I decided to be a teacher. HAHAHA!

Class is going well for me so far. This is the first summer term in which I've taken several 3+unit classes, and I don't know what I was expecting but wow, so much for an easy breezy semester! I have ten assigned chapters to read this week alone, thank godx I no longer have to work two jobs to survive - there's no way I could pull this off if that were still the case. This class has both the lightest assigned readings and the best textbooks, however, so thanks for that. Thanks for requiring the Scribd subscription instead of the physical copies as well, that's really ingenious and so, so helpful. 

I'm looking forward to learning more about the scholars we were introduced to in the first assigned chapters. Several I knew by name of course, but I've never studied the studiers, as it were.  I'm also actually really excited to adopt the character of Freud. Initially I thought that these blog posts were meant to be posted from the perspective of our characters, which I thought was hilarious, and I might still try to do on my own.

Thanks for a good first week, and thanks for acting like a people and not an online instructor robot.