The Mad Masculine
I finish reading an email from my friend Jeanne, who is wrapping up her third week as a volunteer medical person in Haiti, and turn to the news that a sixteen-year-old Turkish girl has been buried alive by her family for having boys as friends.
My nervous system suffers a disconnect.
In the wake of a horrible natural disaster, one overwhelmed woman somehow finds an inner strength and resolve to continue on, doing what must be done in conditions that are hellish, unimaginable, while elsewhere in the world men find it possible to bury a child alive, her lungs and stomach filling with soil.
Who are we? Of course, I want to applaud the woman, and I want to destroy the men. Though my spiritual practice counsels me that every life is precious, that killing is a terrible sin, I admit to a reservoir of rage that would happily roll out over the planet and extinguish every monster male who currently perpetrates violence against women. It would ravage the insane family members who murdered the child; it would reduce to cinders the fifty men who buried a girl up to her neck in a sports stadium, then hurled stones at her head until she died; it would sear the devils who use war as an excuse to rape and disfigure females; it would choke to death men who physically and emotionally abuse women in relationship.
What is their behavior? Hatred of the Divine Feminine? Fear of it? Do they black out, not knowing who they are or what they’re doing? Are they born malignant, or do they become that way? Are they simply evil?
How do we respond? Abuse-Poetry encourages women to write about their experiences. Poetry promotes healing even here, but if we aren’t going to kill them all, what do we do about the man-monsters themselves?
Man-Monster Poetry could be part of a solution. Resources could be dedicated to forcing perpetrators of the crimes I’ve mentioned here to participate in writing workshops. Encourage or prod them to write their stories and listen to victim stories.
All that’s clear is that something more needs to be done. Are we incapable of thinking of intelligent, compassionate solutions? We live in an entertainment culture that blunts the immediacy of human life. Imagine all the money spent on Super Bowl advertising. Imagine just one company taking its million-plus dollar fee for thirty seconds or a minute of TV time and instead pledging it to ending violence of any kind against women. Imagine every Super Bowl advertiser doing that. Would we survive as a culture, as humans? I’d like to know what you think. I’d like to hear what you feel.
Last year, a short while after I started my blog in September, came news of the rape of a young woman in California, a rape that was witnessed by many, who watched but failed to act to stop the act. I wrote two posts about that. The incident still lingers in my mind, perhaps because the stories are so common: I taught English to a immigrant from El Salvador who was raped brutally while in high school; I opened the paper one morning several years ago to read that an artist whom I’d only just met met a horrible death at her husband’s hands, meted out in front of their children, and no one had any idea she had been living a life of domestic violence; I knew another woman in the early ’70s who while walking to her car one evening after meeting friends for a drink was kidnapped and driven for hours in a van, continuously raped. Who among us does know these stories?
I ask the same questions. I ask how is it possible that we mothers raise our sons in love that doesn’t seem enough to put an end to that primal brutal instinct? I ask how is it possible that at the same time we are assisting the injured in Haiti we are killing other human beings in Iraq and Afghanistan?
I can write out the horrors in poems and prose. The words never seem enough to stop their coming.
Maureen, your insights and observations are powerful. As a man, I feel as if I’m being pummeled every time I read about incidents like those you describe, and I share your despair and that awful feeling that words aren’t somehow enough.
Then I remember that words are all we have to begin with, and they can lead us to compassion and wisdom. It’s all we have, really, it’s all that keeps us human. Out of our words comes the universal intention, if it is to come at all, that will turn the wounded minds and sick minds to the light, to healing. Take heart.
[...] was thinking about responses to my last blog entry, The Mad Masculine, when I read the breaking (and heartbreaking) news of Jennifer Daugherty’s death by torture in [...]
I appreciate it so much that you can write so graphically about something so painful and horrible, but with the intention to move us all forward in conscientiousness. None of us has to look far to find these stories, with so many of us women being victim to male brutality in its many forms. I agree of it senselessness, mindlessness, broken-fragmented soulessness… What a concept to have these same perpetrators write about their participation and listen to the stories of victims. I know several men who seem so far from ready for this shift in their awareness and soul growth, but from a higher place of conscientiousness I imagine even some hope for this part of the human race. We all need hope for where ever we are.
Perri, you speak with great wisdom and compassion, and you sum up with the perfect truth–that we all need hope. Yes, every single one of us. Bless you!