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“Women’s presence in public becomes with startling frequency an invasion of their private parts, sometimes literally, sometimes verbally. Even the English language is rife with words and phrases that sexualize women’s walking…Of course women’s walking is often construed as performance rather than transport, with the implication that women walk not to see but to be seen, not for their own experience but for that of a male audience…
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…In Middle Assyria…women were divided into two categories. Wives and widows ‘who go out onto the street’ may not have their heads uncovered, said the law; prostitutes and slave girls, contrarily, must not have their heads covered. Those who illicitly wore a veil could be given fifty lashes or have pitch poured over their heads…
Many things are remarkable about the appearance of this law…
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It makes a women's sexuality a public rather than a private matter. It equates visibility with sexual accessibility, and it requires a material barrier rather than a woman’s morality or will to make her inaccessible to passersby. It separates women into two publicly recognized castes based on sexual conduct but allows men, whose sexuality remains private, access to both castes.”
Data processing in the payroll department was considered acceptable female employment; many of the women, like my mom, were wives of university guys. The sound of their modest heels across the linoleum mixed with the shuffling of the machines processing those stacked cards the women sorted into them.
Womantouch collecting, placing and picking up again. The circuitry, still.
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“My partner Harry has a tattoo that says – it’s from Edouard Glissant – on one arm it says, ‘Our boats are open’; on the other it says, ‘and we sail them for everyone.’ It’s something we talk about a lot. How to make something very specific and very granular and very idiosyncratic, that somehow feels like an open boat? It’s kind of a great mystery.”
It’s said hardly anyone pays attention to paper publishing anymore. And what finds its way to print is disposable or fetishized, so tactile, so over-the-top materially present it makes people swoon with possessive desire. Bookmarks for something lost.
We thought back then, when the personal computer arrived on everyone’s desk in that breathtaking brush aside of typewriters, it would put printing into the hands of the people. And it has, in its way. Although not entirely as we imagined.
A PARTICIPATORY NARRATIVE
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For some of you I worry there might be a conflation of this idea of a Voice of the Many with the everynook&cranny social media floods of the Tsunamic Cyber. There is overlap. They inform each other. But it’s tricky.
Tricky first, because our social media floods seem dominated by the extraordinarily cruel. A sad bringing to surface and unfortunate celebration of some of our least conscious-of-connection traits.
Second, social media is trolled for appropriation by The Sell. In this larcenous use, not only are the most outrageous/loudest set in frames atop the heap, but the tattered edges - a potential source of reboot - are open pit mined for raw material to inject emotional spark/dimension into those flat frames.
This wasteful, quick carbon burn stirs up our possessive desire and the consequent yearn becomes, when unchecked, an endorsement of the display of our brutal, “in your face” primal. “My wealth given meaning by your lack.” We of the Void understand.
For those of us in the Voice of the Many working to encourage literate being, the trick it seems to me, is in recognizing and eluding the grooming, false seduction and capture of this framing. Perhaps it’s the trick for contributing social media, too.
I imagine this Voice of the Many to be a tributary of the larger, continually breaking frame, sometimes cacophonous, Participatory Narrative; a sort of floating coalescence of those on the alert for containment
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“Hindu Philosophers have long described the experience of “being” as a web--jaal. Genes form the threads of the web; the detritus that sticks is what transforms every individual web into a being. There is an exquisite precision in that mad scheme. Genes must carry out programmed responses to environments-otherwise, there would be not conserved form...
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...But they must also leave exactly enough room for the vagaries of chance to stick…. An upright organism with opposable thumbs is thus built from a script, but built to go off script. We all one such unique variant of one such organism a “self.”