Man, Hear Me Roar...

     When you first read that title you may be thinking of the wild and fractured history of MGM's (now an Amazon company) Leo the Lion which roared before every movie presentation (the new 3-D version is a pretty cool update to our times).  And then you may reflect on that semi-macho, semi-casual greeting often used by guys with a quick nod of the head as in "hey man."  But altering that title was somewhat of a lure by me, a wordplay of sorts to pull you into that popular 70s song by Australian singer Helen Reddy: I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar which became a bit of a rallying cry for the feminist movement (think Gloria Steinhem) perhaps because the next line of the song was: In numbers too big to ignore.  Women had arrived on the scene.  But despite the inroads of those times (think civil rights), women have yet to achieve income equality with men; breaking that glass-ceiling has proved to be quite difficult with little more than a few cracks appearing and far from a complete shattering.  But those cracks may be growing a bit larger. Wrote the editor of Scientific American: Don't you love it when a paradigm shifts?  When people realize that they've been looking at something all wrong and that there's a better way?...In our cover story, human biologist Cara Ocobock and biological anthropologist Sarah Lacy upend a long-dominant theory of human evolution: that men alone evolved to hunt.  Drawing on research from physiology, paleoanthropology, archeology, and more, they show that women have always hunted and are better adapted to some endurance tests than men.  The magazine's cover, showing the early beginnings of humans, was titled: How science debunks the myth that men evolved to hunt and women to gather.

     Photographer Lynsey Addario, in her book It's What I Do, feels adrenaline and danger in her work, having gone to such war-torn countries as Afghanistan, Iraq, Cuba, and The Congo.  As she wrote: With my subjects --the thousands of people I have photographed-- I have shared the joy of survival, the courage to resist oppression, the anguish of loss, the resilience of the oppressed, the brutality of the worst of men and the tenderness of the best...Journalists can sound grandiose when they talk about their profession.  Some of us are escapists; some of us do wreck our personal lives and hurt those who love us most.  This work can destroy people.  I have seen so many friends and colleagues become unrecognizable from trauma: short-tempered, sleepless, and alienated from friends.  But after years of witnessing so much suffering in the world, we find it hard to acknowledge that lucky, free, prosperous people like us might be suffering, too.  We feel more comfortable in the darkest places than we do back home, where life seems too simple and too easy.  We don't listen to that inner voice that says it is time to take a break from documenting other people's lives and start building our own.

My tee's front, from 2004...

      All that said, and being true, it was a bit embarrassing for me to be sitting at dinner with my wife and our friend (female) as they talked of the different rules which applied to girls when each of us were growing up in the times that we did: guys in high school could play sports with their shirts off but girls weren't allowed to expose a midriff or wear too high a skirt; and being a tomboy for a girl was somewhat unusual but an okay thing, but not the other way around, because if you were a guy showing any feminine traits, you'd be considered "queer."  I had to sheepishly admit that such differences, while obviously true when pointed out, never entered my mind back then.  Religion, race, politics.  Heck, we were in high school and our parents worked.  And a war was going on someplace near Japan, you know, around that area.  And besides, we had the draft to worry about.  Weren't we still kids, in a way?  All of those idioms and societal expectations about "guys and gals" certainly existed and yet were as distant to me as the coming reality of having to face adulthood -- there but not there, in a sense, at least not for us.  And when you're in high school, doesn't it seem as if the rest of the world is like, well, "us?"  Okay, maybe today's world is not so innocent but back then...

     Now before I go any further, I paint this naïve Grease portrait of innocence (the movie took place in an era before my time but you get the gist) because my teenage brain was still not rid of its youthful hormones (note the bodysurfing episode in the last post) and thus not ready to leave the world of The Rascals and beautiful mornings.  So yes, I admit that I didn't observe those guys/gals discrepancies; but if I'm honest, I am unfortunately still far from educated about knowing women.  So as I write about some of this, keep all of that in mind, and realize that I have no college studies, no doctoral thesis, and no first hand knowledge of the struggles women may have had and may still experience, good or bad.  But I can't ignore that the more I read about the topic, the more it seems to me that women's rights are now rapidly slipping to an era long past, a time almost harking back to my high school days.

     In a review of the book Mother Tongue, Mary Wellesley wrote in the London Review: The earliest history of English had its share of prejudice but also offers a world of nuance and possibility.  The term "girl" was originally gender-neutral, meaning simply "young person": the first recorded use of the word in English comes from a poem of around 1300 which describes a crowd of "gurles and men" thronging a London street.  Similarly, "Mrs." did not become fixed as the title of such married woman until the mid-19th century.  Before that point, it meant something like "boss lady," a female honorific indicating authority.  Some words that now feel firmly gendered originally had another meaning.  "Vagina" meant the scabbard of a sword.  I could not hate this more.  The idea that it is a protective casing for a phallic weapon feels like a betrayal of what the vagina can do.  Anyone who has seen or experienced the vagina expanding to allow an infants skull to pass through it can testify to its wonder. 

     So guys, men, whatever; this is basically for everyone who has not witnessed a birth or has no idea of how giving birth works.  Here's how neurosurgeon Atul Gawande explained birthing in his book, Better: First, a mother's pelvis enlarges.  Starting in the first trimester, maternal hormones stretch and loosen the joints holding the four bones of the pelvis together.  Almost an inch of space is added.  Pregnant women sometimes feel the different parts of their pelvis moving when they walk.  Then, when it's time for delivery, the uterus changes.  During gestation, it's a snug, rounded, hermetically sealed pouch; during labor it takes on the shape of a funnel.  And each contraction pushes the baby's head down through that funnel, into the pelvis.  This happens even in paraplegic women; the mother does not have to do anything.  Meanwhile, the cervix -- which is, through pregnancy, a rigid, more-than-inch-thick cylinder of muscle and connective tissue capping the end of the funnel-- softens and relaxes.  Pressure from the baby's head gradually stretches the tissue until it is paper-thin -- a process known as "effacement."  A small circular opening appears, and each contraction widens it, like a tight shirt being pulled over a child's head.  Until the contractions pull the cervix open about four inches, or ten centimeters -- the full temple-to-temple diameter of the child's head-- the child cannot get out.  So the state of the cervix determines when both will occur.  At two or three centimeters of dilation, a mother is still in "early" labor.  Delivery is many hours away.  At four to seven centimeters, the contractions grow stronger.  "Active" labor has begun.  At some point, the amniotic sac surrounding the fetus breaks under the pressure, and the clear fluid gushes out.  Contractile force increases further.  At between seven and ten centimeters of cervical dilation, the "transition phase, " the contractions reach their greatest intensity.  The contractions press the baby's head into the vagina and the narrowest part of the pelvis's bony ring.  The pelvis is usually wider from side to side than front to back, so it's best if the baby emerges with the temples --the widest portion of the head-- lined up side to side with the mother's pelvis.  The top of the head comes into view.  The mother has a mounting urge to push.  The head comes out, then the shoulders, and suddenly a breathing, waiting child is born.  The umbilical cord is cut.  The placenta separates from the uterine lining, and with a slight tug on the cord and a push from the mother, it is extruded.  The uterus spontaneously contracts into a clenched ball of muscle, closing off its bleeding sinuses -- the expanded veins in the uterine wall.  Typically, the mother's breasts immediately let down with colostrum, the first milk, and the newborn can latch on to feed.  That's if all goes well.  At almost any step, the process can go wrong.  For thousands of years, childbirth was the most common cause of death for young women and infants

     So what can males expect to happen in life when compared to what females undergo during giving birth to a child?  Maybe in our later years we males begin to lose our hair.  And that may be it.  And despite being considered the other "half," women are far from feeling anywhere close to 50/50 in a patriarchal world.  Wrote Gillian Anderson & Jennifer Nadel in their book*, We: The world we share is more divided and unequal than ever.  Rates of anxiety, depression, and self-harm among women are skyrocketing.  And the hard-fought rights that we, as women, thought we'd already won are once again under renewed attack.  More than seven hundred million women live in hunger, and yet those with plenty battle obesity and depression.  Every minute, one woman dies needlessly in childbirth, while elsewhere in the world another woman spend thousands on cosmetic surgery because she isn't able to feel comfortable with how she's aging.  Violence against women is rising, yet at the same time, refuge services --especially for black and minority ethnic women-- are being cut...The list goes on and on, and every one of us knows that it's crazy and it's wrong.  Yet instead of joining together, we often find ourselves isolated and in competition.  Trying to put a positive spin on our lives to disguise the huge gap between how things look externally and how they feel inside.  Not able to lift our eyes to the horizon and deal with the bigger issues because we each have so much on our plate...Our current political systems have failed us, but it's not possible to heal the divisions in our world without also healing the wounds which drive them.  We can't break our broken system by sitting in judgement.  Within each of us lies the seeds of intolerance and hate.  If we simply declare others wrong and ourselves right, we deepen the divide.  But to remain silent is also not an option -- it leaves us complicit. 

Stats on the back of my tee are from 20 years ago...

      Another view came from a male, the Nobel Prize winner, Dr. Denis Mukwege in his book, The Power of Women: There was nothing inevitable about my path in life.  I set out to become a physician, which was already a lofty ambition for a child born in a shack at a time when Congo was a Belgian colony.  But my life has been shaped by events beyond my control, above all the wars since 1996 that have ravaged Congo, and women in particular, under the mostly indifferent gaze of the rest of the world. Circumstances forced me to become a specialist in treating rape injuries.  The stories of the patients I encountered and tested drove me to join a much larger fight against the injustices and cruelties suffered by women...The fight against sexual violence begins with women and men speaking out.  One in three women worldwide has experienced either physical or sexual violence at some point in her life, according to UN Women.  Nearly one in five women in the United States has experienced completed or attempted rape during her lifetime, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  We cannot fight this without publicly acknowledging the sheer pervasiveness of the problem...Women cannot solve the problem of sexual violence on their own; men must be part of the solution.  Men continue to retain an overwhelming grip on political power in all countries, not just through the presidencies, prime ministers' offices, and parliaments of the world that set our laws.  Their influence extends to the apex of religious bodies and to community-level organizations that often have a more powerful influence on personal behavior and attitudes than distant national leaders.  To reduce sexual violence, we need action and commitment all the way down the pyramid of power in our societies, from the top to the very bottom.  Added authors Anderson and Nadel: Leading female scientists, politicians, and commentators still find that if they speak publicly, their looks and clothes are dissected in ways that simply don't happen to men, reinforcing the sense that beneath the talk of equality, we remain objects to be lusted over, dominated, and possessed, rather than equals.

     Being naïve when I was in high school is something I can accept; but it must have left a splinter in me, one that has me still questioning why there is such disparity in the world, and how friends I knew way back then could take such a different course in their opinions and outlooks.  Was it their or my environment or upbringing, or the group of new friends they associated with (they likely view me in the same manner).  How can hate and prejudice become so passed down that something as simple as a sign marking the horrible death of Emmitt Till now has to be encased in bullet-proof glass and surrounded with security cameras (the original bullet-ridden sign is now in The Smithsonian; it was the first of three such signs, each equally riddled with bullets, that forced the most recent sign to be erected).  And where does such thinking come from when it comes to rape or domestic violence or even child abuse of any sort?  Is there any Sense of Wonder when it comes to other people being viewed as little more than a commodity or as "different" enough that they can be looked down upon?  Ages ago, I used to make tee shirts with a "message" on the back, each with a subject dear to me: recycling, animal and child abuse, and domestic violence.  The shirts quickly sold out, since each had a hotline number if such abuse needed to be reported (or if more information was needed).  While wearing one these domestic violence tees long ago, a female worker silently stopped and commented on the tee and said, "Thank you for wearing that shirt."  Misogyny and hidden feelings, as well as those women or children brazenly or silently affected by such, can be anywhere, tangled in the Dark Web or even the deeper dark web of our minds.  Change does need to happen...but how?  (And it is here that I should note that the entire Congressional delegation from my state of Utah voted against reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act)...

     The world history of humanity is long and difficult to absorb, even to historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, who has given it a go in his monstrous book, The World.**  And while his main point is to incorporate families into the picture, he notes: Every ideology, religion and empire has sought to control the hallowed past to legitimize whatever they are doing in the present.  There are plenty of attempts today in east and west to force history into an ideology...World history is an elixir for troubled times: its advantage is that it offers a sense of perspective; its drawback is that it involves too much distance.  World history often has themes, not people; biography has people, not themes.  And it was while reading through a portion of his book that I started to wonder if humans have changed much at all in their dominance, their quest for power and control, and their drive to become the top predator.  Women have held speckled leadership roles, but by and large, the dictators, tyrannists, presidents and emperors --much less the armies-- have tended to be made up of men.  See what you think and whether, after reading one of Montefiore's paragraphs, you tend to feel that our historical nature will change (there IS hope with the Supreme Court upholding the ruling that domestic abusers could be banned from possessing firearms): "Barbarians conspired in their islands," wrote Rameses III, "no land could withstand their weaponry."  The Ramses family disintegrated; Egypt fell to Libyan chieftains; Haiti was broken; in Europe, Celts advanced into the west; in the Mediterranean, Greek-speaking peoples settled Aegean coasts.  In western Asia, Semitic peoples, many speaking Aramaic, founded new kingdoms: in Canaan, they built thriving trading cities on the coast; in the interior, they formed a kingdom around Damascus, while further south one Semitic tribe, speaking an early version of Hebrew, settled and coalesced into a people who called themselves 'Israel."  They may already have worshipped a peculiar notion --one diety-- who did not reside in a single temple but travelled with them in a mobile shrine.  Yet these were all tiny peoples.  The mayhem was also the opportunity for a northern Iraqi city to build the first empire to dominate all of west Asia; the city was Ashur and the spectacular cruelties of Assyria would terrify the known world.

     So there's that.  But Montefiore added in his concluding pages: ...today's dictators and dynasties are not a return to earlier centuries.  Even in iPhone and dagger states, they are part of a new world where events move at unprecedented speed, where contenders and markets are interconnected and where the jeopardy of nuclear catastrophe is ever present.  This, coupled with Covid and global warming, foster fears of apocalypse.  A sense of impending eschaton seems to be part of human character, perhaps a recognition of the miraculous but fragile conquest of earth by one species.  But the stakes today make the End of Days ever more possible...History is driven as much by clowns as by visionaries.  "History likes to joke," said Stalin, "sometimes it chooses a fool to drive historical progress..."The real problem of humanity," said Edward O. Wilson, "is we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology."  And Montefiore's ending words?  A quote by Anne Frank: Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy. 

*The book We, is subtitled A Manifesto for Women Everywhere.  And the actress Gillian Anderson and attorney & active Jennifer Nadel said this about writing this book: We discovered the hard way that no amount of external success could fix how we felt on the inside.  The more we had, the more we felt we needed to get.  No matter what e achieved, it didn't make us happy.  It made us feel guilty that even with the gifts and luck we'd been given, we couldn't seem to make life work.  In the end, we'd both become dependent on a whole host of unhealthy crutches: alcohol, drugs, work, food, abusive relationships -- you name it, we tried it.  And at the same time, we underwent therapy, did yoga, and tried to puzzle life out.  Our crises were severe enough that we had no option but to change.  To start a process of complete rebuilding.  Root and branch...We aren't doctors or therapists or priests.  Our principal qualification is that we handle emotional pain so badly that we've been forced to look for answers.  For over twenty years, we've each searched for what works.  The wisdom in this book isn't ours; it's distilled from s myriad of teachers far wiser.  We are passing it on with gratitude and in the hope that others might gain comfort and meaning from it. 

**If you happen to pick up a copy of this book, you'll immediately feel its heft, and likely be stunned at its small type and nearly 1300 pages.  But even I must admit that I'm not sure if I will read even a third of the book.  I had done that in my college days when I tried to tackle the 11-volume set, The Story of Civilization (each volume was between 800 and 1100 pages); the writing by Will Durant (and later with his wife, Ariel) was compelling and read like a novel, and I dutifully underlined at least 3 of the volumes in yellow marker.  But by the halfway point of the third book, I realized that all the talk of Sumeria and other early empires were blending together and that in actuality, I had retained next to nothing of it and that this new historical overview by Montefiore would prove little different.  But jumping back to this newer book on world history, think of trying to write about not only a region's long history, say all of South America, but write about every region of the world.  And then think of you as the reader pausing to look up words such as soteriology and fontanelles, both of which appear within the first few pages.  All that said, even reading portions of his book proves eye-opening.  Nonetheless, you can't help but be moved by a historian who introduces his book with this: This is a world history that I wrote during the menacing times of Covid lockdown and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.  There are a million ways to do such a thing: hundreds of historians, starting in ancient times, have done it their way; most universities now have professors of world history and scores of such works are published annually, many of them brilliant, and I have tried to read them all.  No book is easy to write, world history harder than most.  "Words and ideas pour out of my head," wrote Ibn Khaldun composing his world history, "like cream in a churn."  There has been much cream and much churning in the writing of this.  I have always wanted to write an intimate, human history like this, in some ways a new approach, in some ways a traditional one, which is the fruit of a lifetime of study and travels.  I have been luck enough to visit many of the places in this history, to witness wars and coups that play a part in it, and to have conversations with a few characters who have played roles on the world stage...This book has given me the greatest satisfaction of my writing life, and presented the most daunting challenge.  But I have suffered much less than many other historians.  Ibn Khaldun saw both his parents perish of the plague.  Sir Walter Raleigh wrote his History of the World while waiting to be executed, a condition that surely fostered the required perspective.  But he was beheaded before finishing (an unbearable thought).  History has a special, almost mystic power to shape (and, if abused, to distort) the present: that's what makes history writing an essential and noble --but dangerous-- profession...Apologies for all inconsistencies.  So tackle this book if you like; but I had to agree with several outside reviewers who questioned how this historian could assemble so many facts and dates during his "Covid lockdown," all while also writing about meeting so many of the people and doing much of the research.  Was this merely a collection from Wikipedia articles, as one reviewer suggested?  For me, several hundred pages in, it dawned on me that I would again retain pretty much zero of his purview...the dynasties, the emperors and rulers, the empires.  Our world and its history is as complicated as this author makes it out to be, but bravo for his attempt.  As to my own reading choices and 200 pages in, I'm moving on...