Whence This Injustice?

William Adolphe Bouguereau

Rebecca Traister noticed a pattern.

Every time a woman expressed frustration — in a meeting, in a courtroom, in a Senate hearing, on a street corner — the conversation shifted. Suddenly the subject wasn’t what the woman was frustrated about. The subject was the woman’s tone. Her composure. Whether she was being too emotional, too strident, too much.

…And in 2018, she published a book that laid out what she had found: Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger.

What makes her argument different from a simple validation of rage is the historical evidence she brings to it. She is specific. She names names. She traces the way American institutions have repeatedly labeled women’s political anger as pathological — and how those same women’s anger, dismissed and pathologized, went on to change the law anyway…

She has said that women’s anger, when it is visible and sustained and refuses to be embarrassed out of the room, reveals something important: not that something has gone wrong with the woman expressing it, but that something has gone wrong with the systems she is responding to.

Anger is information, she has argued. It tells you where harm is being ignored and where change is overdue.

A culture that treats women’s anger as the problem is a culture that hasn’t yet reckoned with what the anger is about.

– From ‘Echoes of The Past’

I’ve noticed something different about Latin cultures that shows me something about the society I grew up in. I didn’t realize how isolated I felt growing up and how much it was just a cultural norm of where I happened to be born. It took me years to realize how fundamentally different other cultures are.

The way Mexicans or French or Italians experience community and relationship in general is miles apart from how I learned it growing up in the US. The assumptions are almost opposite.

We Americans don’t take the same care to recognize and acknowledge others that they do. We assume a kind of distance they don’t. Greeting others, especially when entering their establishments, is basic. If you don’t, you’re rude.

You normally wish strangers bon appétit or buen provecho as you pass their table in a restaurant. There are formalities that recognize the existence and dignity of unknown people that we don’t have in our culture.

It traces back to how we’re raised and what we come to expect. Children in these societies expect to be attended to when they suffer. They are carried long after they can walk. They feel a level of basic connection we often don’t.

I don’t want to romanticize their society; these are generalizations. But, having grown up in a society heavily influenced by Anglo-Puritanism, the contrast is obvious.

I know, however, that all Western societies assume a kind of masculine superiority that fosters injustice. I do think the feminine intelligence and sensibility is on the rise now, for whatever reason.

The masculine principle has blindnesses in every culture. There obviously needs to be a rebalancing of masculine with feminine sensibilities. We’ve been out of equilibrium for a very long time, contributing to confused and violent cultures that are not safe for children.

It’s time for a reevaluation of our actual relationship to each other and the planet itself. There are levels and degrees of relationship. I grew up in an atmosphere of every man for himself, of ‘sauve qui peut,’ and I know the constant background emotions by heart.

Torsten Wolber

It’s a relief to me to find a place where some of those assumptions don’t apply. If one gender feels constantly under threat, if children can never feel ok, the society itself is ill, and is going to express that imbalance in a catastrophic way, eventually.

I think that’s where we are now. Recovering and rebalancing is a huge task. I don’t expect to live to see it, but maybe those of us concerned about such things can leave some helpful act or words or creation behind to aid the process. It’s the least we can do.

Mariano Peccinetti

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Meditations On Living (6 book series)

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by David Price