My week off screeches to a close…not a pleasant thought. I have been productive, but the edit is dragging major arse!

To break up the mood I thought I’d post something a little political. This is a direct result of my boredom with traditional writing and editing and because, in prepping for the summer class I’m teaching, (American Literature) I am, as always, appalled by the traditionalistic and puritanical views that unfortunately shaped the formation of this nation.

Ultra conservative viewpoints still propel the political and social mainstream of this country dictating both social and cultural behavioral patterns. I see it most blatantly in this nation’s treatment of that taboo word, sex…in the way that sexism still perpetuates as a raging double standard between what is accepted behavior of men versus that of women. It permeated the American colonies and perpetuates today in terminology like whore and slut.

If you don’t believe me try teaching high-schoolers…direct progenies of misguided American parental units. In tyring to teach La Belle Dame sans Merci, my male students in every class this year couldn’t get over their belief that she is a ‘garden tool’. On multiple occasions when I intervened to correct sexist comments my ‘feminism’ was interpreted as ‘lesbianism’. Most American males that I encounter on a daily basis have no comprehension what it is like to be a female raised and living in a traditional American environment where masturbation and sexual fullfillment is frowned upon, home-making skills are still considered pre-requisite life skills, and women, happily even, take their husbands names, abandoning their own identity for ‘marital sanctity’ like lemmings rushing over the proverbial cliff.

It has to stop somewhere. Patriarchal power has no place in educated and contemporary societies. Sexism is a serious issue because it exists to such an extent that the vast majority of Americans are not even aware that they encounter and personify examples of it on a daily basis. Wake up and smell the coffee…or maybe in this case, the perfume! Subterfuge eventually becomes the only method where-by oppressed peoples must seek equality and that is never a pretty road.

He Sleeps

He sleeps
sated and soft
his member spent
as his empires
languished.
He had been
the dominant one
on top and
in control
for thousands of years
while she
lay awake
and plotted
how best to gain
her power
in his weakness.
She watched
him
and though she
loved him
she remained wedded
to her plots.
He had refused
to give
a voice to her-
when
once or twice
she had forged weapons
to rise against him
he had
defamed her
and stamped her mark
from the pages
of history.
But time and lust
had delivered him again
and this time,
while
he slept
naively secure
in his prowess,
she would
change the tide
and make her victory stick.