[MD] Reevers of Knowing

[Charybdis]

As a woman, I'd like to say that I don't see that going on.  But then, I
don't socialize much outside of work.
I only denigrate people who are self-harming or self-defeating.  These are
the people that I label as weak, but it has nothing to do with emotion
itself.  Denigrate someone just for expressing emotions?  Never.  And I've
never seen another (sane) woman doing so either.  I've had other women
belittle me, but that had little to do with the actual emotion.

However, as a woman who is, for the most part, emotionally void, when I do
show the rare emotion around other people, I'm occasionally told by men that
my emotion is not a reaction to my circumstances, but a spontaneous fit of
hysteria caused by my sex/gender.  If a woman shows anger or sadness, she's
labeled with the mythic disorder of "PMS," the new feminine hysteria.  I've
occasionally seen a book in stores called something like It's Your Hormones,
in which a male doctor explains to women that all of their problems are
caused by being female.  No one has any such medical diagnosis for male
emotions, and I've never heard a woman berate a man for having hormones if
he became sad.


On Sat, Aug 15, 2009 at 12:50 PM, Louise Pryor <bypryordesign at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Sun, Aug 9, 2009 at 1:47 AM, gav wrote:
>
> ... sweet little show. it was then that the water welled up in my
> > eyes....not a great deal, just a little...i am a man after all! (read
> > emotional retard), but that episode was a simple and beautiful and poetic
> > yes! the spider seemed to love me, and me him/her. something bigger than
> me
> > was coming through something smaller than me and saying 'look!, the book
> is
> > right, your feelings are right, trust them. and i was grateful.
> >
> > postscript.
> > after doing some research i discovered that spider medicine - the totemic
> > wisdom of the spider - is associated with the feminine and rebirth and
> the
> > infinite (8 legs- 8 is the symbol for infinity - der gav!)...the master
> > weaver (ariadne) - a metaphor for how we weave the strands of our life
> > together. if we do it well we create something more than the sum of the
> >  individual strands - a synergistic alchemy occurs....and 'hey picasso',
> our
> > lives become works of art.
> >
>
>
> I really appreciated your story here, Gav, it is one of those little
> incidents that happen in our lives that are magical. Sometimes we can
> "hear"
> another person when our stories have similar themes.
>
> When you said:
>
> > not a great deal, just a little...i am a man after all! (read emotional
> retard)
>
> I wonder at that. We live in a society that so denigrates the masculine,
> and
> I think that's sad. Women say, "you should feel more, you should cry more,
> you should communicate more..." But when you do, we despise you for your
> weakness.
>
> As a woman, I'd like to apologize for that.
>
> Lu
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