Okay, so my ovaries went into conniptions when I first read MoCo native Tori Amos' piece out of the UK, "What I Know About Men." It's too easy when reading that thing to see the entire species of men as this ambiguous yet omnipotent force that shapes a woman's life.
I decided long ago not to be a male-basher, and to be pretty overt about it -- masculinity is a societal pressure in and of itself, so holding a guy responsible for being... well, a guy? Well, that logic lost its effectiveness pretty much the moment I hit puberty, no matter how many times people told me boys did this and wanted that.
The poor wankers, right?
But what keeps me coming back to Tori is this line: "I will never give myself over to anyone."
Well, fuck. Add on "again" to the end of that sentence, and Tori pretty much just stole my mantra from the last seven months.
It isn't quite that my ex-husband did anything wrong. Rather, it's that I gave all of me to him, body and soul, quite literally, so that there was nothing left over for me. It's a romantic idea, really, but quite miserable in the living.
I am just now coming to fully realize, seeing now the changes in me (and, I hope he won't mind me saying, in him) what a huge burden that was for both of us.
More profound still, the realization that this is far from the first time I've done this to myself, laid my whole self in someone else's hands. Like Tori, I've been assaulted, bullied, and abused. And yes, the huge majority of the people who committed these violences against me happened to be men.
But the worst criminal was a woman: me. The men who laid their hands on me or told me lies about me only existed in my life for the briefest wink; I was the one that let those ghosts stare me in the face for years.
And, like Tori, I've found my daughter's presence in my life to not only be healing, but the incentive I needed to take ownership of myself.
So, yeah. Sucks that Tori feels the need to author a piece that, at first glance, centers around the men in her life. Or that I need to read it that way, anyway.
But in the end, we're all interdependent, aren't we? And the only thing that's gonna keep me from losing myself totally to that web of humanity and the hegemonic spider that sucks our souls when we lose ourselves?
Yeah. Duh.
Me.
Obvious as it may be, it's a lesson I gotta learn... over and over again.
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