MALE PRIVILEGE

HUH??

Yet another male blogger went on record today as probably being a feminist.  He mentioned along the way that there is such a thing as male privilege and the males should consider male privilege a privilege and not abuse it. Above is an illustration of the only male privilege I recognize.

I am not a feminist.  I am a chauvinist.  I freely admit to being manipulative and opportunistic.  And, yet, I am completely able to say without any waffling or reluctance that everything I have I got.  I have never in all my many years been affected by male privilege unless I needed someone taller than I am to change a light bulb for me and there was no ladder nearby.  I am sure, if necessary, I would have been able to have all my sexual needs met in some way, were there not a male around for miles, or planets.  I think it is interesting that some people have a penis but I certainly do not envy them owning that.  And whether or not I desired to mess around with one, I am completely glad that they have the penis and not me.

I admit -- and you can all get out your placards saying "See.  She is just another shallow bitch" and start your parade -- that I have ALWAYS felt privileged.  Now I am a grandmother, but awhile back I was a very attractive redhead.  In fact, I was much more attractive than I ever knew.  And yet I was able to USE that factor to very good advantage.  Fuck all that bullshit about I want him to love me for my mind.  I had an IQ of 152 at age eleven and sometimes I had to ACT stupid to get some guy in the sack.  Yeah.  Some guy.  Sure I got married and played all the conventional marriage games and parenthood games.  I have been hurt.  I have been sad.  I have been angry.  But there has never been a male that was or would be less hurt or less angry or less sad in the same situation.

In fact, when I stop for  a very brief moment to consider all the many many things that cause a male's attention to flag, sexually, not to be too obtuse but what I mean is cause his dick to go limp, in retrospect, I got over my tears or anger with way less repercussion.

I wrote a whole book, very conciliatory in nature, and quite short, explaining why it is often necessary for females to tiptoe round the very sensitive penis -- not the very sensitive male that owns it.  Fuck him.  I have never noticed that males get more salary for an equal position or job. I am sure I can find countering statistics for every instance you display to me.  I think all the crap about men walking on the curb side of the walk when in the company of females in order to keep camels from splashing mud on the lady's fine gown is so much anthropological and cultural drivel.  The guy wanted to get laid.  Just SHUT UP.

This is all cultural, anthropological and genetic.  It all started to favor the gene pool and it was never done consciously.  It evolved.  And no, I do not believe cavemen rode dinosaurs.  Sure, people went along with this or that custom or manner so society would not frown upon them.  But, even then, it is/was done in order that the person so acting would be held in positive esteem.  He sought positive esteem.  I didn't.  I had it. I was born with it.  Maybe you were not.  Maybe that is why you have to buy into all this love me for my mind stuff.  Whatever.  It's your program, not mine.  Just don't bullshit me.

If you feel a sense of inadequacy in any area, deal with it.  Don't try to get a bunch of followers to march behind you in support in order that you may feel not so inadequate.  I am not saying you should go step on every one's toes.  I never stepped on anyone's toes.  And I keep my toes out of the way so no one steps on them.


John Scalzi's name has come up twice recently in this type of discourse. One conversation was about "rape culture".  I entered into that conversation.  It was based on some etymological error which I pointed out.  It didn't go over real well, but, it went unrebutted.  This other was him wearing some hideous dress.  Whether anyone so homely and unfeminine, made any kind of statement by wearing a very ugly dress is so far removed from intelligent discourse, it is to laugh.  I genuinely feel John Scalzi is a political suck up.  As far as wanting to get more females to read his books in the male dominated genre of speculative fiction, (or science fiction, or horror, or whatever they are calling it today) he may in fact be a whore.  Not passing judgement.  Just sayin'.

Beat your own drum.  I am not listening.  You shouldn't need me to listen.  My own music plays inside my very fucked up brain, and it is all I need.  When someone echoes it, I send money to iTunes.

Male privilege.  You wish.

I will repost in the a.m. for the dayshift. 


Photo Attribution:   I will get back to you on that tomorrow.  I am in too much of a pissed off hurry right now.  I do have the guy's (sigh) name  (Steven Amman) and the name of the site it can be traced to. If it violates a copyright, please inform me.  I will promptly remove it.  There are plenty more where that came from. 

Driveway

 

We have a very long drive way.  Well, almost this long.  My castle isn't quite that large.

 Every year the vagrant black top guys come by and they ALWAYS have just enough left over for my driveway.  I don't pay any attention anymore to oil-based, tar-based, water-based, squeegied, brushed, poured, sprayed. I only care about the $$ and  I want it to look nice for a year and a half.  We fall for their sales spiel every two years.  The truth is, we would never think of it at all if one of these itinerants did not knock. 

This year, August!  So hopefully it won't all be stuck to the bottom of the snow when we shovel as did the October job.  One year it disppeared so fast that I went on line and did research.  There is supposedly some stuff in the UK called some kind of paint that lasts forever, but I couldn't find it over here.  One person snidely offered that if I wanted it done right I would dig it out and put in four inches of gravel over three inches of sand covered with three inches of bitumin-something.  Okay.  He is probably the same guy that answered when I wanted a quick fix for the downstairs shower.  If I want it done right, I will dig out to the studs and put up cement board and copper pipes and such a kind of tile with such a kind of base.  Instead I chose to epoxy it which almost killed me with the fumes and peeled in three months.  So yeah.  Now we are going down to the studs anyway.

One year we tried to coat the driveway ourselves.  We got one sixteenth done and it was about ten buckets of the "airport" quality gunk.  But now that I recall, runways are concrete.  At least they used to be when we lived next door to that hoodlum in Oak Park that had the O'Hare contract.

And these two guys with nice trucks that will probably re-poed in November, are the biggest babies.  They have knocked on the door six times.  "Where's my son?"  I should have told him he was in the sack with the widow next door.  "Can I have  a bottle of water?  I need to take my meds."  That's a new one.  Then dad wants a bottle of water.  "We didn't even take time for lunch or dinner."  "No.  I am not giving you dinner."  "We have to go get gas for our machine."  "There's gas under the porch for the lawnmower."  "No.  We need special such and such."  I think they went to Oklahoma for it.  They just got back and the motor is running, but one guy is screaming at the other.  I wonder what they do, besides flee, if they accidentally spray my lovely siding with gunk. 

The perils of home ownership.  We are too old for this.  We should go live in one of those senior high-rises, but I love my yard.  And Louie has been away so long, it seems like I have to make too many decisions by myself.  Oh, wait a minute.  He has never talked to a driveway guy, or a pool guy, or a siding guy, or a roofing guy, or a window guy, anyway. 

So, my brand new uVerse system doesn't work which is the second chapter in the cable saga.  My neighbor came over to chat about it.  Apparently they decided to install it, fiber optic cable or no.  The service man admitted to my neighbor the wiring in this neighborhood was inadequate.  What is wrong with people?  Let's fight this war even though the bullets haven't arrived yet.  Maybe if we pretend to shoot it will work for awhile anyway.

And then I notified the notorious nationally known Twinkie Police force of Lindenhurst that I  had to leave my cars in the street and she wouldn't take the report because I didn't have the license numbers. Yes, old lady that cannot walk on the sticky new driveway, get your flashlight and stumble across a hummocky acre of grass in the pitch dark to get the plate numbers so we can distinguish your cars from the other two thousand parked in the street illegally on the 1800 block of Hazelwood.  So I said just give me the tickets, biting off the "fucking" part as a descriptor, and I commented on how cooperative (fucking cooperative) they are every time (every fucking time) I have to call (I have to fucking call) them.  My daughter's brother in law is the Lindenhurst attorney, so bring it on, Twinkie Police.  I should have said, (Yeah, we always think of this too late) "you will know right away.  It is the driveway lined with Twinkies."

It's Not Delivery. It's DiGiornio

So I was just setting, waiting for the results of my biopsy and eating some left over pizza.  Boy, that delivery man was SOO tall!  Oh, no.  Wait up a sec.  It's not delivery.  It's DiGiornio.  Anyway, I was going over the autopsy results on the recently discovered Kraken.  I am great at multi-tasking.  When we captured him he was still alive, but we "accidentally" killed him. So we decided to do an autopsy for the sake of Science and all else that is good and holy.  We, so far, have found out he was a male, very lonely, and did not eat ships.  And it set me to thinking.

We use people.  Everyone does.  I am sure you do not admit it to yourself.  I do.  But I feel I have always "used" people, and I was known as a master, to prove something to myself.  I think most people use people to prove something about themselves to others.  Like, "See? I am desirable."  Or, "See, I am attractive."  I always came up with, "Yeah, I can do that too."  Something I had to remind myself of repeatedly it seems.  Especially after all those misbegotten breeding experiences.  (See what I did there?)  But it was never, "she can have three little boys and I can't".  It was always, "I am going to be successful at this damnit, or die trying." Of course it all set  a lot of huge, nasty, rusty, menacing wheels in motion, but that was other people trying to prove stuff, not to themselves, but others.  Of this I feel very sure.  But.  I may be wrong.  I have been. I may be wrong about who was trying to prove something to whom and why.  Although I am pretty sure I have a handle on that one. I may even be wrong about it yet today.

I have a close relative who, due to a wondrous genetic legacy, is extremely smart and very beautiful.  Also cute.  And she is blessed with the kind of metabolism that runs like a mother so she is easily able to maintain her tiny, well-proportioned physique throughout the rigors of her very busy life. (Well, Boot Camp is not so easy.  I'll grant her that.)  She has a wonderful life.  Actually a beautiful life, a handsome hard-working, somewhat self-deluded husband, two amazing intelligent and beautiful children (kinda bratty, tho) and a huge gorgeous house with an actual swimming pool that is not a plastic and metal over-sized water dish set on the ground.  Of course this is all off set by the fact that she has a high stress job that takes a lot out of her.  But we do have to help The Higher Power keep the old yin and yang in balance.

The thing is, this girl seems to have everything going for her.  But she "wants".  She is not sure what, but she knows something is missing.  God in his heaven only knows how she got the idea things had to be completely perfect.  But I think maybe it is human nature to "want".  It might be kind of like "hope".  You just can't keep going without it.

But along comes a situation where she is being "used".  It is actually not harming her or her family, since it is a long-distance mostly imaginary thing for the users.  (There are two of them.)  There are people that come up short in so many departments that they have to invent scenarios which contain people and things to "blame' and to compare themselves and each other to.  My relative got into this mess completely innocently.  It was actually totally my fault, but I too was acting innocently and somewhat altruistically. (Or so I tell myself.)  It was a kind of on going drama that was a mere distraction for my relative.  Sort of like a soap opera that you tuned into every now and then.  But then the whole thing blew up like Krakatoa and it became instantly apparent what my relative was being used for.  People who could not take responsibility for their own misdeeds, mistakes, errors, misjudgements, suddenly needed a place to focus all that negative energy and this relative was a convenient and very carefully set up target.  She was "thrown to the wolves", "thrown under the bus," -- whatever.  Fortunately she has enough going on that she is very generously able to understand and forgive these people who have such troubles they are blinded to what the troubles really are and why they have them.

It just leads me to wonder, are these characters using her and others with deliberation because that is their modus operandi, or is it completely innocent, that they are so sad and lonely and troubled that they unconsciously seek a focus to ease their pain, their guilt, their unhappiness.  I will never know.  No one could offer me any explanation at this point that I would be able to accept since their credibility, if it ever existed, has taken a hike.

****

In other news:   I am going to try to incorporate my Clueless blog into this one since it is not publicly linked and it is messing up my stats.  Plus, it is great, pithy stuff no one should miss.  Just ask Jonathon Wilhoit, the well-know book reviewer. Also, the FINE WHINE title should be getting a lot more blog hits since a "blogger-columnist" of questionable integrity and intelligence who shall remain unnamed but whose initials are JK has stolen my words as a sub-heading for the self-centered posturing and moaning about her life that passes off to readers of The Chicago Tribune as reality.  Talk about trying to find a focus for blame.  But that is another story. One I am uninterested in telling.  She does a great job on that all by herself.

I am happy to announce that the majority of my blog hits now come from the google search for dittymac.blogspot.com.  I think it is important.  Don't tell me the truth.


Attribution for adorable illustration: "Kraken; the Early Years"
www.neatorama.com

Just For Tonight

My heart is sore and achy.  

I wish I had a magic wand.  

I want to make everything all better. 

Image attribution:    psychcentral.com