When Girls Just Aint Good Enough

When I was a kid, I had to listen to a lot of crap. Not just from boastful boys, but also from well meaning adults. Things I remember being told as a child include:

Boys are just _________________ (smarter/faster/better) than girls.
I can't believe your father lets you ________________________ (play baseball/go fishing).
A man needs a son to carry on the family name and daughters to care for him in his old age.
Girls should play with dolls. Boys should play with trucks.
Girls would be hurt badly if they were hit by a baseball (as if boys wouldn't be).

I used to be shooed out of garages and off back stoops were boys and men congregated. I was told that my mother had called to ask me to come home when she hadn't. You can imagine how these things went over for the tomboy that I was as a kid. It didn't help that all the kids in my neighborhood were boys (with the exception of Sheila Arrington, who didn't like to play outdoors at all). I recall being singled out by other parents from within a group of neighborhood boys and asked, "Does your mother know you are out here?" I used to reply, "My mother wants me out of the house", and that usually satisfied them. But there was a spirit-crushing moment when all my friends were off to sign up for Little League and I couldn't join them. It was worse when they showed up with their brand new baseball gloves and bright white uniforms and colored socks and team baseball hats. I just had to make do with my hand-me-down baseball glove and no cap at all. I can't tell you how lonely it was to come out after Saturday morning cartoons and have the entire block be void of children to play with. I couldn't do much about not being allowed to register for Little League, so I signed up to play slow-pitch softball. Only softball didn't have uniforms or hats. We didn't have team sponsors to pay for all that. I had to go down to the sporting goods store and have my own shirt made. We had a rag-tag league, and worst of all, we had softball gloves that were useless for playing baseball on the block. In all the years I played softball, I don't think I ever broke that glove in. Something else I just remembered. My softball coach was black. In all my years hanging around baseball games with my brothers, I never recall seeing a black Little League coach. I am pretty sure that never happened. I liked our coach. He was waaaaaaaay better than having one of the mothers coach. He knew something about playing ball.

A chum of mine from grade school located me on Facebook yesterday and we got to reminiscing about the old days at good ol' Charles Russell Elementary. In particular, we remembered the school year that girls were required to stay on a 2500 sf asphalt pad that had nothing but hopscotch games and "balance beams" painted on it, while the boys had the run of the playground including all of the playground equipment (swings, teeter totters, monkey bars, baseball diamond, and basically any area containing dirt). The female teachers who supervised children outdoors following lunch militantly enforced these rules. So not only was there institutional discrimination, but there was also segregation. Girls had no balls or any other playground equipment with which to play. I have no idea why this rule was established suddenly and why it was applied only to girls. But I do recall that after about a month of this, we took matters into our own hands and began to protest. We organized. We got our 12" rulers out of our desks. Attached paper with protest slogans on them, taped up our protest signs and began to chant and march around the perimeter of our imprisonment. We had our own little women's movement. I can't recall now if we were successful. I do recall that we garnered the ire of the teachers and principal. We were told by the teachers to "stop being silly". Our protest signs were confiscated. All the evidence, including our names, were given to the principal. The male principal. Mr. Wheeler. The man was a troll. I remember something else. I remember that as the worst year of my young life.

Is this sinking in now? When I was a kid, denying girls equal opportunity was not just some sports issue solved by Title IX. Denying girls equal opportunity was a way of life. An accepted way of life. An enforced way of life. By everyone. Television showed women thrilled to be in subservient positions. I never understood why those damn girls on Little House on the Prairie always seemed to happy to be reading constantly and playing in a 20' perimeter around the cabin. They only hung on the fence and never went inside to ride ponies or poke cows or examine cow shit. They just hung on the fence and had meaningful conversations with Pa.

That was total bullshit. I hated that show.

Memories are funny things. I expected the sting to lesson with age. It hasn't. I recall a serious justification being made by grown men for excluding girls from Little League baseball surrounded the requirement that all ball players wear a "cup". And vaguely suggestive comments about girls needing bras and what would happen if a ball hit a girl in the chest. Hee hee. Funny, huh? Not.

My parents weren't ground breakers. They weren't stereotype busters. They were average parents who never questioned the rules. Oh, they told me things like "you can be anything you want to be" and didn't seem to mind that I wanted to be things that included the word "first". As in "the first woman president" or "the first woman astronaut" or "the world's first female architect". I think this is why I developed this sense that I was going to be notable or celebrated in some way as an adult. After all, I was going to be "the first". It seemed like everything I wanted to do just to be a well rounded person seemed to include the word "first".

When I went to college the very very first time, I trained to become a draftsman because, you know, girls couldn't actually be architects. And I tried to get out and get a job in the construction field. And no one would hire me. No one. In all that time, I had one interview in which I was informed that I wasn't going to be able to wear dresses to work because I'd have to go out to job sites and there would be mud. I tried for months to get a job and finally had to accept a job as a clerk at a pharmacy. I also had to go back to school. I had wasted 'the first" attempt at a college education.

I encountered similar discrimination in the workplace. If there wasn't overt discrimination against women in supervisory positions, there was the added bonus of the fear of competition wherein female supervisors passed over competent women who might compete with them. Let's face it, I just don't have a personality type that is compatible with second-tier status. I think this is a prime motivation why I am seeking a doctorate. I'm tired of being at the mercy of anyone. Good will and staff development my ass. I am so f'ing done with that. What's next?

Being a girl should be good enough. Someone needs to alert China.

Shooters gone wild

A man in Alabama killed 10 people and then himself this morning. Just another segment in our ongoing series, Mass Murder in America, coming soon to a television news program near you. Over the coming days, I'm sure we will learn quite a bit about this man's life. (Out of curiosity, compare this to what we learn about the lives of the people he murdered.) Why do people do this? What sort of mental defect, meltdown, or deviant personality is responsible for this kind of unforeseen, unpredictable, and unstoppable behavior? Why? Why? Why? Why do so many people have to die?

I understand anger. I understand depression, too. I understand being so despondent that you contemplate ending it all. I have been there. But I have not been here. There is a trend, dare I say, of people becoming overwhelmed with feelings of helplessness and hopelessness, and instead of riding it out or getting some help or even killing themselves, they kill everyone they hold near and dear. Oh, I get that the people closest to you can come (rightly or wrongly) to be seen as a the cause of all your difficulties and mental unrest. But I do not get the mental defect that embeds itself in an human brain telling a man that the only way to deal with a problem is to kill every individual he encounters in a single day--to kill people not remotely associated with his pain--to just kill, kill, kill, and kill again.

I believe, or at least I tend to believe that most people think things through. There are "crimes of passion" in which a blind flash of anger can end in total destruction. Instead of slapping someone, someone gets shot. Or stabbed. Or strangled. Usually a single occurrence and usually not likely to be repeated. But when we talk about Mass Murder in America, we aren't talking about crimes of passion. Mass murder demands a plan that, at a minimum, involves a hit list, a travel route, an armament list, a shopping list, a disguise, an escape plan, and a game-over plan. Even in a demented mind, these thought processes are undertaken, no matter how twisted and dark the road, leading to the inevitable conclusion that the action they are taking is right, smart, and justified. I don't think it is in human nature to kill indiscriminately. I think, even in the face of tremendous mental illness, the tendency to justify our actions remain. Uncovering that logic is the only hope we have to answer the eternal question, "Why?".

There is the camp that says you can't figure out why when you are dealing with madmen. I disagree. But when the mentally corrupt kill themselves when cornered, you lose the key bit of evidence in the scenario. You lose the logic. If psychologists and sociologists haven't already resolved why people do this and how to identify and treat them (and I'm assuming they haven't otherwise, the CDC would have issued a directive to the police, mental health workers, schools, and the American public), perhaps our approach to this epidemic (when one is one too many), is to take a different approach to capturing the shooters.

How does a person get from "I'm going to kill myself" to "I'm going to kill myself, my wife, my children, my cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents, my wife's family, several police officers and one or two random strangers on the street in an all-out, blaze o' glory, free-for-all"? It's like the Darwin Award, the Darwin-in-law Award, and the Darwin-Twice-Removed Award all rolled into one. You don't just wipe out your own genome; you wipe out every last individual on Earth that shares a significant portion of your genome as well as anyone who found that genome attractive. Why does this only seem to afflict white men of a certain age group? Why does this seem to be an American phenomenon?

I have no idea, but I will posit some theories.

On their being white. Whites have a culture of privilege. They think that they "deserve things by virtue of being". Oh, they may not explicitly finish that phrase with "being white", but they think they deserve them without having earned them. We label this white privilege because other racial groups don't suffer from this delusion and sense of entitlement. I don't know a single black man of any age who thinks the world is going to plop a home, a meal, a wife, top-notch health care, a safe place to raise his children, a college education, a stable job, and a stress-free marriage into his lap without having to bust his ass to earn it. Ditto for Asian men. This is a uniquely white cultural defect.

On their being American. Replace every instance of "white" with "American" in the preceding paragraph and then replace "race" with "country". There's my theory. Apparently, my theory needs rethinking.

On their being men. Men, particularly those in blue collar communities, are brought up in a culture that defines manliness by an ability to lead, provide, and protect. A man is expected to be the leader in his home, his place of work, and his community. He is expected to earn a living. He is expected to earn more than his wife. He is expected to be the deciding vote on matters of family, and to have veto power over all others in the home. And he expects everyone else to go along with his expectations. Oh, some of you educated and enlightened men claim to see your role as "partner" with your spouse, but when push comes to shove, there is something inside the head of most men that self-identifies as "submissive" or "dominant" depending on who makes the important decisions in their lives. In our culture, leadership and power are male traits and men have grown comfortable with this. They now have a sense of entitlement to it. Look at any corporate board, disparity in pay between men and women, numbers of female vs. male CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, yadda, yadda, yadda. Men will compare themselves to one another all day long by money. While they can see that women and minorities might not make as much money, they believe the answer is to simply pay them more. Men don't understand that it isn't a matter of saving money that causes women and minorities to make less for the same job. It is the maintenance of a power differential. White men don't compete with women and minorities. They are separate ball games. I would guess that few white men, when promoted to a supervisory position, have their subordinates decide, en masse, to quit rather than work for someone of their gender. Or color. Or nationality. I theorize that most men, haven't had to ease their colleagues into accepting their advancement, or to develop alternative methods for ensuring that others "accept" their leadership. I doubt few men get nicknames like "bitch" or "ball-buster" applied to them by virtue of doing their job. I believe men are used to standing up and proclaiming their leadership in a "if you don't like it, don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out approach" and this attitude generally works for them. Women and men of color generally haven't enjoyed this unique brand of self-aggrandizement. And yet, white American men seem to think this is "normal". When normal is threatened, some men panic. Some men panic a whole lot.

On their being, generally, younger than 50. With age comes wisdom. It's an adage for a reason. People who kill themselves, I think, don't believe that things will change. They don't believe they will ever feel better. They don't have the benefit of experience with failure. They don't know how to change their circumstances. They are hopeless. Whether their hopelessness has merit is questionable. With age comes experience, acceptance, and assurance. It is a genuine shame that we can't share so many lessons borne of experience. Some lessons must be learned the hard way. Like marriage. Like humility. Like failure. Like getting beyond depression. And when you are dealing with a weak mind, assurances that things will change/get better/pass are less likely to be believed.

But there is a missing piece here. We can posit that young, white, American men have the cards stacked against them. They have a sense of entitlement so grand that if the world fails to provide them according to their sense of entitlement, they crumble. But how that cookie crumbles into a bloody rampage is the question.

Why? Don't you think it's time we found out?