I wondered to myself as we sat down – how is it exactly that I find myself in these situations? I was the only male at a table of seven girls, all hailing from different parts of America, all studying in Belfast. We were out for dinner to say goodbye to our dear friend Dayna, the first of our group of university friends to fly their way back to the wrong side of the Atlantic. Sitting opposite a New Yorker from Cuba and next to a Texan with a heart for Seattle, and Ireland in her blood, I smiled at the conversation which drifted from baby names to literature to language to celebrity to politics with much laughter and insight along the way. There’s an episode of the West Wing which sees the President, Leo and Josh stand back in one scene and marvel at the women around them. This is how I felt that evening as I sat amongst this smart, attractive and loving group of women…women I got to go to dinner with…
My friend Dayna, and I hope I don’t do her the disservice of misrepresenting her, has suggested to me before (Back in the days when glorious visits to coffee shops would see me gain an insight into the art of living wildly and notes slipped to me in class would ensure that I knew I was a tool for having a crush on the French girl… “I knew that’s what you were thinking from the moment she walked in the door…”) that the world would be a different…a better…place if it was run by women. Not women like Thatcher or Elizabeth, who had to act like men in order to gain and maintain the power they wielded, but women who were free to embrace the insight offered from within their femininity…and from their position as an oppressed group…
The feminist argument is an interesting one although, I would argue at least, it gains a lot of its strength from our own ignorance - we’ve never seen such a world so have nothing to base a judgement on - and from the fact that arguably falsifying examples can be batted away as more cases of women being forced to act like that pathetic crowd with the penises. I am swayed by the argument for the simple reason that…well…they could hardly do a worse job than the gender who have been running things up to this point, but remain dubious, feeling that perhaps it is power itself that brings out the negative traits that have been deemed masculine and not the testosterone that (though I am not saying it never plays a part) is blamed here.
What is true is that women have the potential to elicit wonder and so often live up to their billing. From my own mother to those like her all over the world, we find women at the centre of their families and their community, giving life and then holding it together. A couple of things people have said and some stuff I have read this summer has seen me think again about the place women have in the world, particularly, given the nature of my year’s study, the place women have in times of conflict. For it is women who are left behind to suffer…left behind when their fathers, husbands, brothers, sons go off to fight, left behind when their fathers, husbands, brothers, sons go off to die. Their vulnerable position sees them used and abused, their very bodies turned to battlefields where rape becomes a weapon of war. I am torn between feelings of sympathy (what a weak word) for the ill-formed caricatures my mind conjures as I think about such women and the crushing impact that life has had on them, and feelings of awe demanded by women, exemplified by Shirin-Gol in Siba Shakib’s “Afghanistan, Where God Only Comes to Weep”, who find a way to bear this, who find a way to cling to life and family…and maybe even a little hope…even though there are moments when they are overcome by despair.
This is one of those entries which I will be disappointed in…the words failing to conjure the feelings or shape the ideas…but I will let it stand since I don’t know if I could manage something better. When I think of the women who have played and continue to play roles in my life, briefly or otherwise, I am struck by real thankfulness for the lessons they have shared with me and the love they have offered me…as well as intense sadness that I wasn’t able or willing to be the better man that they so often deserved...in the colourful words of a character from a drama about a group of lesbians called The L Word, "I don't give a shit if I've made you a better man, it's not a fucking woman's job to be consumed and invaded and spat out so that some fucking man can evolve." And that sentiment doesn’t just apply to romantic interests but, possibly even more truly, to the other women in my life – friends and family, areas of my life where I have been beautifully blessed but not always realized it adequately.
Right, I gotta go and do something masculine now like climb a mountain or eat some meat or beat something weak up… I believe that men have the potential to be awe-inspiring too by the way and you can beat your ass we’re as hard as some kind of nail…although Leech has taken the weights home…
