Queen Hatshepsut

Mummy Reveals Egyptian Queen Was Fat, Balding and Bearded

My favorite quote from this article was

"More startling, the descriptions of Hatshepsut suggest that women haven't changed all that much over the centuries."

It makes me wonder if women haven't been struggling against misogyny all this time, and only now have the free time to be effective? A friend just told me that Ancient Egyptian women may have been better off than many women of the past.

Egyptian women owned property, were equal to men under the law (could file divorce, sue, appear in court. etc.), could become literate and professional (there were female doctors and office workers), seem to have been sexually empowered, and had the right to rule (right of rule was matriarchal, but the queen usually transferred power to her husband--a Hatshepsut and other ruling queens refused to transfer power or refused to marry).

And that is why the fight for women's rights will never end - women had rights then, but we lost it.

But this article is more about the Queen's physical features. You'd have to be an idiot or complete misogynist to actually be surprised that human women have not changed in such a short span of time. But if you can't make women feel bad that they aren't as great as they used to be, and you reveal that obesity and hair loss are normal, then suddenly, women might stop starving themselves. No one wants that.

Wikipedia's article on Malnutrition has this to say:

An array of afflictions ranging from stunted growth, reduced intelligence and various cognitive abilities, reduced sociability, reduced leadership and assertiveness, reduced activity and energy, reduced muscle growth and strength, and poorer health overall are directly implicated to nutrient deficiencies.

Women are accused of not being good leaders, they are traditionally shorter and have less muscle mass than men. They did not participate in sports, and our capacity for rational thought is put into question all the time.

Women and men may not be that different physically after all. I read, in my second Women's Studies class, that our society has systematically malnourished women (and here, when I say society, I mean world society) - first due to lack of resources, and now as a way to keep women buth "fuckable" (want to be a size 0?) and suffering the effects of hunger.

Note the attempts to erase this woman from the history.

Weddings, whats the point?

One of my favorite people, a former employee, explained the significance of this day. She told me that 7 is God's number, because he rested on the seventh day after working for 6 days to create the earth. Consequently, three times as many people are getting married today than on any other day. Source

To me, marriage is the creation of legal kin, as opposed to directly biologically related kin. We seem to understand that a child has the right to see her dying mother or father, but not every kid gets to come into the hospital room. Marriage takes two biological strangers from the human species and gives them the rights we allow biological kinfolk.

Women know that their kids are their own, and that by getting pregnant, they will pass on their genetic material. Men do not have this luxury, which is just one part of my "evolution of sexism" theory, and they know it. The ultimate goal of life is to sustain life, and pass on genetic material. Women have more control over this than men, and men have been punishing us for it for a long time.

But marriage, itself, is not necessarily a punishment, especially not if the man in question can provide the woman with viable pregnancies and help her effectively raise the new people. No, the punishment comes in the form of "women don't have the minds for math" and "don't be such a girl" - not to mention rape and murder¹ after the wedding and damn, everything else I talk about.

I don't know how much more explanation I need to give before I can get to my point, but I'm satisfied with what I've already written. Many cultures have realized that the joining of two adults needs to be recognized to be official. Hence, the wedding. Some weddings are short, sweet, and to the point. Some weddings last a week. Some weddings include the slaughter of a whole cow and a town feast. Some weddings include a million dollar dress and 5,000 famous people. My parents wedding was in a small local Catholic church. The bride wore a knee length brown-green dress, the groom wore a tan couderoy suit [hey, it was the 70's]. The reception was a dinner in the church basement, and their "honeymoon" was an afternoon outing to a local lake.

But so many women put their entire lives into their wedding. I admit, as I child, I liked to play wedding, if only for the pomp. But I also liked to play queen and royal palace for the same reason, often with the chess set. I went to wedddings as a child. The dresses were beautiful, yes, but the couple often made it to the reception so much later because of the photographer. The speeches ran long, when all I wanted to do was eat and dance.

And now, we all love to hear about bridezillas and elaborate weddings - well, all except me. Despite what I believe about the true purpose of weddings, I can't get past the blatent sexism and patrimony of the ceremony. In the past, both the man and the woman were leaving their respective parents' house, but the man stands at the head of the church, with his buddies, while the women put on an elaborate parade. In the end, the grand marshall, the man who paid for the whole thing, escorts his property down the aisle to give her to this other man, for his use.

Weddings are called "her day" because in the traditional, sexist reality, weddings were her last opportunity to be beautiful and show off, and she was now a wife, destined to begin a life of servitude to this handsome man. He doesn't worry about the wedding because he knows that his life will continue as normal, but better than normal because now he has someone to take care of him - just like his mother once did.

But so many non-famous women still want the huge wedding. They want all the pomp, all the gradeur, and all the tradition. The song must be just right, the dress must be perfect, the vows must be beautiful, the flowers must be breathtaking. And in the end, who gives a crap? It is one day, one dress, and a bunch of meaningless words. The real wedding is in the signing of the document, not in "I do". The point of a wedding is to tell everyone that you are now legally related to someone else, nothing more, nothing less.

My parents walked down the aisle together. They gave themselves to each other. My mother might have worn that dress again. My parents married as adults, and they did it without fuss, or without going into tons of debt.

My Matriarchal Roots

A grew up in a matriarchal family. I really did. This is not because the men were not there - my grandparents and parents stayed together, and in what appeared to be good relationships between equals. This wasn't even because the women were the primary breadwinners of the families. Rather, my family understood that women were people, and expected women to be just as successful as men.

I grew up in rural America; I grew up the older of two daughters. My mom is an educated professional, and my dad is a farmer. I was born on my dad's 36th birthday, in the Wisconsin summer, not in the nearest hospital to where my parents lives, but the one with a chair to allow my mom to sit up as she gave birth.

I grew up being expected to work when I got old enough. I grew up weeding gardens, picking up apples, picking raspberries, shoveling snow and later loading hay, feeding cows, and lifting heavy things. My parents expected it of me, and I saw it in the people around me. My grandmother worked hard, and loved it. And nobody got out of tasks for their gender.

On my mother's side, my grandmother was a typical housewife and my grandfather worked in construction. But my grandmother emigrated from Germany as a single woman. When her parents expressed concern, before she left, that she would go to America and become a prostitute, my grandmother threw it right back in their faces. She asked them if they thought that they had raised her so badly, that she would, in the late 1920's, think that prostitution was a viable life path. They didn't, and she didn't, so she took her brother's advice and moved to America.

There, she met my grandfather, but due to the depression, they did not marry - they possibly didn't even have sex - until about 1940. They then had four kids. They assumed they were done at three kids, but that fourth pregnancy, my mother, caught them by surprise. Of course, there are no mistakes in a Catholic family. Because they already had two girls, my mom was supposed to be a boy, oops. All of the kids went on to get education. The first became a nurse and married at 25. My uncle went to Vietnam and then used the GI Bill to go to college. He married in 1986 or 87, as I remember. My mom's other older sister went through a great degree of soul searching, even a stint in the convent, before really moving out on her own, but not without a great deal of fuss from her parents. Now she is a cultured and educated professional. Finally, my mother, the baby of the family, used the roads paved by her sisters to not get married right away, and lived during her 20's. She went to college and got a BS, then decided to go to graduate school and get a Master's degree.

Without being a typical consciousness-raising, bra-burning feminist, my mother was strikingly independent. One of her favorite stories is of the year she saved her money to buy a summer pass to the local pool, only to learn from her mother that she needed to stay home to cook lunch for her father. After putting up with that for a while, she finally put her foot down and told her dad to make his own damn lunch and went off to enjoy the fruits of her own labor and planning. Another story regarding my grandpa was the time his wife left him instructions to cook dinner, but she neglected to tell him to either turn on the oven or put the bird (chicken?) in the oven, so he didn't. What may have been a protest on his part about having to actually do something for the family turned into a funny story about my grandpa's ignorance.

But I did not grow up with those relatives - oh, I visited them a lot, but my mom had moved 12 hours away, to rural Wisconsin, and met my father, who was living with his family after his stint in the Navy and 5 semesters at UW Madison. I was closer to that family, and that was the true matriarchal family. And the matriarch of the family was my dad's mother. She was the youngest of 10 kids, and she was a daddy's girl. Her life was about work, everyone appreciated it, and she gave the orders.

She had a degree from a teaching college, but her career was as a farmer and a mother. She taught all 12 of her kids how to read and write before they went to school. She sold raspberries primarily, but also sweet corn, tomatoes, currants, strawberries, and apples every summer. She and her husband raised cows, pigs, and chickens, managed the biggest farm in the township, and ran a successful small business. She made cider, soap, bread, quilts, doughnuts, and she did her laundry with an old ringer washer. I don't know if there was anything my grandma couldn't do.

And she loved us. She loved everyone, and she gave. She did what needed to be done, and she accepted everyone. She was scary as hell, and she wasn't afraid of anything. She raised a generation of strong people, and even with their faults, they managed to raise my generation, and we're doing well. We're strong men and women, and we'll always remember where we came from. We carry the spirit of my grandmother - a woman who wasn't a feminist only because she didn't really need the movement to tell her that women could, should, and would work like men. I said it twice before she died, but I can never say it enough - Thank you Grandma, for everything.

Nine of my grandmother's 12 kids were girls, but only four of those girls went on to have kids of their own. Two of the remaining five never married - not to mention my mom's sister that never married. But unlike the patriarchal fear mongering, these three women are all still wildly successful. All three are home owners, and one owns about three houses - at least three - including the house where she grew up, the farm.

Most of my aunts and female cousins are successful professionals, including two nurses, three teachers, a high ranking army officer, and a firefighter. Many are married, and along with the three mentioned before, I have a couple of older female cousins that aren't married either. I grew up watching these women, and importantly, so did my male relatives. The men of the family behaved as if women were people - they knew their place beside women, not in front of or behind.

My matriarchal family did not berate women and girls for being women and girls - nor did it berate men and boys for being men and boys. The family did not expect anyone to not work because of her gender. If anything, my matriarchal family taught everyone that women and men could, would, and should work, and hard too. So I grew up knowing that I could do for myself. My dad doesn't think we should get married until we are thirty, and he is highly critical of the men my sister and my cousins do bring home. One cousin recently had a baby, and my dad isn't sure if her husband is up to the responsibility of being a father. I'm so glad that my family raised everyone to be an adult - a fully functioning, independent adult, male and female.

Love

Published retroactively

One of the stories on NPR this morning was about an exhibit at the Roman Colliseum. It is about Eros, who used to be a powerful god - a personification of the intangible feeling of love. The exhibit curators said they chose Eros because "love is universal".

But is it?

During my sophomore year of college, (2000/01), I learned about the Taliban and the realities of life in Afghanistan. I remember telling a friend about what I learned. She was very disturbed and told me, "I wish I didn't know that." I began wearing a piece of the burka on my bag as a way to remember the women that didn't have... well... anything that I took for granted.

There were more pressing concerns for those people - like the concerns of pregnant women tossed out into the street during the second stage of labor because a man was able to see their vulvas. The violence came first, but I also wondered, "how does love exist in such a society?" Surely, there were the men who coped with their wives', mothers', sisters', daughters', friends' difficulties sympathetically, but were just as powerless. Surely, there were the women who believed the Taliban's Islam and were happy about the Burka. But that leaves 95% of the rest of the population.

How can a woman accept the embrace of a man that threatens to beat her if she exposes an ankle to his friends? How does a young boy learn that women are people when he witnesses his father rape one of his stepmothers with an electrified metal rod*? How can love possibly exist in those situations? I remember hearing reports from Bangledesh of women who rejected the advances of a particular man. Common custom was to throw acid in the woman's face. In a society where women are sacred of mutilation for expressing their feelings honestly, can love really exist?

And even in ancient Greece, Rome, and Sparta, men turned to other men for sexual satisfaction because the common belief was that women weren't even human enough to feel love. Does a personification of that love really apply to love as I define it? Even the love between men wasn't equal - it was between teacher and student, slave and master. Is that what love is? If it is, we shouldn't glorify love. If it isn't, then we need to stop pretending that love is universal, or even present in some parts of the world.

*That happened in Pakistan, a young girl was married to an older man with other wives. I don't remember the situation that caused her to run away to her own family, but I do remember reading what her punishment was. She eventually did escape and told her story in mid 2002, which I read in Cape Town. I don't know about children being involved, I'm just asking a question and attempting to make people remember that the torture and supression of women affects an entire society.