on Chickens, Cats and Misogyny

I have a terrible and bad habit.

I read youtube comments.  I read newspaper article comments.  I read editorials.  I click the links rabid commenters use to justify their positions.  It is fairly poisonous, but I do it because I want to have a better grasp on what it means to be human, for better and for worse.  I feel this can inform my fiction writing.

After a long and tiring conference in San Diego, last night in our hotel room, I decided to just fool around on the internet as a way to relax.  I visited one of my favorite web comic's tumblr site, the creator of Hark! A Vagrant! http://beatonna.tumblr.com

She showcased a great deal of old anti-suffragette propaganda.  Note: I love old propaganda!  Communist Chinese propaganda is my personal favorite, but in general, propaganda from older times, where what we take for granted to be true or untrue now, can be very telling.  We see a lot of the same types of attacks between people on either side of the issues, the same method of boiling down and distilling well thought out rationale into offensive talking points and ad hominems.  Caricatures are made of complex and multifaceted people, in this case suffragettes, and detailing them as a large group of ugly spinsters.  It is scarily fascinating as we similar fights being waged now against marriage equality, or birth control as a point of health care.

But of course, I followed the links down the rabbit hole, to the places that archived these pictures and the comments surrounding them.

What I found is disturbing.

There are people in America who literally believe the 19th amendment should be repealed.  There are people who unabashedly believe that if they are married to a woman, what that means is the house they have is always the man's, the woman is only there to clean it and take care of the children.  There are people who believe that women who have career aspirations are being selfish and leading to men's misery.  There are also people who genuinely believe that feminism is the result of ugly old women reacting to the threat that men can go out and choose pretty young women in stead, in the form of prostitutes, and not say, because women wanted to have a little bit of self determination in their lives.  http://historyoffeminism.com/

This is not made up.

So why do I call this on Chickens, Cats and Misogyny?  Because it is interesting to see these aspects of humans as reflected in the behaviors and practices in other species.  There is a species that I own that clings very tightly to very gendered behaviors.  The girls do one thing, and if they are good at being girls, they stay.  The boys do another thing, and if they are good at it, they also stay, at least for awhile.  I am of course referring to my chickens.

As an interested party, I like this gendered set up.  I want chicken eggs.  I want my girls to be girls and lay them.  I want my boys to be boys and wake up the girls, get them out and pecking at food, and to inform and protect them in the case of danger.  As it is, our fully adult rooster is very bad at being a boy.  Roosters are supposed to eat last, and go in the coop last, to make sure all girls are accounted for.  He doesn't.  He is getting the chop.

But as much as I like the gendered roles of chickens, I am extremely glad to not be a chicken.  I'd also note that our taxonomy is also quite different, particularly in relation to the other animal I own: a cat.

Now my observations are skewed since our male and female cats are both fixed.  Additionally feral colonies, which are matriarchal in nature, behave differently than lone wanderers.  When left to their own devices, domesticated and abandoned cats will behave more or less in the same way, as long as they are not in heat.  None of the behaviors of my cats can be attributed to the fact that they are one sex or the other, excepting for Arashi when he humps a pillow, due to a late neutering.

I, personally, would much rather be more like a cat and less like a chicken.

But I digress.  I go down these rabbit holes to try to understand why people genuinely believe that my desire to be treated no differently from a man, to have a say in government and my life as much as a man does, is insidious; that me wanting to stand up for my rights is wrong while Washington, or Adams, or Jefferson wanting "freedom" is right.  And so I trolled.  But I trolled with a curious heart, even as I wrote on one website "Wrong!  you are wrong!  I have a she-wee, I pee standing up all the time!"  I only was obnoxious once.  The other trollings I did more was a reach out to develop this understanding.

Sometimes ridiculous claims in any debate come from a suppressed frustration about a real problem.  People who think medicine is evil are on the far spectrum of understanding that there is a profit incentive in modern health care, rather than a health incentive.  Women who think all men are evil may have had traumatic experiences with men.  It isn't a far cry to say men who think women shouldn't vote probably have had traumatic experiences with women, or they recognize that a majority of women voted for Obama, and they really wanted Romney to win.  This doesn't make anybody justified of course, but it provides a logical interface that I can engage directly.  It isn't a question then, of what they think men and women should be doing, but rather, a morality that thinks it is acceptable to silence people they do not believe in. 

All I can think about when I view the some of the other arguments against feminism is that, if we lived in a Chicken World, where the line between men and women was strong and would never fall, how much of life would I be missing out on?  I already have depression issues and have contemplated 自殺　in the past.  When do I least feel like that?  After a hard climb up a glacier laden mountain, during a board game with some of my male friends, meeting people in the community who thank me for doing my profession.  Those things would be forbidden to me in a Chicken World.  Or what of my sisters?  Much as I despise one of them, what a waste would it be to waste her talented mind doing something she is not as interested in doing; childrearing, instead of something she is interested in doing, electrical engineering.  Why in the world should she be barred from doing that which she loves when it is what she loves?  Anti-feminists say women are only truly happy with a family.  Even if that was true for every other woman in the world, why should any one woman be barred from making an alternate decision with her life?

After finally turning the computer off and laying in bed, trying to sleep, I realized something that means I won't be going down this rabbit hole again.  These people who live in the Chicken World, whether it be based on gender or race or any arbitrary qualification, they aren't where the interesting stories lie.  I try to get a handle on the diverse perspectives of people to develop believable characters, but you never really see characters like these in an engaging and thought provoking story.  Who do you see in these interesting stories?  You see the women who became fighter pilots in WWII to test out the planes that were to be taken out in the field.  You read about the young black boy who grew up in a poor inner city but is now a leading voice in the field of quantum mechanics.  When is the last time you read a compelling story where any of the main characters were people with one dimensional appraisals of huge swaths of the population? 

You don't.

So I'll leave them to their Chicken World.  I'm going to go lick my butthole and be a cat.