Far too many women are willing to believe that a role for a thinking woman already exists when 'his'-story shows that such a role does not exist, nor has it ever existed. American universities did not change their curriculums because large numbers of working-class females showed up in the mid-1960s. Consequently, women came out of 'state' systems of higher education prepared to do our versions of white boys because that's what everyone was taught to do. I can run with the big dogs because I have, but I want to make the case for a 'role' worthy of an intelligent woman in the home where children grow. The 'role' would give the Feminine a valid place in Western culture and everyone access to a new power source. But, I Don't Want To Be A White Man When I Grow Up, speaks as frankly as possible about how such a 'role' can be created, and what it could mean to America's future in the global community. For the first time in the American experience half the women of childbearing age are unmarried and no one is contemplating what this means. Human procreation deserves no less than the attention given to disappearing polar bears and glaciers the size of Vermont falling in the ocean. We get bent out of shape about young women taking pregnancy out of the context of marriage without examining what might be wrong with "marriage." This writing endeavor is my best effort to address this situation from where I was standing in the circumstances that created it. I don't pretend to have all the answers for what's happening to our young people. I want to argue for coming together to examine the merits of the answers I do propose, and possibly come up with even better ones.
But, I Don't Want To Be A White Man When I Grow Up
Making The Case For A Role Worthy Of A Thinking Woman and Call To ActionBy Sonny HarperAuthorHouse
Copyright © 2009 Sonny Harper
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4490-2657-8Contents
Chapter 1. Sex In The Revolution.................................................................1Miss Winfrey And Her Majesty Do Not Qualify......................................................1Lies Skirting The Truth..........................................................................7Mr. Rodman's Wedding Dress.......................................................................12Burkas For The Mind..............................................................................17The Missing "Her" Story..........................................................................21Our Little Girls Are Not Stupid..................................................................25Where's The Lake Of Pee?.........................................................................33Wet Water And Self Centered Man..................................................................40Chapter 2. Epiphany At Micky D's.................................................................44Abraham's Daughter?..............................................................................44I Do Not Choose To Become A Pagan................................................................50What Is Wrong vs. What Feels Wrong?..............................................................57A Blind Man's Advice On How To See...............................................................65A Knowing In The "Aloneness".....................................................................74Chapter 3. The Brink of Masculinity..............................................................83God Help The "Good" Wife.........................................................................83Designated Doormats..............................................................................90An Inescapable Cage That Waits For Men...........................................................98The Brick That Waits For Every Woman.............................................................106A Woman Going Loudly.............................................................................118We're Trying To Do English Here..................................................................123The First Sorority And Secondary Sisters.........................................................129Education Is No Innocent Bystander...............................................................134Chapter 4. The White Boy's Due...................................................................143I Don't Want To Be A White Man When I Grow Up....................................................143Questions That Take More Guts Than Brains To Ask.................................................154Socrates And His Friends Didn't Know.............................................................159Masters Of The Universe..........................................................................163Give The White Boy His Due.......................................................................171Chapter 5. "Stuff" In America's Wormhole.........................................................182America's Begotten Is Not Blonde Or Blue Eyed....................................................182Able-bodied White Babies, (Non-renewable Natural Resources)......................................194"If Only The Darkies Would Sing".................................................................202Oh Where, Oh Where Have The Tinkers Gone?........................................................214Chapter 6. The Children..........................................................................224The Maid's Children..............................................................................224I Endured, And Survived My Education.............................................................228Languages Of Real Learning.......................................................................234Perk Walk Of The Paradoxes.......................................................................238Down Home Sex Talk For Young Woman...............................................................246Down Home Sex Talk For Young Men.................................................................255Monster's Respect vs. "Love" From Men Who Don't Know How.........................................261Chapter 7. A Better Standing In The Conquest.....................................................268Competitive Blowback.............................................................................268Exactly What Did Constantine Donate, And Why Does It Matter?.....................................273Disintegration In The Capillaries................................................................284The Union Lacking Nothing........................................................................295What Did The Flowers Do To Make White Men So Angry?..............................................302Humanity's Greatest Ally.........................................................................309Money Won't Get Our Diapers Changed..............................................................318Chapter 8. The Revolutions Were Televised!.......................................................326(In Summary).....................................................................................326Everybody Went Home Before The Revolutions Were Finished To Watch Them On TV.....................326Unfinished Revolts In Need Of Attention..........................................................329"Sucker Punching Fair 'n Square".................................................................332The State Of Women...............................................................................343The State Of Children............................................................................347Our Pursuit Of Democracy.........................................................................351The Role Worthy Of A Thinking Woman..............................................................356
Chapter One
Sex In The Revolution
Miss Winfrey And Her Majesty Do Not Qualify
The magnanimous rise of Ms. Oprah Winfrey to undeniable prominence may immediately come to the minds of many readers when envisioning a role worthy of a thinking woman. I have great respect for Ms. Winfrey and I do not seek to take anything away from her many achievements, but Ms. Winfrey with all her accomplishments cannot be the pattern for the role I hope to find.
She is the one conspicuous modern-day example of a female rising to irrefutable power in the character of a woman. She set and reached amazing goals with the caring nature of a peace-loving female. She did indeed obtain power in this male oriented world using kindness, love, courage and phenomenal generosity, but there's something missing from this resume.
Any role among the roles that little girls can choose to play when they become women must include a personal commitment to legal marriage as well as the intentional conception and birth of children. Both commitments are extremely important to anything and everything else a woman can choose to do.
Legal marriage is the load-bearing pillar of the role I hope to see created because a mortal race's first responsibility must be to reproduce itself in a predictable format. Legal marriage is also essential to give men lawful access to their mortality and a vested interest in securing our future. Children are the only known paths mortals have to an earthly future and women are still in the forefront of transporting them to the physical realm - for the moment anyway. This is a very powerful place in a mortal race, a point of reference that needs to be reexamined, reprioritized and treated with special care. It is also the cornerstone of the role for a thinking woman.
Ms. Winfrey has never been part of a legal marriage arrangement that we know about. Single women without children, no matter how powerful or philanthropic, do not have the same investment in the future as married women with a personal commitment to raise productive human beings. It is simply not the same and there is no way to ever compare the two. The year 2090 is a different place for people who have a flesh and blood invested in it than it is for those who don't. Ms. Winfrey herself has publicly deferred to motherhood as the hardest job on earth.
The emotional plunge that's involved in the day in and day out commitment to raise a child demands a level of vulnerability that is in no other human relationship. When a woman commits the emotions involved in personally mothering a human life, (whether or not she gives birth to it) she runs the risk of facing the horror of losing that life before she loses her own. It's a horror like no other a woman can know.
Ms. Winfrey has done wonderful things for this society in the place she's created for herself and I sincerely hope she continues. Realistically speaking, however, Ms. Winfrey's place (even with hard work and extraordinary luck) is the equivalent of winning a billion dollar lottery. This path to recognition and respect is not available to 99.999% of ordinary women. If little girls spend their time and energy trying to become Oprah when they grow up where will babies come from? If little girls strive to be like Oprah how will men legally connect with their mortality in the tangible realm?
Far too many women are willing to believe that a role for a thinking woman exists when 'his'-story clearly shows that such a role does not exist, nor has it ever existed. My generation was the first big group of working-class women to pursue 'four' year college degrees of our own, as opposed to husbands with four-year degrees. The universities did not change their curriculums because large numbers of females showed up in the mid-1960s. Consequently, we all came out of our state systems of higher education prepared to do our version of a white boy because that's what everyone was taught to do.
Western females were traditionally educated in the convents of Europe and Western males educated in the universities, with the Church overseeing both of them. The all male Church Council at Nicaea that formed the basis of Judaic/Christian Civilizations did a thorough job of leaving the Feminine out of Western culture. The Feminine, around which human life revolves, was never part of a Western university education and millions of females have been educated in the mode of conquerors.
There was no thought of creating a valid part for intelligent women in our own physical and mental character after my generation of ordinary women began to graduate from our country's state universities in mass during the late 60's and early '70's. As fate and wonder would have it, the greatest hope for our species just might be none other than women in this group. Women who have been to "Oz" met the Wizard and are no longer willing to forsake their original nurturing nature. I'm referring to the feminine nature that reflects the life sustaining properties of the earth.
The nurturing mind-set behind the role of a thinking woman is not new. It's been around for thousands of years. To date, there has been no single group of people in the world that's large enough and committed to the principles of nurturing advocated by humanity's spiritual icons to make a difference in the way the world functions. Females are half of the human species! I'm gambling that the group of women I've identified have the strength, intelligence, and intuition to re-educate ourselves about the world we also live in, an education that's centered in our character and rooted in our female mind
Unfortunately, these most unlikely leaders seem to be the least aware of their female power source, or how it works. The few women in 'his'-story who gained serious power and recognition outside the home used the same deception, force and/or threat of force in the same character and role that men play. All the while, men who have deliberately challenged the belligerent hostile world with the nurturing loving nature of 'Woman' are lifted to the level of the Immortals, men like Krishna, Confucius, Buddha, Jesus, and Mohammed.
In today's Age of Information the present Queen of England is another incontestable example of real female power in the character of a woman. Even so, she cannot qualify as the model for the role I'm hoping to find. Imperialist Western males have been briefing Queen Elizabeth II for almost sixty years and I dare say that she knows more about what's going on in this old world than any woman alive.
The information she has accumulated over the decades makes her one of the most powerful people on earth and no one knows if, or how, she uses that power. (Oh, to be any item in Her Majesty's purse.) I can't begin to imagine what there has been for a person to overhear down through the years.
Her Coronation was a truly regal affair. It was every bit as elegant as Princess Diana's wedding, and she was just as beautiful as the late Princess. The new Queen was beyond stunning in her robes and gown. Mother bought my best friend Daisy and me cardboard cutout paper doll sets of the young Queen Elizabeth II.
We spent hours and hours on our porches cutting out paper replicas of her finery. Daisy and I watched her Coronation on TV just as we were about to enter puberty in the shadow of Marilyn Monroe, a puberty in which I spent the majority of desperately praying for boobs.
I envied the new Queen's figure and asked God to just let me have half of what she had on her chest. Just half of the feminine endowment on her chest would have made me happier than words can convey. My prayers were not answered! My lifelong boobless state will be eternally indebted to Ms. Jane Fonda's body type in the role of "Barbarella." She changed the ideal feminine silhouette from hourglass curvy like the Queen's to long and lanky liberating my scrawny figure from under Marilyn's mammary awnings.
The Queen of England is a wife, mother and female monarch who has been inconspicuously powerful for over five decades. She's who Cleopatra would have been if Cleopatra had been able to deal with men as well as Great Britain's Queen Elizabeth II. My only problem with the Queen is that she's English.
Daddy unceremoniously informed me that some of our ancestors were English after I complained to him about how they treated me on a trip to London. His eye-opener made their mistreatment all the more irritating. I came away from their strange little island with very unpleasant memories and a bad taste in my mouth. The only pleasantry I saw over there were the babies. The English babies were the prettiest babies I'd ever seen, while the English people were the least attractive white people I've ever seen. (I'm still trying to figure that one out.)
I have no problem with being related to white people. I take issue with being related to mean ugly white people. If white masters were going to be so rude as to run around forcibly disbursing their genetic matter they should have at least had the courtesy to be beautiful. What a person thinks about that situation is ultimately irrelevant because you can't pour people out of your bloodstream no matter how they got there.
Irrespective of my bad attitude toward English people Her Majesty is an excellent example of a powerful woman in the character of a woman. Even so, she cannot be a model for the role I'm looking for. We can buy our little girls all the little princess outfits China can make, but very few of them will ever have the opportunity to become the Queen of England when they grow up.
Lies Skirting The Truth
The role I'm looking for will have to be grounded in what really goes on in the world around us, as well as the real origins of those challenges. There is nothing in life more galling to me than for hypocritical self-righteous ex 60's and 70's "Ho Dancers" to judge the sexual conduct of young women today. Certainly they haven't forgotten our conduct when we were their age.
The only thing more annoying is when those same people apply post AIDS sexual morality to those of us who willingly acknowledge conduct they know we all took part in. If you're bold and bad enough to do something, you should also be bold and bad enough to at least admit it. This is only fair in the fair exchange for doing it.
I hear today's young people bragging, "Man, we partied all weekend!" My boomer generation partied for a decade! Some of us partied and hooked up too, virtually every night. Sometimes all night, then got up and went to work the next day on time - for years. We were the original 'friends with benefits.' (Check out some the stock film footage from Woodstock, Studio 54, and The Circus.)
We also initiated the consequences of those benefits, consequences that youngsters suffer today without knowing it. Our descendants trample on Western mores they've never even heard of. Young women today don't extend their hand 'first' when shaking hands with a man. They'll walk into a place of worship in a dress with no sleeves in it. They won't wear a hat to a daytime reception. They don't know why "Yes, Ma'am" and "No, Ma'am" is their handle to say what's on their minds. Many of the social rules that today's hip young women break with impunity were looked upon as antiquated by women in my generation, and we didn't bother to pass them on to the young people coming after us.
I'd like to direct the attention of my contemporaries to the consequences stemming from our conduct as well as capture the interest of the young people who got stuck dealing with them. The faade of decency that many veterans of the Sexual Revolution create to disguise our past sexual activity is most damaging to the young women coming behind us. It's doing far more harm at this point than anything we did during the revolt.
Yes, Elizabeth, Jamilah, Maria, Rachael and Sue Lin there was plenty of sex in the Sexual Revolution, enough sex to call what happened a 'Revolution!' If the truth were told there was an awful lot of sex and precious little revolution. A lot more than politics was involved in the revolts of the late 1960s and '70s. You can bet your happy who ha on that. I know because I spent my younger days and nights partying from one end of this country and over half of Europe smack dab in the middle of the insurrection.
I did not hold the Sexual Revolution all by myself. (Though not for lack of trying.) Do not be fooled from the claims of 'decency by omission' on the part of too many women from my era. Of course, now days you'd be hard pressed to find very many aging female veterans who're willing to admit they participated in our pre-AIDS sexual concert. Oh yeah, Gamma was a superstar all right!
And what does this have to do with the lives young people are trying to live today? Just about everything! There's important information that the 'nice' girls who were willing foot soldiers in the Revolution could share with our sexually backward part of the world. We learned things from and about men in the wee hours of the morning that can completely change the way we look at the confusion we're living in at the beginning of the new Century.
I'd like to say the reason things are so screwed up is because the world got turned on its backside, but that wouldn't be true. The world has always been turned on its butt. The multitudes of challenges we're facing are indications that people in my generation haven't really tried very hard to change the world in recent years.
Some attempt to make it appear they're trying to set things straight, but it's just that, an appearance. Individuals with the kind of discipline and talent I know to be in the boomer generation have a purpose for what they plan to do. If it doesn't get done, it only means they didn't intend to do it in the first place.
A more important issue involves the young Americans coming after us who have sincerely tried to deal with the screw-ups surrounding our good intentions without a full accounting of what we did, and didn't do. I'm not just referring to the unflattering conduct that we neglect to own up to, but the other things that we've flat out lied about
The unprecedented sexual intimacy that 'nice' girls and boys shared gave both sexes enough first hand knowledge to objectively evaluate the characters our genders have been expected to act out since the Western play was scripted. The sexually intimate moments we experienced are the perfect vehicles to challenge long standing American social, political, economic, religious and sexual hypocrisy - if we choose to! (They were also welcome respites during an uncertain and extraordinarily turbulent era.)
The sexual intimacy that women freely shared with men during the late 60's and early 70's put us in a position (no pun intended) to learn things that men will never share with other men and potential competitors. There are moments in a sexual encounter that allow intimate strangers to exchange parts of their souls as well as their bodies. Those moments can teach women things about men that we cannot learn in any other way. They also allow men to learn things about women that only a willing woman will teach a man.
Much to my amazement I discovered that more than a few present day middle-aged male pillars of the community are just as sensitive about their sexual "hippie" past as middle-aged women. I have changed the names of the people whose lives I'm sharing out of respect for their sensitivity. I've also changed some of the details necessary for identifying them out of respect for their anonymity.
The people in my stories were part of my life and I cannot convey my experiences without them. Their life's struggles belong to them and I choose not to publicly identify the struggles in such a way they can be traced back to the people who survived them. This makes it easier for me to tell what I saw and believe to be valid about a most unsettling time in our nation's past.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from But, I Don't Want To Be A White Man When I Grow Upby Sonny Harper Copyright © 2009 by Sonny Harper. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
