Saturday, July 01, 2006

Fun on the Monkey Bars

File this in the "Every Day I Live in the Patriarchy" Section of your lives.

So today I went for a long run, and along my run I came across some bars upon which to do pull-ups, so I was doing my routine of tricep-dips, pull-up negatives, chin ups and push ups. This list makes me seem much more cut than I actually am.

As I was doing my routine, I heard a child's voice behind me saying "Look at HER!" I turned around and saw a little girl pointing at me. She was walking with her brother and father, and her father looking up and seeing me said, directly to his son, said, "Do you want to try that?" The boy, who never responded to anything in the interaction, didn't respond the question at which point the man came over the bars and sort of winked/smiled at me and did a few pull-ups and went on his way with his children.

What the F?

A. Girls, when they express interest in being strong, should be allowed to be f-ing strong.
B. Dude, you have issues with strong women if you're so scared of:
1. Your child becoming one.
2. Needing to assert your physical dominance over the one that you see, or bizarrely attempt to hit on her.

BUH.

I love my life in the patriarchy.

P.S. Did Title IX actually exist, or was it a good dream I had once?

2 comments:

belledame222 said...

AUGH.

most of all augh for his poor kids, esp. the daughter.

fucktard.

would've served him right if the bar had broken right off and conked him in the gob.

tangentially: weirdly enough, i just last night was dreaming about being in or rehearsing for some sort of dance/theatre performance (not an uncommon theme for me) which involved a bunch of us women going up on (exaggeratedly high; like, mountains) pull-up bars (that part *was* unusual).

i remember in the dream that i was feeling extremely inadequate and anxious, not unrelated to my own real-life experience of not having a lot of upper-body strength, and of bad experiences as a child when we were forced to do physical "tests" requiring pull-ups.

also upset because i'd wandered away (physically) during the instructions, which is probably a metaphor for something i'm just starting to seriously examine in myself, a tendency to space out, maybe even more than i realize.

greymatters said...

Big fucktard.

And as a beneficiary of Title IX (no thanks to my own father), it did exist and did good, even if under continued and continuous assault ... often by those who claim to love daughters, sisters, spouses, etc..