Harriet Tubman, shero, used her wit, intuition, high (if unschooled) intelligence we can call genius, and spirit to run the Underground Railroad and later said:  “I freed a thousand slaves. I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves.”

Biographies of her life flew off the shelves when I was a school girl, inspiring females across racial lines and giving us an inchoate sense of sisterhood because of the sheroics Tubman pulled off, navigating by intuition and starlight, unschooled in anything but her own elemental womanliness.  She is one of my all-time favorite role models.  We might need her example of an underground ourselves one day, as women for women and girls.
There are today Harriet Tubman dolls to inspire girls, e.g., http://www.girls-explore.com/servlet/the-22/Harriet-Tubman-Doll-Set/Detail.  And then there’s this week’s offering by Def Comedy Jam’s Russell Simmons, who thought it funny to You-Tube post a parody sex tape suggesting Harriet Tubman’s success resulted from post-rape “seduction” taping of her “massa” to blackmail him into  letting her take slaves to freedom.   http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/russell-simmons-harriet-tubman-sex-608491.

Even Spike Lee responded angrily with an is-nothing-sacred type online screed that resulted in Simmons taking down the YouTube.  Everything Lee said on Twitter might as well be said about pornography or rape which sadly not all women abhor (just as during slavery not all slaves abhored their slavery and not all slaves let Tubman take them to freedom on her Underground Railroad).  Lee asked:  “Why Do We Desecrate Our Ancestors?Why Do We Hate Ourselves?” http://www.businessinsider.com/spike-lee-slams-russell-simmons-for-producing-mock-harriet-tubman-sex-tape-2013-8

Simmons assertedy was surprised that this offended anybody, and was particularly surprised that it offended black women so mightily.  This is just more reason to appreciate that individually far too many men have no clue when it comes to what matters to women, and think about life as if their brains were from another species.  

I’m no longer interested in why that might be.  Nature, Nurture (or the lack thereof), or some combination of biology and sociology, it makes no difference because  we will never know for sure and by evolution (socially and biologically) the game is always changing any way.  What we need to do as women is look at male behavior, individually and collectively.  Treat men as if a silent movie and only watch what they do.  Consider this our joke:  “How do you know a man is lying (or saying something inane or hypocritical)?  When his lips are moving.”   This should be our baseline unless and until any man proves himself consistently to be otherwise in favor of ending men’s asinine behavior against women,  starting with any one of our own lives where they need to make some serious reparations.  

Would Simmons of Def Comedy Jam think it funny to do a sex-tape video about MLK, Jr. or Gandhi?  No, it would never happen.  But in MLK, Jr.’s case, with the known womanizing in his history, http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2430999/posts, the tape would at least be based in the truth of his seduction of women, unlike Tubman who did not seduce men but was instead a female slave sexually abused by males.

In Gandhi’s case, with the known creepiness of his bringing young teen girls into his  bed theoretically to test his spiritual purity (which hurt his reputation in India and Pakistan but seemingly not among new-agers in the USA), there would be validity to the truth of his creepy relations with females sexually as a man of immense political and social power. 

 Gandhi ‘tested’ himself by sleeping with naked grand-nieces Manu, left, and Abha, right, in the photo-op with the “great” man and creepazoid.  Look how the patriarchy makes them feel grateful for his favors because he is such a “great” man.  Ick.  Does it get much creepier?  Yes, it does, and that’s why I’m a radical feminist.

As usual, as Simmons proved this week, men regularly reverse the truth about women, erase our sheroics, and act as men to our detriment as females of every age, every day of our lives.

Underground railroad to freedom, any one?

Sheroes and Female Abilities

The daily news is so bleak for women, it’s time  to shift into celebration and in spite of apparent doom, honor the sheroes.  Among my favorites, including each of us just for surviving the emotional, spiritual and physical onslaught of patriarchy, are the young women featured in the film, Rabbit Proof Fence.  

I saw this film in a theater about 10 years ago (maybe more) and was amazed at how the mainly male fllmmakers did not try to hide what were the obvious powers of the young women for geomancy, aeromancy, and related elemental connections that got them back as escapees on foot to their aboriginal mothers after the government of Australia separated them by 1500 miles.   These young women were half “first people” of Australia (aboriginal mothers) and half “white” (no doubt the products of rape by “good ole boys,” Australian settlers from Scotland and other UK countries originally, having “some fun” with “the natives”).  On the USA continent in my own lineage, my great-great-grandmother had been a “native” (Cherokee) that a “good ole boy” from Georgia of Scot descent “found” in “the backwoods” (probably a renegade from the Trail of Tears that killed so many Cherokees) and “brought home” (raped and abducted her) to “make her his wife.”   In the mantel photo of her at my grandma’s house that fascinated me about the “squaw great-great-grandma” while growing up, her brown face was both knowing and indescribably sad.  Of course, look at all the white man’s culture had robbed her of.  (And as a result I entirely understand why it takes a higher percentage of Cherokee blood than courses through my veins to be tribally enrolled.)

Also as a result I had a strong personal affinity for this Rabbit Proof Fence story of young women in Australia, where yet another generation of the heirs of the Roman Empire in their evil hubris in the name of the invented monotheistic man-god saw fit once again to try to destroy womankind and our multi-faceted powers.

Guess what you rapist fuckers!?!!!  Guess what you chronic hypocrites!?!!! We’re still standing.  As womankind.  Try to tear us down all you want and we keep on.  And we have powers that you have tried to take from us, that we are just starting to reclaim and use.  We already know the result.  Nature loves us, not you fuckers, and we overcome.

Valete Interfectors!!!*

*(Translation from the Latin of the Roman Empire which seeded some of the worst of the patriarchy :  Bye-bye murderers!!!)

More man-made madness (insanity of patriarchal normality)

This is the “world” men in their hubris and violence have made. A few feet away from the left-and-right pictured Hungary monument (men are so hungry for all that is wrong) is the fenced-off “park” area used these days by males only (off Wilshire Blvd., near Alvarado in L.A., CA, USA), because women dare not go alone for fear of men raping them.  You might work a full-time job and pay your taxes just the same as any man, but if you are a woman in L.A. you use the public and tax-supported city “parks” at your peril.

Red state, blue state, left or right, it’s all patriarchy and it’s all about a system of male dominance including the threat of impregnation or other violence against women.  We won the vote to net us nothing.  The same energy of the suffragettes can be used by women not for reformist revolt, not for endlessly wringing our hands over the evils of men, not for taking care of male adults to our own depletion, but to live with other women in mind, to consider the better world we want for ourselves and for our daughters.