Poles Apart (11 page)

“I like that idea. I like it a lot.”

We sat in silence a bit longer.

She broke the silence to ask “The young women you dated just couldn’t live up to your views on equality? Is that why they bailed out?”

“They didn’t always put it that directly, but I’m pretty sure that’s what happened,” I replied. “My last girlfriend, um, well, woman friend – although that just sounds weird – broke it off just when we were starting to get serious.”

“What happened? If you don’t mind me asking.”

“Well, it seemed like a minor disagreement at the time, but the issue was clearly standing in for a whole bunch of baggage I was carrying,” I explained. “We were talking about marriage, in a remote, oblique kind of way. But I mentioned that even if my eventual spouse wanted to take my name, I wouldn’t
let
her take it. It was a concession to patriarchal tradition I wasn’t prepared to make.”

“And that led to a lengthy and heated discussion?”

“Well, yes, you could say that. She didn’t consider that particular tradition to be another small cog in the malevolent misogyny machine, the way I did.”

“Did you really refer to it as a malevolent misogyny machine?” Beverley asked.

“I might have. I’m a writer. And I have a weakness for alliteration.”

“I see.”

“Yes, well, she didn’t. She ended a two-year relationship the next day,” I said. “The fact that her last name was Higginbottom might also have been a contributing factor.”

“Yes, perhaps.”

I fell into a routine over the next two weeks or so. I’d rise in the morning with the hammering, sawing, drilling, and yelling that always ensued as the construction below hurtled toward completion. To be clear, I didn’t really rise
with
all that noise
but rather
because
of it. And then I’d write. Then in the afternoon, I’d head to the hospital to coach my father around the walking paths and meet with Beverley about the latest essay. Then in the evenings, I’d revise, based on her comments. I was studiously ignoring the bio piece I owed
Make-Up Artist
magazine that I should have been working on. But the guy I was supposed to profile was not responding to my emails and phone calls to set up a time to interview him. What was I to do, fly to
LA
and camp out on his doorstep?

So I wrote thirteen six- to eight-hundred-word blog posts for my
Eve of Equality
blog – a baker’s dozen. I was strictly blogging behind the firewall, still finding my voice. The posts weren’t yet live. I still hadn’t hit the Publish button. But I was feeling good about them. In the posts, I was riding the rail between substantive and rhetorical, serious and light, but always with the goal of making the reader think, and feel, a certain way by the end. I also tried to leave readers with something they could actually do, or in some cases, stop doing. Sometimes the “ask” was easy. Start using gender-neutral language, for instance. Words are powerful. They shape our way of thinking and reinforce damaging stereotypes, etc., etc. Other times, there wasn’t anything concrete to require of my still nonexistent readers beyond simply having them think differently or believe something. If nothing else, it was an intellectually stimulating and fulfilling exercise in refining my own views on an increasingly complex set of social issues.

I researched and wrote blog posts on:

I’m not suggesting that I was in any way qualified to write about these sensitive subjects with any expertise and authority. But I could write about them with enthusiasm, energy, and conviction, because I did feel strongly about all of this. I also worked very hard to present a clear, balanced, thoughtful, and reasonable viewpoint without being in any way incendiary, divisive, and insulting. I wanted to take that club out of the hands of the opposition.

It was very difficult to keep the posts within the eight-hundred-word limit I had set for myself. And even eight hundred words
seemed a trifle long for the online reader’s attention span. But it forced me to hone my arguments and focus on clarity, brevity, and the pure force of words. I had no idea whether I’d been successful. After labouring for days over the same thirteen blog posts, phrase by phrase, sentence by sentence, sometimes word by word, my sense of perspective on what I’d written had pretty well abandoned me. That’s where Beverley came in.

I don’t mind saying that I took great satisfaction from her surprise at the power of the writing. She kept saying things like “Did you really write this?” as she waved around the printout of the latest post. She made a few suggestions, usually when she believed I either wasn’t giving the reader enough credit or was assuming too much knowledge on their part. She also offered some interesting anecdotes that brought some of my positions to life and made them more compelling. Often, a true story has much more impact than yet another rhetorical flight. Storytelling is a powerful tool in advocacy.

In one post, she wondered whether affirmative action programs might set back the cause of equality by prompting doubts about how some high-flying women in business and government came to be high-flying. I argued that until equality is achieved, we need programs in some sectors to hasten the pendulum’s return to the middle, to equilibrium. I’m not sure I convinced her, but she seemed more comfortable after I’d toned down my conclusions. We had great discussions that always left me feeling very much alive and utterly exhausted at the same time. After each visit, I
was more and more comfortable in my humble endeavour. My father even sat with us for some of our discussions, as even that fate was preferred to yet more walking. He scoffed often and openly at the beginning, prompting the occasional “Oh hush, Billy” from Beverley. But by the end, he registered his views less frequently and often only by rolling his eyes.

I still hadn’t explained the blog idea to Beverley. I’m not sure why I hadn’t beyond a faint need to keep
Eve of Equality
anonymous in the strictest sense of the word. So she still thought I was just writing essays that I might gather into a collection at some point. I allowed her to carry on under that misconception but felt a little duplicitous about it.

We’d just finished reviewing the final few blog posts I’d written by then. I could see Dad labouring up the Blue path across the verdant hospital grounds, making his way toward us. Beverley handed me her marked-up copies of my “essays” on John Stuart Mill’s book and on a selection of seemingly innocuous daily acts of misogyny.

“I like the Mill piece,” she said.

By that stage, I’d read the slim Mill volume three times and researched it as well. I liked my Mill piece, too.

“I’m glad you gave Harriet some credit, even if her name doesn’t appear on the cover.”

“Clearly the book was a joint effort, and I thought his wife ought to get the credit she deserved. In fact, I’m surprised he didn’t insist on equal billing on the front.”

“Men ran the publishing world then, and now, so I’m just happy the treatise was published at all,” she said. Then she turned to the final essay. “Provocative title. Perhaps a little too provocative?”

“How do you mean?” I asked.

“Well, ‘misogyny’ is a very strong and politically loaded term.”

“Yes, it certainly is. That’s precisely why I used it in the title, to draw people in.”

“Yes, but do you deliver on ‘misogyny’ in the piece, or is it more about the inherent ‘sexism’ of our daily lives?”

“I’m not sure I distinguish between the two. Do you?”

“Not really, but ‘misogyny’ always seems the more bellicose term to me. More Machiavellian. More cruel.”

“Agreed, but I like the power of the word in the title. I was going for provocative.”

“It’s your piece,” she replied. “Other than that, I think you’ve written another compelling essay that deserves a broader audience.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I’m thinking about writing one more piece. Are you familiar with a guy name Mason Bennington?”

“Everett, I might be somewhat isolated in a Florida rehab hospital, but I am not living under a rock. Of course I’ve heard of that reprobate. He’s a degenerate of the first order, set on returning women to what he thinks is their rightful place – naked and writhing on a pole for the collective entertainment of boors and louts.”

“I see. So you’re still wrestling with your views about him.”

She smiled. I continued.

“I was thinking about writing a piece that challenges all the positive press he somehow seems to generate. Some stories even call him a saviour to all those women working in seedy, dangerous strip clubs across the continent. It’s offensive.”

“More than offensive,” she said.

My father reached our bench and dropped onto the end of it as far away from Beverley and me as possible.

“Hello, ladies,” he said, huffing and puffing. “Have you saved the world yet?”

“We’re getting closer, Billy boy, we’re getting closer,” said Beverley. “The question is, when the day of reckoning comes, will there be a place for you in the new order.”

“Can I still watch the
NFL
in the new world?” he asked.

We both ignored him.

“So you think I should do it? Write a piece on Bennington?”

She looked at me and narrowed her eyes. She looked almost fierce for just a second.

“Get your ass home, and get writing.”

I skipped dinner and sat down at my laptop on the kitchen table. The music was pounding below again, as it had been for most of the last week. Out my kitchen window, I could see the alley below and the loading dock for whatever enterprise was about to open below me. Several woman were smoking out on the concrete outcropping where trucks had been unloading
equipment and supplies earlier in the day. I rested my foot on the big nut and bolt below the table. I could feel them vibrating to the pulsating beat of the music. Once in a while, I heard a metallic click, almost like a tiny squeak, as the whole unit shifted microscopically. Were they swinging on the chandelier? After a time, I could have sworn the nut and bolt felt warm. I wasn’t sure whether I’d warmed it with my foot or if it were getting hot one floor below. It was almost comforting to cup the nut and bolt with my two feet as I wrote. Strange, I know.

I focused and wrote about Mason Bennington that night. It stretched to 875 words. I suspended my eight-hundred-word limit for this piece alone, as I wanted to get it right. I think it warranted the extra few paragraphs. I liked it. I really did. But what did I know? Beverley and I had become so immersed in this stuff in those two weeks that I’m not sure I could be impartial about the essay. In fact, I’m certain I couldn’t be. I read it one more time and then went to bed. Not to sleep, just to bed. It took a few hours to get to sleep. Tina Turner’s “Private Dancer” drifted up from below as I finally drifted off.

I spent the next morning taking a final read-through of all the posts. I then decided on some kind of order for them so that one theme more naturally flowed into the next, taking the reader on a kind of a journey – perhaps not an enjoyable journey, or even an enlightening journey, but a journey nevertheless. As it worked out, the Mason Bennington post seemed to work best as the last essay in the series, at least until I wrote the next one. The
plan was to contribute one post each week after the blog was up and running with these initial essays.

I couldn’t think of a reason not to, so I spent an hour copying and pasting the posts into the back end of my WordPress blog. I carefully and comprehensively tagged all the posts with appropriate keywords to try to draw like-minded readers to the blog. If someone were searching for a feminist blog that tackled the issues I’d already written about, they would find
Eve of Equality
, if they knew their way around an Internet search engine.