Poles Apart (22 page)

I wanted to summarize this research and explore this idea with some thoughts about what we might do to extinguish these gender stereotypes in our children. Isn’t that the most effective path to true equality? Start very young? I thought I’d write the piece as a narrative from two points of view: a child in a family with traditional gender roles, and a child raised by parents in a gender-neutral setting. Well, it might work.

I opened a new document, my fingers poised over the keyboard. Okay, go! Nothing. Right, then,
begin
! Hmmm. I couldn’t seem to get started, even though I had a mental map of pretty well the entire blog post in my mind. I tried a few different opening lines, but backspaced through them. I tried to write the conclusion first. No dice. I sat there for half an hour, utterly blocked. It was so strange. I’d written more than twenty posts by that stage and had never experienced this. Something was different, I mean beyond my arrested words. Something felt different. I thought about it a little longer until the mist suddenly cleared and an idea magically resolved in front of me. Surely not! But it was worth a try, wasn’t it?

I carried my laptop back to the kitchen table, where perhaps it belonged. I sat down. My socked feet instinctively cupped the bolt and nut protruding from the floor. I felt the pole’s pulse and warmth. I sat there for a few minutes taking it in. Then I wrote that seven-hundred-word post in twenty-three minutes flat. My fingers never left the keyboard, not once. They flew from one key to the next until I was done. I read it over several times, making
minor word substitutions and sometimes shifting the back half of the sentence to the front. After thirty minutes, I hit Publish.

It was quite late by this time, which was why I was a little surprised when my cellphone rang. I was even more surprised to see “Billy Kane” displayed on the screen.

“Dad? Is everything okay? Are you okay?”

“Sure, Ev, I’m fine, Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Well, it’s just that I don’t think you’ve ever called me this late. I was just crawling into bed.”

“Yeah, sorry about that. I went to bed two hours ago, and still can’t sleep,” he said.

“And you thought if you can’t sleep, I shouldn’t be able to either,” I replied. “I’m kidding, Dad. I’m not sure I can sleep either. What’s up?”

“Nothing much. Beverley and I had another turn around the grounds after dinner. She is like a dog with a bone, now that she thinks I can be saved.”

“Dad, you’re very lucky to have one of the real pioneers of the women’s movement taking an interest in this little experiment. You should try to free your mind up and really try to hear what she’s saying.”

“You think I have a choice in the matter?” he replied. “She just won’t stop. If I didn’t like her so much, I’d have bailed on her long before now.”

“But are you taking in the points she’s making? Are you truly giving it a chance?”

“Look, son. I’m an old dog and this is a new trick. But I think I’m trying. I hope I’m trying. She sure is something else.”

“Please, Dad. Try. It would mean a lot to me. And I know it would mean a lot to Beverley. But don’t mess with her mind and tell her you’re buying in to it all if you’re really not.”

There was silence between us for a few seconds. I just let it ride.

“Hey, Ev, did your Mom and I ever tell you that for most of her pregnancy we truly thought you were going to be a girl, that is until we caught a glimpse of your minuscule block and tackle.”

“Um, no Dad. You’ve never mentioned that.”

“Yep, it was all kind of strange. For the last four months of Mom’s pregnancy, until you were born, we thought we were having a daughter.”

It snuck up on me. In moments when my mind was occupied with other, more pressing matters, Shawna Hawkins seemed to materialize in my thoughts. I wasn’t thinking about her on purpose. She would just pop into my consciousness and hang around, being smart and beautiful and funny. I couldn’t really explain it. I think it might have been one of those head-heart dichotomy things.

Intellectually, I don’t think I’d ever considered Shawna as a viable relationship candidate, not that she’d be interested in me, anyway. Why? I suspect my brain couldn’t get past the fact that she was an exotic dancer. That other fact, that she had a daughter, might also have played a part in my reflexive, thought-free, reluctance to ask her out. When I identified and analyzed this instinctive reaction, I felt narrow-minded and small. After all, she seemed very nice. She was obviously intelligent. Hell, she was just a dissertation shy of a Ph.D. She shared my interest in
feminism and my taste in books. So what if she took her clothes off in front of wealthy men to earn money? Should that matter? Should that be a deal-breaker? My heart seemed to be leaning toward no, while my head was firmly in the “be careful, it’s complicated” camp. Of course, I had no idea what her relationship status was or if she might even consider saying yes if I ever asked her out. My brain hurt from the exertion of it all. I tried to get my mind to change the subject, but she continued to loiter in my thoughts, hovering somewhere between my head and my heart.

Revenue from EofE’s online advertising was starting to roll in. The amount was quite shocking. My writing had never earned this much money before, and probably never would again. I kept reminding myself that Candace Sharpe’s blessing, a lightning strike, a fluke, was responsible, at least for this initial stratospheric spike in the blog’s popularity. But I also recognized that my massive Candace-induced following would only stay with me if they continued to feel nourished, satisfied, and fulfilled by the content I provided. Candace might have led the horse to water, but I would have to make it drink, and keep on drinking.

In short, the ad money would dry up fast if my audience stopped coming back. Only I, and the blog posts I wrote, could keep them here. That responsibility weighed on me but also excited me. I certainly did not start the blog to become rich. But I confess this recent and significant financial incentive to keep
my newfound following aboard the
Eve of Equality
train, did keep me very focused.

That afternoon, I received an email to my EofE address from the
Huffington Post
, one of the most popular news sites on the Internet. It invited me to cross-post to their site, thereby giving me access to a much broader audience. No money would change hands. I thought about it for a bit before responding. Eventually I agreed, but only after insisting that the EofE
URL
be prominently displayed at the top and bottom of each post I sent them, with at least one link to the site embedded near the top of each post. I didn’t want the
Huffington Post
to siphon visitors from my site but rather help to spread the word and increase traffic on the EofE blog. It took about an hour of email exchanges to nail it down after I declined an invitation to talk about it over the phone. Half an hour later, the most recent of my blog posts appeared on the main page of the
Huffington Post
site. They also issued a news release and made a big online announcement about Eve of Equality’s availability on their site. The net was spreading ever wider.

Again that night, I watched it all from the front-row seat of my living room window. The neighbourhood protestors were back. But this time, Mason Bennington was ready for them. As soon as their numbers reached a critical mass and the marching and chanting started across the street, the big wooden doors of
XY
opened and out streamed about fifty supporters, also bearing
placards and a passable sense of vocal rhythm. The pro-
XY
contingent all carried signs mounted on five-foot-long polished chrome mini-dance poles. Clever. I recognized some of the dancers, but Shawna was not among them. Perhaps she had the night off. But Lewis Small and Brawn, good soldiers both, were also marching and chanting. This was getting interesting.

A selection of the pro-
XY
signs:

Their chants were not particularly original, but in a two-party rally, it was more about volume than content. With both sides trying their best to drown out the other, I had some difficulty discerning the words of the pro-
XY
chants, but I did catch these few lame little gems:

“Keeping women off the streets. That’s what Mason B believes.”

“More jobs, better pay. Mason, Mason, wins the day.”

“His dancers come, his dancers stay, ’cause he protects them every day.”

To add some visual flair – and probably to ensure that the pro-xy side of the rally snared the lion’s share of the media
coverage – the dancers donned their performance costumes. It made for quite a sight. It was hard for middle-aged local residents in casual clothes to compete visually with provocatively dressed versions of, among others, Little Bo-Peep, Cat Woman, Amelia Earhart, I think, and possibly Sappho from the Island of Lesbos. As expected, the several news station vidcams on site were largely focused on the smaller, but more arresting, group of marchers on
XY
’
S
side of the street. Speaking of arresting, this time there were four police cruisers on the scene. I’m not sure it was a coincidence that more of the women police officers seemed to be patrolling the neighbourhood protestors’ side of the street, while the men in blue were clustered around the scantily clad
XY
contingent. Lewis Small and Brawn were stationed almost as sentries it seemed, at either end of the
XY
line of marchers.

Mason Bennington didn’t seem to be at the club tonight. Probably wise. But I did catch a glimpse of Megan Cook, below me, near the front door of the club, watching the scene with considerable concentration. She was wringing her hands a bit and then stopping abruptly when she noticed what she was doing. From her dour demeanour, it was quite obvious she’d rather have been just about anywhere else at that precise moment, including, but not limited to, at a dentist’s appointment, at her nine-year-old nephew’s bassoon recital, or perhaps even in the midst of her own alien abduction.

For a while, the two sides of the rally kept it pretty civil, even courteous. For a time they took turns, letting one another chant
unopposed. But around 10 p.m., the antiphonal chanting ended and things started to get ugly. The forces on the other side of the street suddenly swelled with the addition of what appeared to be a gang of young thugs looking for trouble. They were spoiling for a fight and didn’t seem to have any connection to the neighbourhood group. But you could just feel the animosity spike in a matter of moments. One of the young hoodlums from this new group, who also happened to have an absolutely booming voice, started hurling insults and epithets. I watched as the original community protestors backed away from the scene. It was pretty clear to me that they were as surprised as anyone with the violent turn the situation seemed about to take. They beat a hasty retreat.

The
XY
troop responded by marching and chanting faster and louder. I watched as Lewis and Brawn started bobbing from one foot to the other as they surveyed the scene. Lewis no longer looked happy. And Lewis almost always looked happy.

At about 10:05, the first projectile arced over the road and landed just beside Megan Cook. This did not make her happy. It turned out to be a smoke bomb, and a very effective one at that. Just before Megan disappeared in the smoke, she wrapped her arms around her head in anticipation of what might fly by next. It was a rotten tomato that hit the wall above the door and showered everyone within a twenty-foot radius with seeds and foul juice that I could smell through my open window. I had a feeling the other side of the street would have come armed with more than one smoke bomb and one rotten
tomato. I was right. In the next few seconds, a veritable vegetable patch of rotten organic grenades landed on the
XY
side of the street, pretty well on target, with several direct hits.