Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Many interactions in life in community select for thick skin

[Sarah Lesher (sarah.lesher]

As do many interactions in the outside world.  [Please see my earlier post
if you think I'm commenting on (micro)aggressions against POC.]

We live as a species that evolved to be more like regular chimpanzees --
aggressively seeking power and status -- than the more "wrap everyone in
love" bonobo chimps.  [I make no claim to expertise on chimp behavior so
please correct me if these superficial stereotypes are, well, not nuanced
enough.]

Half of the world's population -- females -- have been subtly or brutally
subject to male aggression for millenia.  Only very recently have brains
had some slight ability to compete against brawn.  I'll leave out
aggressions against those with gender and sexual orientation that didn't
meet society's norms.  [Though I read somewhere that some native Americans
allowed males who did not want to be warriors dress and live as women --
again, anthropologists please correct me.]

Females have systematically been aborted, killed at birth [what Spartan
said "if it's a boy, raise it; if a girl, expose it"]. I remember a
(fictional) line written by Pearl Buck about how a child was saved or at
least received with delight because "it has a fruit in its crotch."

Men in China especially but also India are suffering from a lack of women
to marry because they have be so undervalued.

The Nobel Prize for the Double Helix model of DNA went to Francis Crick and
sexist and racist James Watson because the contributions of a woman,
Rosalind Franklin, were ignored and diminished.

Yes, growing up I knew a few tough women who beat the olds. My parents'
veterinarian from 1950 on was a woman.  A woman who was a family friend
became a doctor after being an ambulance driver during WWI.  But then when
my sister applied to vet school, the interviewer looked up from her
application, scowled, and said "I though XXX was a man's name."  She didn't
get in for another year or two.  (Now more than half of all veterinarians
are women.)

My ability to contribute what I would have liked to during my life was
finally squashed after decades of macro and micro aggression against my
gender and various other external attributes that didn't conform to what
society deemed desirable and appropriate.

Finally, too late, I did develop a thick skin.

But as serious as our culture's bad treatment of POC is, just consider --
as you yourself likely personally experienced if you're over a certain age
-- millenia of aggression against women in cultures of all skin colors.

Enough of a rant.  I just wanted to at least slightly broaden and nuance
issues being debated in this extremely long and very important discussion.

Because cohousing/intentional community does exist in a much broader social
context.

--Sarah
Sarah Lesher
and my community is irrelevant


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