​Dismantling the Patriarchy
by Shelley Pineo-Jensen, Ph.D.

​The construct of patriarchy is predicated, fundamentally, on the gender binary.

Intersectionality
​Increase in number of abject traits intensifies the effect.

Disrupting Hegemony
Gender is a construct.
Transmen and women disrupt the codified power relations between genders.
Biology (sex) is what it is, but “gender” is a construct, a sorting of universal human attributes into two boxes.
The binary is a construct.
Queer theory is the name of these theories of human behavior.
Queer is saying “I do not accept  the socially constructed limitations of my gender assignment. I can manifest a full range of human behaviors and am not restricted to performing only the behaviors assigned to my gender.”
Disrupting the gender imbalance goes to the heart of patriarchy – the belief in winners and losers.

Gender is a construct
What it means – “gender is a construct” – is that “winners and losers” is a construct. The gender binary, also known as “masculine hegemony” and “the patriarchy” is a belief system that allows a few members of the group to exploit and disadvantage others. These titans of industry/thieves/corrupters monopolize huge amounts of the earth’s resources, depriving billions of other earthlings the resources they need.
The silly billionaires take rockets to the stratosphere, but the more venal ones are transnational corporations gobbling up the earth’s resources and leaving a wasteland behind.
I feel like I’m living in a badly written Phillip K. Dick story.
Masculine hegemony and patriarchy seem to mean pretty much the same thing. It is a universal cultural belief that there is a natural division among all the peoples of the world into two classes, the gender binary, male and female and hence masculine and feminine.
There is a huge difference between those two sets of words.
Male and female are biological facts although there is not as strict a biological divide as many people assume. Even here, there is a continuum between most “male” and “female” with intersex somewhere between.
Masculine and feminine, on the other hand, are ascribed. They are an arbitrary distribution of characteristics of human beings. From birth, American children are sorted into two boxes, masculine and feminine. Baby boys are tough. Baby girls are sweet. Gender is so pervasive that it is largely invisible, except to border crossing trans people and other queer folk.

We must secure the future life of our planet by uniting as one people. Non-binary is the uniting feature. All the queer people are on the same page about certain realities of this existence – that much of what we are meant to believe are just constructs combined with perceptions.
“The other is bad” can be dispensed with when you become the other. Everyone and anyone is capable of being queer. Being queer is simply not being willing to comply with one’s gender assignment.
Liberation from gender assignment allows women agency as leaders, inventors, and innovators.
Liberation from gender assignment allows men emotions and feelings, along with collaboration, communication, and cooperation (all characteristics assigned to the female side of the binary that are also essential for the continuation of the species and probably all life on the planet).
We’re driving toward the cliff at full throttle now, like Thema and Louise, well knowing that we’re already at 400 parts per million and you know what that means. Well past 350.org.
Earth will host human life. We can do it, united beyond the gender divide, winners and losers, and patriarchal violence to the delicate balance of earth’s biosphere.

Action Plan
Give voice to these queer ideas.
“Gender is a construct.”
Say it out loud to people where you can fit it in.
Open a conversation among all people.
That thus we empower ourselves to see past the binary that divides us into winners and losers.
As long as we continue to perpetuate winners and losers in America, 
we will give all the resources to a few selfish greedy men (mostly) who use their billions to waste fossil fuels to blast themselves up into space.

You’re On Your Own (YOYO)
We MUST abandon winners and losers -- “You’re On Your Own”(YOYO).
The falsity of the gender divide drives people to cross over to the other side of the divide – more every day. Trans men and trans women are the pioneers of “gender is a construct” – proving it with their bodies and lives.

We’re In It Together (WITT)
Human beings must reject the conventional wisdom of “winners and losers” and start advocating for human solutions.

Figure 1. Winners and Losers in Patriarchy

Figure 2. Queer Theory (Harold Pliska)

Figure 3. Queer Theor(ies) (Dr. Ryan Calabretta-Sajder)

​A dark future is clanging its bell at my window.
Thunderbolt and lightening, very very frightening,
that same storm that ravaged parts of the Pacific Northwest lately.
But Oroville Dam picked up 20’ of water I heard
There is a light snow-pack on the western mountains.

Gotta build up that ice on the mountains to recharge the water table
or else we’ll survive because we divine the production of clean water from sea water.

The hydrological cycle is starting to wobble.
If we are passive, it will get worse.

We already must adjust our thinking
about how and where we build our homes
in the coming relentless storms.

So we can rebuild the same way in hurricane ravaged areas near Houston,
or we can design homes in safer places,
or safer homes for places with risk of predictable natural disasters.

If we stop all carbon today
it will not cure massive changes
in world weather patterns.


Grow local economies with
green investments in homes
Energy-efficiency retrofit and solar panels . . .
tax relief for capitalization than puts local people to work.


The past predicts the future
but TODAY DECIDES TOMORROW.


~ Dr. P-J
10/25/21

Grandma Chandler’s house in Mukilteo
Hydrangea
​– purple and blue

Seattle - 2343 B
Snowball bush
​– yes, we had a snowball fight with them

Forget-me-not
​– spindly, stretching up, along the fence by the back gate

Tulip –
a single red tulip, by the drain spout mud puddle where I made mud pies and shared the mud with big dauber wasps (side by side play)

Big purple bearded iris
​– sneaking out from the board fence of the people on the corner

Yellow and red Snap dragons
– stolen surreptitiously in 2nd grade on the way home from school
- so much guilt - stealing flowers is a crime against humanity
- so much joy - making the thing snap open and shut

Lily-of-the-Valley
- one of the best fragrances in all the world
- an ancient row in a flower bed no one could see adjacent to our cottage,
between our house and the neighbor's,
she of the penciled-in highly arched, scary looking, Jean Harlow eyebrows, a smoker, died and her cottage left untended for weeks - my dad finally started mowing her lawn and other upkeep on her yard
. . . but the flower strip was 18" deep and 12 feet long, packed full of the most fragrant flower in all the world. 

Woods near Seattle
Violets
– little ones in the forest

Blackberries – in flower not so interesting, but good to come back to.

Morel mushrooms
​– fungi but as beautiful as any flower

Wenatchee
Cherry Tree
​– blossoms of no particular interest, okay but no memorable smell.
Giant monster of a tree with five main limbs coming out of a huge base that had a crack down the side where it had been struck by lightning.
You could just shimmy your toes in the bottom of the crack and get a toe hold and then lunge up the tree to the first big limb.
Rest a moment and then climb up the main branch to a nest in the sky.
Read Nancy Drew and Judy Bolton (no more than one a day!) and in the right season, eat the best cherries of your life
​ . . . just reach up and pick ‘em.

Apple blossoms
– The whole town smelled good when the apple blossoms were in bloom.
Walking through clouds of pink.
The Apple Blossom Festival:
marching in the parade, first in fourth grade, as a pioneer,
then as a starling,
then a bug.
7th grade in drill team in a pink gingham dress your mom had to make
with no sleeves,
underneath you wore a white blouse with a collar,
black shoes.
White socks.
​White Gloves.

Lilacs
- So many on the bushes that Mom cut off huge bouquets, wrapped them in newspaper, and sent them to school with us. I gave Mrs. Vanderpool the wonderful smelling bunch and she actually liked something I did. That was a one-off. She put them in a giant vase and they brightened the room and smelled delicious.

Red poppies
- most interesting in fall - as dried out geometric rattles

Pansies
– my father planted them by the kitchen door. They did well and were lovely.

Nearby Wenatchee
Lupine

Sage brush – not a flower but a smell of the high plateau that I miss. Someday I plan to go back to the high plateau and smell the sage brush. Perhaps I'll even see a tumbleweed blowing down the road . . .

8/20/21
Yes, I am the kind of person who reads The New Yorker. And yes, I am the kind of person who keeps a big stack of aging New Yorkers trying to read all the dog-eared articles. This book review from April seemed promising - the quote from J.M. Coetzee . . . "'a deformed and stunted' society produces a deformed and stunted inner life" really resonated with me as it applies to my own country - deformed and stunted indeed, but with hope, I like to believe.

And then I got to the passage "first the mother dies, then the father, then one of their daughters, then their only son" and I stopped reading. I find I have no further interest in anything James Wood has to say.

It all rides on the insertion of the word "only" to describe their son. Why say "only son" and not just "son"? The meaning is the same - "only" is redundant. But oh what a powerful redundancy - as though the low value daughters are akin to a litter of kittens, but the son . . . oh the son is the inheritor of the family name, the family estate, the family heritage. And only one! What a tragedy.

But the daughters? Oh you know, just girls. That some number of daughters survived? Not important compared to the loss of the ONLY son.
​
​And that gives rise to another "only son":

Does the author compare the loss of the only son to the loss of the most famous martyr of all time? Well I won't be reading the rest of the book review so I'll never find out. The author weaves the narrative of male patriarchy into his text and it's not for me. Perhaps I'll read some bell hooks to soothe my wearied soul.

as8/17/21
Yesterday I saw the Van Gogh Exhibit in DC. 
I wish now I had taken pictures of the things that disturbed me about the exhibit . . . But I did get a few photographs of things I liked about it.

Overall, I highly recommend this show:

• There is an interesting set up of images of vases projected onto a large bias relief style vase. Comparing the vases was an amusing exercise, if a bit small potatoes.
• There is a model of The Bedroom that you can walk into. You can sit in there, have your picture taken. Wow factor is high on that piece.
• In that same section there is a deconstructed model of one of the Japanese paintings and a three dimensional construction of the lobby/entrance to the mental institution. Fascinating.
• The largest room is immersive in its own right. Some of it is not really about Van Gogh, but it is still interesting.
• ​The close look at all his self portraits is wonderful. His eyes are piercing and he's looking right at YOU. He's intimidating.
• The coloring room seems like it is for children, but that was also really enjoyable. Just do it.
• You have to pay extra to be a VIP - DO IT! You then get to do an additional 3D immersive experience at the end plus you then get a lanyard, a badge, and a poster, all with starry night decor. The 3D googles were hard to fit on and the whole thing made me car sick, but WOW was that an amazing trip. You start in Van Gogh's bedroom that he so famously painted, check out some buildings in the village, walk past a windmill, walk (glide really) through a wheat field and then a Pissarro-esque forest, then come into the village where the outdoor nightclub is there on your right and then down the street to the quay. So many paintings brought to life and you get to travel through them, looking all around. Are the mountains in the background authentic to Arles? I dunno.​

On the down side:

• One of the panels tells us the largest amounts of money ever paid for Van Gogh paintings. This elevation of the economic value of these objects - as though their worth is amplified because rich individuals and corporations speculate on the value of art - is beneath contempt. It has no place in an art gallery.
• Speculative theories are presented as fact and they denigrate the contribution of the artist. For example, with no further evidence that some modern eye doctor thinks he's proven it, Van Gogh's inventive mastery of color is chalked up to the "fact" that he was color blind. In other words, he didn't invent it! He was just a victim of color blindness. That really ticked me off. There is  zero contemporaneous fact offered to support this claim, although he was seen by numerous doctors, wrote thousands of letters discussing his life, and consulted with (hobnobbed?) scores of other artists.
• In another presentation, we hear the voice of someone claiming to have a profound understanding of the symbolism of Starry Night - in which the stars are the light of optimism and the village is the darkness of despair. The cyprus tree unites these two opposing forces - bridges the gap. Van Gogh's letters are quoted repetitively in the exhibit. There is NO evidence provided of any kind that Van Gogh intended his works to have symbolic content. Yes, we are all subject to Jung's collective unconscious - communication by symbols is the universal human condition. But to ascribe these thoughts relating to Van Gogh's mental illness is unsupported by fact and demeans the artist. It's just speculation that looks like click bait. Do we care about Sylvia Plath's work because she killed herself? Are we just prurient consumers of morbid lives?
• They made a big deal about Van Gogh's last painting, of roots, as somehow manifesting his depressed state, while ignoring other works that had a similar structure of bare wood and the unvarnished truth about nature, not prettified. I found it odd that the curators, who made a big deal about his suicide, did not bother to mention the counter-theories that he was shot by an unsettled teenager. If we are going to dig around in the mud - why not bring up the controversy about that? But no - it didn't fit in with the producers narrative that he was not a suicidal individual.
  
• The obsession about his mental illness and suicide seemed to be of a piece of the current obsession with the lives of famous people - someone kidnapped Lady Gaga's dogs - news at 11; Robert Downey Jr. got loaded and went and slept in a bed at the neighbor's house by mistake, now you can dislike him rather than appreciate his art. I admire these artists but knowing this level of information about their personal lives is degrading to all of us. Pitching Van Gogh as a color-blind suicidal nut-job - why is that needed? There is SO  MUCH to discuss about art without bringing that up. 
• Another element that I found missing was any discussion of Van Gogh's brush work. Their claim is that the reason Van Gogh is so well appreciated is his use of color. Au contraire! While his use of color is spectacular, his brush work, the amount of painting he used, the thickness of the paint, and the brush strokes themselves, unmediated as it were, are a huge element - an element I would argue that is more powerful than his use of color. I love his brush strokes of flowers . . . 
• ​Additionally, his vision of the way things look - the refraction of light around stars, the shape and nature of the clouds in some of the landscapes, the way wall paper pushes forward into the foreground, the difference in how a painting of irises looks close up and far away (abstract vs REAL - as though you are looking out a window at them) - there is SO MUCH MORE TO VAN GOGH than his use of color. How could the curators have neglected these aspects of the best painter of all time?

So I recommend that you go SEE THIS SHOW but bring your critical thinking with you. Are the opinions offered as facts actually supported by evidence? Do you appreciate Van Gogh's art because he was crazy? Or perhaps because some rich people have paid for a painting more than the gross domestic product than some of the world's poorest nations? Shun the anti-artist commentary and focus on the magnificence of Van Gogh's work.

8/3/21
Drove back to Baltimore from Fredericksburg, hauling a load of dishes and clothes and whatnot from one of the storage units. Mama Bear is cleared out and Papa Bear should be cleared out by next Tuesday. That leaves Baby Bear - all high value items - books and paintings. We're getting there . . . 

Driving through the construction of the new HOV toll road on 95 got on my nerves so much that I invented a new name for those lanes - the "Pig Lanes."

Virginia let a contract out to an out-of-state builder to install a toll road down the center of Highway 95. The charges for this one way road are astronomical - only wealthy people can afford to pay that rate on a regular basis.

So when traffic is stop and go all the way from Quantico to Fredericksburg, which it is frequently, the poor people can watch as the wealthy fly by in the Pig Lanes. The incredible expense of these special roads, with immense ramps and other structures and waste of lanes (two lanes going only one way at time where four lands could be fit) will NOT improve traffic flow. Far from it. What the Pig Lanes do is ensure that the rich people won't have to get in the slow traffic that regular people must suffer. 
​
The rest of the drive was much more pleasant, after we got past the Pig Lanes, and the slide show shows some of the views that intrigued me on the way home.
​

8/1/21
Yesterday, the elder of my two daughters and her amazing boyfriend rented a moving van and picked up all the furniture pieces from the "Papa Bear" storage unit that are too unwieldy to move in our cargo van. They drove them up from Fredericksburg to Baltimore and unloaded them all to the correct rooms and then dead-headed back to the U-Haul place near where they live. I am grateful to have such helpful relatives.

The pre-eminent piece was our bed. I slept in my own bed again last night, the first time since around mid-April, around 14 weeks. During those unhoused weeks, we did get to sleep in a bed sometimes: for the 2 1/2 weeks we mooched offa my sister-in-law and her husband, my brother, and the one night stay-overs every two weeks in "Base Camp" (a bedroom in my daughter's house), and those two days at the motel near Colonial Beach. So there were some breaks in the "get down on the floor to get into bed" routine . . . and the "bugs can crawl right over you with ease" torment . . . 

Sleeping in a bed is more than the nice mattress, the sheets, the room to move around, the closeness to your mate.
The getting in and out of the bed is so radically easier.
While I slept on an air mattress hoisting me 2 inches from the floor, I kept holding onto the idea that I was become more nimble every time I got out of bed at o-dark-thirty to go pee, having to position myself just so and then roll over onto my knees, which I positioned onto my soft furry slippers to keep from injuring my ancient knees (well one of them is really circa-2016, isn't it? All titanium and plastic, innit?), and then grabbing onto my excellent camping chair to get the leverage to stand up. I was getting more nimble, but I was also injuring my knees on a regular basis, making them ache. Being 70, I am trying to care for my creaking infrastructure and not do myself a mischief. A real bed helps that enterprise tremendously.

My heart goes out to all the people who are getting evicted at this very moment - some of the "15 million people in 6.5 million U.S. households" according to an article in Reuters today. (U.S. COVID-19 eviction ban expires, leaving renters at risk.) I have some sense of what they will be experiencing, if they are unlucky enough to have no relatives to mooch offa but lucky enough to have camping equipment.

​I'm counting my blessings.

July 23, 2021
Since the start of the year, in concert with my team mate, partner, love of my life, husband, I have packed up my entire house into three storage units, moved to a bedroom in my daughter's house from where I launched 6 weeks of the worst camping in my life, and discovered that camping under these circumstances is just a nice name for being homeless. I had a van crammed full of everything that would fit but rarely found the energy to use any of the work, art, and magic tools that I brought.
It was a soul sucking experience with ticks.

Then I started searching for a place to live full time, while camping. It is very difficult to find a new home when you are not able to GO to the places to meet with tentative landlords or property managers. And when we did go to look at a place, we had to leave all kinds of valuable things unsupervised in our campsite for hours. We did our best to secure the most precious things (Mike's computer and other work tools being foremost) but it would have been a devastating blow if someone had looted our campsite.

Then I started mooching off my brother and his wife - it took three weeks to find and lease our new home here in Baltimore, 20 minutes from where my brother and his wonderful wife live.

Now I'm unpacking three storage units worth of stuff from a large home with a shed into a two bedroom basement apartment. Many things must go. I need to stop paying to store things that don't fit in my home.

So I've been busy non-stop since the start of 2021, except for that wonderful brief hiatus for my 70th birthday - when my eldest daughter took me to The Magic Kingdom in Disney World.

• I love mail delivery.
• I love being housed.
• I love air conditioning.
• I love having hot running water.
• I love having ice that doesn't melt.
• I love having electricity whenever I want it.
• I love having a full sized refrigerator with a big freezer.
• I love never having rain water seep into my kitchen and form large pools of water that I must stand in to cook.
• I love that Mike doesn't have to haul in water, wash dishes in the rain, go out on ice and potty disposal chores.
• I love being able to use my computer whenever I want, without feeling guilty about stealing the electricity that Mike needs to do his job.
• ​I love that I can have a house plant. I hope to get the house plants my daughter is caring for soon. I wonder how Violet is doing with her new mother. 
• I love a hot shower with strong water pressure with no strangers nearby, no mosquito attacks, no calibration of how to get dressed without getting my clothes wet on an unclean floor. I love that my shampoo just sits on a shelf in the shower and does not need to hauled to and from the shower every time I want to wash my hair. It's just THERE!
• I still like my camping dishes and continue to use them but I love having access to all my best utensils that didn't make the cut, that didn't get to come camping with me. I never planned to have boiled pasta while camping . . . so I didn't need the pasta serving tool. Garlic press. Pizza wheel. Knives in a wooden block holder (a lovely gift from my brother) instead of in a bag in a tub, confusing to locate amongst the other bags in the tub.
• I love being housed.

Life is good.
Dr. P-J