The Second Shot Heard Around the World - Part 2
Monica King
October 14, 2005
There is a lethality in the vow “until death do us part”.
A low voltage, low vibration hissing rattle that comes with that vow. But women are from Venus, men are from Mars. At least one popular psychologist told us from the front of his best selling pop psychology book cover.
Certainly the last quarter century of walking on this planet earth had showed me there ARE real differences in the way men & women think, based on biology.
Psalm 23:1-5
The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not be in want. He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters, he restores my soul. He guides me in paths of righteousness for his name's sake. Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me. You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.
Life in a body IS inherently dangerous.
The psalmist knew that. It is what emerges in a world of light & shadow. Risk takers are adventurers, cheating death over & over again. Or not.
When I graduated from Simmons back in 1977, our nation was in the midst of fulminating change. We were nurses being taught to nurse by veteran women healers who ministered to the sick at their bedsides. Not only were our professors smart, they were wise.
We attended our classes in the era when Our Bodies Ourselves was first published. Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, & other feminists were encouraging us to “take back the night”, burn our bras, streak through the cities, flaunt the norm of what the feminine role was we had inherited by the 50s generation coming of age. The experimental drug culture, the anti-Vietnam protests, these were our cultural milestones then. Encounter groups, raising consciousness groups all coalesced in a time when we were questioning our functions relating to our biology.
The whole notion of equal pay for equal work was a burning issue of our professors. It was a time when research had paved the way for a liberation from the inherent function our wombs have in contrast to the mighty phallus. The first time when the masses were truly liberated from the inherent tension built-in to the insurance of the making of a next generation.
A man searches for a woman like a guided cruise missile seeks a heat-radiating target. For the x & y chromosomes carried by hundreds of thousands of little polywog-like swimmers on a marathon race to penetrate a mother egg with a highly selective semi-permeable membrane. To join with her x. As in all Olympic athletic competitions, only one of those competitors, to initiate new life, would seek conquer & prevail. Once that victor penetrated the fortress of the egg’s outer covering, the mysterious magic would begin anew in a microcosmic world that reflected the same course of regeneration in our outer world, again & again & again, worlds without end.
On a cultural level, the prelude, the trance dance that precedes this mighty microscopic cellular competition is called “courtship”. It is an ancient rite. It is played out in every sentient species where a “maleness” & “femaleness” can be seen. In winged creatures & rodents alike, the same ancient dance is the opening act of the drama of procreation.
And it is a trance dance. Mediated by powerful organic chemicals Nature engineered. HORMONES.
The subtle, oozing biochemical liquids that, in a complex & carefully concerted mix administers within the body those characteristics which make us look predominantly male or female. And which also roll off of our male & female bodies into the air we breath, subtly rolling into our noses, where the most ancient & primal sense of all, our sense of smell, triggers the trance & the dance we call “attraction”. This dance, this mating ritual, has been the source of creation myths & sacred writings for as long as we have depicted our stories on cave walls to word processors. We have evolved along these pathways over thousands & thousands of years.
In our generation, in my coming of age, our “higher centers of thought”, our cerebral hemispheres were also awakening, processing increasingly more complex thought pathways. Critical thinking. Philosophy, mathematics, music, art, architecture, We developed more technology to peer into the vast intergalactic world of intercellular space & discovered there are universes within universes of dancing, moving gyrating light & wave forms. We are the manifestation of the stuff of thought & imagination. Answering the bigger questions we all eventually ask ourselves & each other...why are we here? How did we get here? And where are we headed?
In our time a massive shift of paradigm was already in motion. My generation knew we were not “slaves” to simply our inherent biological urges. We questioned what led us down the aisle, to stand before an officiant of some Higher Authority who would sanctify the potential fusion of the new life that is the possibility when pheromones start rolling & being exchanged between sets of male & female nostrils.
The aisle that led to a dewy-eyed bride, fully charged with the pink haze of romantic trickery hormones mediate in the sub-cellular soup that our bodies contain, to gaze romantically at her protector & progenitor; her prince who would be king in their shared castle. The mesmerizing, visceral draw of magnetism that either attracts or repels two souls, two separate worlds of genetic possibilities to come together in an officially sanctified way to vow a fidelity to the union. Before the community where that dance began.
She believes with all her heart her trust is being well placed. Her female brain has scanned this prince thoroughly, seeking the qualities she will need in him of ability to provide for her when she settles into a nest to bring forth their recombinant DNA experiment together. And to raise this new youngster to maturity.
He, on the other side of the aisle, gazes at her as a conquest. After all, this is the most sought after prize of a highly competitive race. He too, has done his primal thing. He has scanned thousands of potential incubators for the next body he would deposit his share of the gene pool in. He is looking & practicing, his is all outward thrust, adventurer & striver.
The holy grail in his mind is the perfect receptacle for all those swimmers. The ONE who looks like she is built to bear his fruit. Has the skills to build a nest. Is attractive enough to be yin to his yang. Mysterious. Warm, moist, & trustworthy enough to be able to be a trusted ear to his deepest, darkest secrets, hopes & fears. Sturdy enough, strong enough to ward off enemies who would potentially attack the nest while his offspring are little & vulnerable. Bountiful enough, skilled enough to nourish both herself & her unborn & newborn infant. Wise enough to pass on through her teaching, all the skills the youngster needs to navigate the increasingly complex environment they are in.
Yet because his role in the procreative dance is so relatively brief & climactic, he has this ultimate freedom of time, & mobility to seek, to aim, to fire, seeing that his target has been hit, & then leave. It is the stuff of all high drama. It is high stakes gambling for both parties. Because it is the competition of competitions, it is a life & death high stakes marathon. He will kill off other competitors. He will stalk, chase pursue. He will conquer.
Perhaps these ancient, genetically encoded rites & rituals, built right in to the double spiral of our DNA codes, are the hormonal stimulants of these outward rituals which include these incredible vows made to each other; to remain together, “’til death do us part”. Perhaps this is why, at last, in the onward & relentless march of linear time as we know it, such vows have brought us to this time of times.
Prophetic voices from all over our planet have foreseen this great juncture in evolution.
There certainly has never been a time before when our entire globe was literally interconnected with a web of technology which provides eyes in the skies to scan every inch of our mother ship before. Nor a time when these primal functions of our biology could be overridden or overwritten. We know longer needed to be living with an automatic programming. The manual feminine hand could take charge of our free will at last, so that we could write our own destinies, with our OWN words, in our own power. Not censored, not shackled, not enslaved. In a Different Voice, as Carol Gilligan articulated at that time. We were free to read the sacred texts of science & religion OURSELVES, without these truths being mediated, edited, & transmitted through a “higher authority” from either church or laboratory.
We had stormed the citadels of the Ivory Towers to see for ourselves, & as we flowed in, to process through our own female brains, data, knowledge, clues to our existence we had only been hand fed before through patriarchal authorities who invented these places where the highest knowledge, the most esoteric & secret powers of the universe had been gathered, catalogued & collected as archives to pass on to our posterity.
With this generation, women en masse could LIVE the liberation of their inherent & ancient biological imperatives. To be the receiver. To be the living temple for unborn potential in the next generation. In my coming of age, we did NOT have to pattern our lives as our mothers did, going on to higher education as they did with the primary purpose of placing ourselves in happier hunting grounds, or ground our parents considered suitable for this dance of dances to enact itself once more. We did not go to college to “get a man”.
We went to be able to support ourselves independently. To invade the bastions of male privilege, to claim the strutting liberating freedom a man knows inherently. Never, ever, not once concerned he will need to “sacrifice” the impulse of higher learning, adventuring & intellectual adventures in favor of being the stay-at-home parent. Sacrificing the satisfactions derived from glories earned for magnificent outward achievements, trophies won, awards given, letters after names to indicate, “Hey look at my peacock feathers, now ain’t I something!?” We too, could now override that biological urge, that innate time clock mediated by circadian rhythms, eternally rounded, spiraling us onto the next plateau of the onward thrust of evolutionary energy.
The bride shines with the light of her attractiveness on her wedding day. She shines with her inner radiance & beauty, made outward in her bridal garments of white symbolizing her purity, her untainted-ness from the ravages of another conqueror. She is the groom’s prize, the object of his quest for his personal holy grail.
The ideal virgin, pure as the driven snow. She is an object of attractiveness. Most highly sought after. She is not another grade of woman, one he has no respect for, one he simply uses for his “lower animal urges”. She is no whore.
She is his Madonna. He has, at least at this stage of the drama, foresworn his endless & primal urge to deposit his swimmers in these lesser vessels. That is the deal that is struck at that altar. Stop striving & philandering. Bridal those lower animal passions. Pledge your truest devotion, your highest aspirations & achievements to ME, & I will give you rest, comfort, solace, & shelter from the storms. A place of retreat from the battles & the wars for territorial conquest of property, lands, real material goods & services & servants. Don’t let the little head take charge of the big head. Yes we know this requires discipline. These urges, when properly focused can be put to better uses. In service of stability, home building, child-rearing, provision of what is needed.
Stop seeing these whores, these sluts you have no respect for in the Ultimate picture. These sperm banks. Human receptacles for his life fluid which must never, ever be spilled needlessly on the plain & mundane earth. According to “higher authority”. No these simple biologically driven urges & acts have been amplified over time to become associated with “sin”. Terrible, shameful acts, worthy of damnation & hell.
And as enlightened as our generation has become, we still carry, nestled in our middle & primitive brain stems, the old voices of those terrifying patriarchal commands. The whole conceptual framework of good & evil, right & wrong, lives in our quiet subconscious microscopic codes. In our blood & tissues & organs everywhere in our body human. Both male & female voices, histories of the past.
Coming through a long era of male-voiced dominance, we burst into the light of hearing how the Feminine voice sees her universe. It is not like waking up to sunshine streaming in the window. It is instead, a gradual waxing & waning of inner light, of the inner gnosis which is born in the night of the soul, searching for answers to the scariest fears & doubts. Menstrual, blood wisdom. So hidden & repressed, the mere mention of it brings fear to eyes who have known being burned at the stake in other lifetimes for knowing the power of it, & exercising this.
Witchy, magical earth-based spirituality. Paganism. Taboo. Ecstatic & forbidden sensual delight in the dance of the flesh. Woman wisdom that was painted as the knowledge of the devil & demonized, with draconian punitive consequences for exercising it in any way not in service to the male-created hierarchy of power over, rather than the communal, collaborative wisdom of women that survive themselves & their children into era after era characterized by warring.
Battling over territories, how maps are drawn, places on the earth carved up, scents of male urine laid down in sprays of pheromone laden golden streams to say; this is MY woman, this is MY clan, this is MY hunting ground.
It is these deep wells of ancient essence, our own unique vibratory codes, as unique as each snow flake in each new winter season, that gradually arise to our higher centers of intellect & inspiration. We are reacquainted with these voices in dreams, in images, which flash like a movie across our imagination, in the whiff of a scent that awakens an ancient longing & deep gnosis.
The Beauty & the Beast So there we stand at the altar.
She fantasizing of living “happily ever after“.
He thinking, I have won. I AM the man! The baddest of the bad. I GOT her!
The end always justifies the means in this ancient dance. Hormonally driven behavior has no “conscience“.
Conscience is a function of higher mind. Yet women are from Venus & men are from Mars. The planet associated with love & romance, pink & flowers, scents to lure the warlord home.
All of this evolutionary growth, which is the ONE universal constant, encompassed in an ever-expanding universe, within a universe, within a universe, on & on into infinity.
Change IS the only constant. This is a TRUE universal law.
Daniel was a competitor. He won the chase for a trip down the aisle to the place before a civil officiant to witness this vow; to love, to honor “until death do us part”.
I, in a pragmatic compromise with myself & my own inner intuition, which felt, & heard the rattle of the serpent in those vows, turned a blind eye. I capitulated. I caved. I agreed to take that near fatal trip to that ceremony. It nearly cost me my life.
Survival is only the first step. But is key to those who inherit the kingdom. To the victor go the spoils.
Keep checking back...Part 3 coming soon
A low voltage, low vibration hissing rattle that comes with that vow. But women are from Venus, men are from Mars. At least one popular psychologist told us from the front of his best selling pop psychology book cover.
Certainly the last quarter century of walking on this planet earth had showed me there ARE real differences in the way men & women think, based on biology.
Psalm 23:1-5
The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not be in want. He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters, he restores my soul. He guides me in paths of righteousness for his name's sake. Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me. You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.
Life in a body IS inherently dangerous.
The psalmist knew that. It is what emerges in a world of light & shadow. Risk takers are adventurers, cheating death over & over again. Or not.
When I graduated from Simmons back in 1977, our nation was in the midst of fulminating change. We were nurses being taught to nurse by veteran women healers who ministered to the sick at their bedsides. Not only were our professors smart, they were wise.
We attended our classes in the era when Our Bodies Ourselves was first published. Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, & other feminists were encouraging us to “take back the night”, burn our bras, streak through the cities, flaunt the norm of what the feminine role was we had inherited by the 50s generation coming of age. The experimental drug culture, the anti-Vietnam protests, these were our cultural milestones then. Encounter groups, raising consciousness groups all coalesced in a time when we were questioning our functions relating to our biology.
The whole notion of equal pay for equal work was a burning issue of our professors. It was a time when research had paved the way for a liberation from the inherent function our wombs have in contrast to the mighty phallus. The first time when the masses were truly liberated from the inherent tension built-in to the insurance of the making of a next generation.
A man searches for a woman like a guided cruise missile seeks a heat-radiating target. For the x & y chromosomes carried by hundreds of thousands of little polywog-like swimmers on a marathon race to penetrate a mother egg with a highly selective semi-permeable membrane. To join with her x. As in all Olympic athletic competitions, only one of those competitors, to initiate new life, would seek conquer & prevail. Once that victor penetrated the fortress of the egg’s outer covering, the mysterious magic would begin anew in a microcosmic world that reflected the same course of regeneration in our outer world, again & again & again, worlds without end.
On a cultural level, the prelude, the trance dance that precedes this mighty microscopic cellular competition is called “courtship”. It is an ancient rite. It is played out in every sentient species where a “maleness” & “femaleness” can be seen. In winged creatures & rodents alike, the same ancient dance is the opening act of the drama of procreation.
And it is a trance dance. Mediated by powerful organic chemicals Nature engineered. HORMONES.
The subtle, oozing biochemical liquids that, in a complex & carefully concerted mix administers within the body those characteristics which make us look predominantly male or female. And which also roll off of our male & female bodies into the air we breath, subtly rolling into our noses, where the most ancient & primal sense of all, our sense of smell, triggers the trance & the dance we call “attraction”. This dance, this mating ritual, has been the source of creation myths & sacred writings for as long as we have depicted our stories on cave walls to word processors. We have evolved along these pathways over thousands & thousands of years.
In our generation, in my coming of age, our “higher centers of thought”, our cerebral hemispheres were also awakening, processing increasingly more complex thought pathways. Critical thinking. Philosophy, mathematics, music, art, architecture, We developed more technology to peer into the vast intergalactic world of intercellular space & discovered there are universes within universes of dancing, moving gyrating light & wave forms. We are the manifestation of the stuff of thought & imagination. Answering the bigger questions we all eventually ask ourselves & each other...why are we here? How did we get here? And where are we headed?
In our time a massive shift of paradigm was already in motion. My generation knew we were not “slaves” to simply our inherent biological urges. We questioned what led us down the aisle, to stand before an officiant of some Higher Authority who would sanctify the potential fusion of the new life that is the possibility when pheromones start rolling & being exchanged between sets of male & female nostrils.
The aisle that led to a dewy-eyed bride, fully charged with the pink haze of romantic trickery hormones mediate in the sub-cellular soup that our bodies contain, to gaze romantically at her protector & progenitor; her prince who would be king in their shared castle. The mesmerizing, visceral draw of magnetism that either attracts or repels two souls, two separate worlds of genetic possibilities to come together in an officially sanctified way to vow a fidelity to the union. Before the community where that dance began.
She believes with all her heart her trust is being well placed. Her female brain has scanned this prince thoroughly, seeking the qualities she will need in him of ability to provide for her when she settles into a nest to bring forth their recombinant DNA experiment together. And to raise this new youngster to maturity.
He, on the other side of the aisle, gazes at her as a conquest. After all, this is the most sought after prize of a highly competitive race. He too, has done his primal thing. He has scanned thousands of potential incubators for the next body he would deposit his share of the gene pool in. He is looking & practicing, his is all outward thrust, adventurer & striver.
The holy grail in his mind is the perfect receptacle for all those swimmers. The ONE who looks like she is built to bear his fruit. Has the skills to build a nest. Is attractive enough to be yin to his yang. Mysterious. Warm, moist, & trustworthy enough to be able to be a trusted ear to his deepest, darkest secrets, hopes & fears. Sturdy enough, strong enough to ward off enemies who would potentially attack the nest while his offspring are little & vulnerable. Bountiful enough, skilled enough to nourish both herself & her unborn & newborn infant. Wise enough to pass on through her teaching, all the skills the youngster needs to navigate the increasingly complex environment they are in.
Yet because his role in the procreative dance is so relatively brief & climactic, he has this ultimate freedom of time, & mobility to seek, to aim, to fire, seeing that his target has been hit, & then leave. It is the stuff of all high drama. It is high stakes gambling for both parties. Because it is the competition of competitions, it is a life & death high stakes marathon. He will kill off other competitors. He will stalk, chase pursue. He will conquer.
Perhaps these ancient, genetically encoded rites & rituals, built right in to the double spiral of our DNA codes, are the hormonal stimulants of these outward rituals which include these incredible vows made to each other; to remain together, “’til death do us part”. Perhaps this is why, at last, in the onward & relentless march of linear time as we know it, such vows have brought us to this time of times.
Prophetic voices from all over our planet have foreseen this great juncture in evolution.
There certainly has never been a time before when our entire globe was literally interconnected with a web of technology which provides eyes in the skies to scan every inch of our mother ship before. Nor a time when these primal functions of our biology could be overridden or overwritten. We know longer needed to be living with an automatic programming. The manual feminine hand could take charge of our free will at last, so that we could write our own destinies, with our OWN words, in our own power. Not censored, not shackled, not enslaved. In a Different Voice, as Carol Gilligan articulated at that time. We were free to read the sacred texts of science & religion OURSELVES, without these truths being mediated, edited, & transmitted through a “higher authority” from either church or laboratory.
We had stormed the citadels of the Ivory Towers to see for ourselves, & as we flowed in, to process through our own female brains, data, knowledge, clues to our existence we had only been hand fed before through patriarchal authorities who invented these places where the highest knowledge, the most esoteric & secret powers of the universe had been gathered, catalogued & collected as archives to pass on to our posterity.
With this generation, women en masse could LIVE the liberation of their inherent & ancient biological imperatives. To be the receiver. To be the living temple for unborn potential in the next generation. In my coming of age, we did NOT have to pattern our lives as our mothers did, going on to higher education as they did with the primary purpose of placing ourselves in happier hunting grounds, or ground our parents considered suitable for this dance of dances to enact itself once more. We did not go to college to “get a man”.
We went to be able to support ourselves independently. To invade the bastions of male privilege, to claim the strutting liberating freedom a man knows inherently. Never, ever, not once concerned he will need to “sacrifice” the impulse of higher learning, adventuring & intellectual adventures in favor of being the stay-at-home parent. Sacrificing the satisfactions derived from glories earned for magnificent outward achievements, trophies won, awards given, letters after names to indicate, “Hey look at my peacock feathers, now ain’t I something!?” We too, could now override that biological urge, that innate time clock mediated by circadian rhythms, eternally rounded, spiraling us onto the next plateau of the onward thrust of evolutionary energy.
The bride shines with the light of her attractiveness on her wedding day. She shines with her inner radiance & beauty, made outward in her bridal garments of white symbolizing her purity, her untainted-ness from the ravages of another conqueror. She is the groom’s prize, the object of his quest for his personal holy grail.
The ideal virgin, pure as the driven snow. She is an object of attractiveness. Most highly sought after. She is not another grade of woman, one he has no respect for, one he simply uses for his “lower animal urges”. She is no whore.
She is his Madonna. He has, at least at this stage of the drama, foresworn his endless & primal urge to deposit his swimmers in these lesser vessels. That is the deal that is struck at that altar. Stop striving & philandering. Bridal those lower animal passions. Pledge your truest devotion, your highest aspirations & achievements to ME, & I will give you rest, comfort, solace, & shelter from the storms. A place of retreat from the battles & the wars for territorial conquest of property, lands, real material goods & services & servants. Don’t let the little head take charge of the big head. Yes we know this requires discipline. These urges, when properly focused can be put to better uses. In service of stability, home building, child-rearing, provision of what is needed.
Stop seeing these whores, these sluts you have no respect for in the Ultimate picture. These sperm banks. Human receptacles for his life fluid which must never, ever be spilled needlessly on the plain & mundane earth. According to “higher authority”. No these simple biologically driven urges & acts have been amplified over time to become associated with “sin”. Terrible, shameful acts, worthy of damnation & hell.
And as enlightened as our generation has become, we still carry, nestled in our middle & primitive brain stems, the old voices of those terrifying patriarchal commands. The whole conceptual framework of good & evil, right & wrong, lives in our quiet subconscious microscopic codes. In our blood & tissues & organs everywhere in our body human. Both male & female voices, histories of the past.
Coming through a long era of male-voiced dominance, we burst into the light of hearing how the Feminine voice sees her universe. It is not like waking up to sunshine streaming in the window. It is instead, a gradual waxing & waning of inner light, of the inner gnosis which is born in the night of the soul, searching for answers to the scariest fears & doubts. Menstrual, blood wisdom. So hidden & repressed, the mere mention of it brings fear to eyes who have known being burned at the stake in other lifetimes for knowing the power of it, & exercising this.
Witchy, magical earth-based spirituality. Paganism. Taboo. Ecstatic & forbidden sensual delight in the dance of the flesh. Woman wisdom that was painted as the knowledge of the devil & demonized, with draconian punitive consequences for exercising it in any way not in service to the male-created hierarchy of power over, rather than the communal, collaborative wisdom of women that survive themselves & their children into era after era characterized by warring.
Battling over territories, how maps are drawn, places on the earth carved up, scents of male urine laid down in sprays of pheromone laden golden streams to say; this is MY woman, this is MY clan, this is MY hunting ground.
It is these deep wells of ancient essence, our own unique vibratory codes, as unique as each snow flake in each new winter season, that gradually arise to our higher centers of intellect & inspiration. We are reacquainted with these voices in dreams, in images, which flash like a movie across our imagination, in the whiff of a scent that awakens an ancient longing & deep gnosis.
The Beauty & the Beast So there we stand at the altar.
She fantasizing of living “happily ever after“.
He thinking, I have won. I AM the man! The baddest of the bad. I GOT her!
The end always justifies the means in this ancient dance. Hormonally driven behavior has no “conscience“.
Conscience is a function of higher mind. Yet women are from Venus & men are from Mars. The planet associated with love & romance, pink & flowers, scents to lure the warlord home.
All of this evolutionary growth, which is the ONE universal constant, encompassed in an ever-expanding universe, within a universe, within a universe, on & on into infinity.
Change IS the only constant. This is a TRUE universal law.
Daniel was a competitor. He won the chase for a trip down the aisle to the place before a civil officiant to witness this vow; to love, to honor “until death do us part”.
I, in a pragmatic compromise with myself & my own inner intuition, which felt, & heard the rattle of the serpent in those vows, turned a blind eye. I capitulated. I caved. I agreed to take that near fatal trip to that ceremony. It nearly cost me my life.
Survival is only the first step. But is key to those who inherit the kingdom. To the victor go the spoils.
Keep checking back...Part 3 coming soon
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