Large Fierce Mammal

Today’s Dark Sentiment is about a very real curse that stalks our girl children, our wives, our mothers – in fact every woman. It entwines them in its evil tendrils and draws its nourishment from them by draining their sense of self-worth, forcing them to suppress their intellectual and creative spirit, and filling their hearts with the particularly vile belief that their chance of finding love and happiness is proportional to how closely they conform to an ideal of beauty that will be forever held just out of reach to keep them striving – and paying – to attain it. Today I want to dig up the roots of the filthy, lying, parasitic thing and sprinkle on a little LFM herbicide.

In the eyes of Nature men and women are not equal. They are essential and complimentary versions of Human, each constructed with the differences necessary to accomplish Nature’s goals within Her scheme of things. This necessitates the visible sexual differences, called primary sexual characteristics, that we all know and love, as well as certain invisible but just as important ones that are chemical, i. e., hormonal in nature. Also one produces the eggs, the other the sperm, and if you’re not sure which is which, ask the person sitting next to you because they generally know. Nothing else really matters for the purpose of this discussion, so I’ll keep it simple and stick with those.

Beyond that, and in accordance with Her tendency to keep things simple by avoiding solving the same problem twice using two different methods in a single organism, Nature simply duplicated what didn’t need changing between the male and female of the species. One of the things she had no reason to fiddle with was the brain. While history right up to the present day is fraught with myths of one sex being somehow intellectually superior to the other, there really is no reason why that would be an evolutionary necessity. Any society that fails to recognize and embrace the power of an entire sex is ultimately doomed to limp along like a six cylinder car with three dead spark plugs, two flat tires, and a lobotomized driver, and it’s the power of women that almost universally gets devalued for the basest of reasons.

I’m going to set aside bullshit based cultures that will flog a woman for daring to drive a car, or burn her to death for having the temerity to become literate, and focus instead a little closer to home. Real close actually.

Here in North America, of which Nova Scotia is a part, boys and girls attend school together and, unless their parents choose to send them to a private boys’ or girls’ school, they are not segregated. Along the way, through means subtle and otherwise, girls start hitting speed bumps that boys are rarely even aware of. I’m not saying boys don’t meet their own special challenges on the road to manhood, of course they do, but theirs are far less insidious than those stalking their female counterparts.

When was the last time you heard someone warn their son that he needed to rein in his intellect because girls don’t date smart boys? How about a perfectly normal looking adolescent boy regularly weighing himself and freaking over his seemingly inexorable weight gain? These are only two of the issues regularly encountered by girls, and they often continue to haunt them throughout their lives.

There are women who give up and either surrender themselves to living a life of desperate misery, or choose to end it altogether. Still others stay on the treadmill and conform so they can at least get what limited sense of accomplishment and happiness the evil monkey on their back says they will be permitted to keep. Some of those stand up straight, put on a bitch mask, and rant on the treadmill about how men are the cause of it all, but that’s just the monkey talking.

All is not lost because there are some, a very few I will admit, who have met the abomination of which I speak, felt its sting, undeniably wear its scars, but nevertheless came to adulthood as women of such phenomenal power that they exist on a level where it can no longer reach them and its frustrated screams are a distant, albeit still audible, echo.

The power of these women has nothing to do with how much money they have, what artificially bestowed rank they hold, or who they know. I am speaking of that most fundamental power which comes of knowing your talents and limitations without feeling the need to have others explain them to you. Trusting your own judgement so you can commit to a course of action with resolute self-assurance, while casting a look of disdain on those pretenders who must perpetually keep one foot behind the safety line. Having the ability to be assertive with a firm handshake and solid, unwavering eye contact. Knowing when to stand your ground and when to concede. Knowing the difference between making an enemy and recognizing one. When it’s time to build or burn a bridge, and most importantly, when it’s time to blow it up with the other motherfucker on it. Knowing the difference between conceit and the fact that a person, group, or situation isn’t worthy of your time. When to exploit the weakness of one who thinks they are dealing with someone who is “only a woman”, and when to play sexual attraction to advantage – a stratagem I admire, having used it myself more than once.

I speak with certainty that such singular women exist because I have personally met a very few, and married one of them. It’s of her I will now speak, giving a few examples from her own experience at the hands of the curse.

Mrs. LFM on her first day of school.

Born in Poland in 1982, Mrs. LFM and her family came to Canada by way of a year in Italy, arriving in Halifax, Nova Scotia on 8 October 1986. Not long after, she entered the Nova Scotia school system speaking only Polish and Italian.

In 2000 she graduated with honours from Bridgewater High School, top of her class, with a $20,000.00 scholarship to Dalhousie University, and had won the $8,000.00 Michelin bursary for scholastic excellence. By that point she had lost the Italian, but was fluent in English (with no detectable accent of any kind), Polish of course, and French. All this she accomplished in the face of obstacles that would have tanked most adults, let alone a teen aged girl.

From the age of 5 and lasting until she was 10, Mrs. LFM suffered from asthma to a degree of severity as to require regular hospitalization and, not surprisingly, had an impact on her school attendance. At the age of 11, her father Ryszard required a liver transplant which took place in Halifax, creating an emotional, financial, and logistical burden on her family that necessitated further time away from school. When she was 14 she developed mysterious life threatening personal health issues of her own that again took her out of school for lengthy periods, and often left her believing that she would not live to be an adult. At 18, an antibiotic prescribed to treat a persistent lung infection left her – a young woman who excelled at mathematics and logical thinking – terrorized with inexplicable memory loss, cognitive impairment, and overall physical weakness so severe that she required a cane to walk.  Fortunately, she made a complete recovery when the cause was realized, but it took two months from start to finish, and I have no words for the emotional weight she must have carried during that time.

Graduation news coverage.

My Wife is, in every sense of the word, brilliant, as well as beautiful inside and out by every definition imaginable. While she would never have believed it at the time, and while I know she had family to support her, and was further supported by some exceptional teachers who understood her plight and permitted her to make up for lost time without ever giving her a free ride out of sympathy, in the end it was her own power and intention to achieve that carried her through and made her the woman she is today.

Jack Black is in a band called Tenacious D. My wife should sue him for breach of trademark because she is, without a doubt, the original, accept no substitutes, title holder to that name.

Mrs. LFM has given me her permission to reveal this litany of misery on the road to a happy ending so I could use it as a shining example of the point I came to make tonight. As exceptional as she was, and is; in her teens – in the midst of everything I’ve mentioned – Mrs. LFM had all the self-doubts and body issues that regrettably afflict most young women.

Mrs. LFM on the right with her sister Dorothy who is being a shite. This was taken the year before the date of infamy. Notice all the obesity. Click to enlarge, and if you get enlarged looking at pictures of my wife when she was 12 I'm coming for you.

She was physically active. She walked, biked, hiked, swam, and ran. Every summer her family made a camping pilgrimage to Kejimkujik National Park where she continued with more of the same for weeks at a time. By the time she was a teenager she had built a foundation of muscle that gave her the well sculpted calves and thighs I admire today, even as they go right on up to make a glorious ass of themselves.

Mrs. LFM at 13. Do another detailed examination of all that obesity. Click the picture for a better view, but remember what I told ya.

If children don’t adopt an active lifestyle early, they will be seriously, and more than likely irretrievably, behind the 8 ball when it comes to developing the basic musculature and tone that is at the heart of physical fitness. Mrs. LFM was doing all this, uncoached, using the same methods all kids used when I was among them. And still, her gym “teacher” persistently ignored all that in favour of seeing her lack of interest in team sports – an aversion I share to the point where loathing doesn’t come close to describing it – as a problem.

And then one day in 1995, that same gym “teacher” committed what is, to my mind, a crime so heinously unforgivable that if it happened to my daughter I would be aggressively and persistently pursuing career changing consequences that wouldn’t end until I achieved satisfaction.

When Mrs. LFM was the ripe and tender age of 13, this person had her class perform a misguided exercise that involved weighing, measuring, and then squeezed the results through the infernal sieve of stupidity that is the “Body Mass Index” or BMI. Results in hand, and completely ignoring all the impinging lifestyle factors that an actual professional who is genuinely interested in cultivating the fitness of her students would reasonably be expected to take into account, this person looked at her young, impressionable, well muscled and exceptionally toned student and said, “Diana, you’re obese.”

I regret to say that the “teacher” involved has procreated, and you will all be happy to the point of giddiness to learn that she is still plying her trade to the best of her ability, teaching grade 7 mathematics. A dark sentiment indeed.