Inspired by Lynn's writing on The Role of the Feminine.

By Lili Hun

This single clause sparked a flood of thoughts in me.

First, whether you like being at the mercy of your husband all depends on your husband's treatment of you as well as on his character and values. And of course, yours weigh in as well. Though I fail to understand the mismatches of the shrew with the nice guy or of the good woman and conscientious mother who gets the womanizing asshole. Archetypes, of course. Present company excluded. The mercy of some husbands is better others. Some don't even know what the word means.

A married woman once told me that duration of a marriage is also dependent on luck. I've never forgotten this, because she of all people seemed to prove otherwise by her marriage. Once a truck somehow toppled onto part of her car (I didn't ask for physical details, because it was a painful subject.). Her car caught fire with her two sons and her in the vehicle. Serious, extensive burns, including on the face. At some point in their healing, her husband took care of them at home, stretching out their tightening limbs as the skin advanced in the healing process. Her husband obviously deserves all the love she can heap on him. And her statement about luck in the face of that story left me sobered.

Next, we're always at the mercy of something or someone, all of us, male and female, though clearly much more so as a woman. I began to think about this culture as something that I was at the mercy of quite young. When I first arrived in this country, I was just under six. I had the jaw dropping experience of seeing my first black person. I was tugging at my father's sleeve, and he was trying to hush my little voice. Then came the little black schoolmates, often unpleasant, tormenting. An occasional black friend here and there, but I caught onto the n-word and used it in my frustration when being verbally mistreated at six. My father's disappointment (he became a protestant minister eventually)... I stopped using it, but I never got used to the culture (used loosely). There was a fist fight after school in third, fourth, and fifth grades with black kids only—two girls and one boy (scary, he was big). I hunnishly (meaning like a Hungarian, a made-up word by James which applies well to describe my rebellion but first used to describe my attitude when I'm driving in Dindu traffic) refused to swallow their crap. The structure of school. The tyranny of some teachers. The old world imposition at home, and the conflicting new world outside: pleasant yet rude with respites from rudeness, but still unnavigable and alienating.

For eighth grade, I traveled back to that part of the world to relearn my father tongue which we had stopped using to avoid being discovered while we were escaping to the free part of Europe. I felt culture shock both going in and coming back. Which was home? The coming back part, I never recovered from. I have two cultural halves which do not make a comfortable whole.

Then there was the relative emotional distance of my mother, the English speaker, who came from a blue-collar Jewish home in the Bronx, whose dad was a truck driver. Tough for her—she wasn't a boy in a Jewish family. Her folks were pissed at the cost of seating for the high holidays, so she never saw the inside of a synagogue. They got a Christmas tree when her bubbe died... She didn't marry a Jew (surprise!), I didn't even know I had Jewish background until I was 14 and they were divorced. More culture shock. I became my own little anti-Semite when I was in my teens and early twenties, because I couldn't deal with being part of a tribe that always got killed. Who wants to belong to that?

Eventually I wanted to explore what I had been running from, learned to own it to varying degrees, rejected my father's Christianity, and live an uneasy peace with formal/religious Judaism. I fall into that category of Jews who consider themselves more spiritual than religious, yet defend Israel as the only democratic country in the Middle East and needed homeland for the next time the world tries another Jew-killing spree (they never stopped, you say?). We're not all rich. Not all bad. Not all greedy (which is a human trait, actually). And there's as much religious variety among Jews as Christians. So I'm basically a religious mulatta who even went to Catholic school for 1.5 years with resultant issues about Catholicism. I don't bother denying my background as I did when I was younger. Hitler would have called me a "mischling" and gotten me anyway.

But the feminist lie is essentially the lie about freedom, which has been debunked on this website, only for women. We're not free. We've lost the ability to raise our children and make a home unless our husband makes a high enough salary to do without our slave wages. We're solidly nuclear, and the grandparents are often superfluous. Hell, the elderly are completely superfluous. And a woman may also be superfluous to her man and imminently replaceable by someone younger and more attractive (try that on for mercy). Yeah, now she's free to live alone. Nothing has improved. Instead, it's worsened for a woman. Feminism hasn't improved my lot one bit, and it left me unprotected when I most needed it. So Christina, who fought to take Wood Shop instead of Home Ec in seventh grade, if you're out there, ef you! I still make hot chocolate, I still have all my fingers, and I still sew. Why the hell do I need a wooden napkin holder when I'm worried for my life?

This, is Stark Reality, and it's infinitely preferable to the crap you're getting fed by the media, or to the B.S. work conversations about what people bought with their slave wages or charged (Do they actually talk about that part?). That has liberated me. Much better to know the truth of what you're facing than to be left in the dark wondering what lie waits to expose itself like a flasher. Sick f*ck society.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not a complete downer about my reality here. If I lived in a Muslim state, I'd have offed myself long time ago to get mercy. I'll take America and a bowl of prozac any day.

Postscript about a different stark reality:

Digressing for the Harm City readers by association with the content of the previous two sentences, the 2015 riot / purge / pillaging showed just what a thin thread holds this Baltimore society together, especially without police who do what we were taught they do (oops, another lie?). It was never good here, but it's worsening to the extent that I want to be a character in a LaFond novel and enjoy giving the savages their due. A little Sci-Fi music please, James. I want this particular fantasy to be absolutely perfect.