Yesterday I had 4 appointments plus had all the regular things to do at home and today I'm wiped out. Someone was supposed to help me get the 8 foot long slatwall to the condo today but I just want to stay home and recuperate. We found out that there's no way to lower the back seat of my car (at least no way short of destroying something or the other). So I have to find some other way to get them there. Not too mention that they're too heavy for me anyway. My church is AWOL - a case, I think, of out of sight out of mind. (I'm not as useful as they'd hoped, I think, in pressuring me to hurry and become a member. Next time I go to church I"m going to wear my "invisible diseases" t-shirt to maybe get them to realize that I might be sicker than I look at first glance.
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Anyway, that's not why I'm writing here today. The thing is that I just can't believe how wimpy so many women are. So I'm going to write here as if I'm telling a friend in Seattle that I grew up with about women and handy people (not) outside of the pacific northwest (Washington, Oregon, Idaho and sometimes Alaska and British Columbia). So here's how I imagine myself telling her about these things.
M., I know this may be hard to believe but it seems like everywhere outside of the pacific northwest that I go (except Siberia) it seems that women are wimps! Now if you needed to have a sofa moved any distance, for example, even a strong man would generally not attempt this alone, if nothing else because of the size of the sofa. But two reasonably strong and healthy women could do it too, don't you think? But no, that evidently is not the case. If I need a sofa moved there is no other woman who could do it with me, I guess because they're all wimps (even though at first glance they don't appear to be wimps). So by process of elimination, that means it has to be a man helping me.
But the thing is that in these non pacific northwest (or Siberia) locales my being a woman precludes the possibility of me lifting the sofa alongside a man, so that means that I have to be sidelined while two men do it. Of course, with my current back issues I really can't help lift sofas, but even when I was healthy I found this to be the case all to often. And if my health precludes me helping carry the sofa, what's to stop two other women or a man and a different woman (i.e., not me, say husband and wife team) from carrying it? But no, women en toto are sidelined from such activities and chores.
This makes me think that these people are unfamiliar with pacific northwest (or Siberian) mores and are probably also not from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong and the men are good looking.
In many places, I think, men don't like strong women and so they encourage women to be weak and needy, which makes the men feel all strong and heroic... like rescuing Repunzel from the tower she's locked up in.
But not only this, but I think that men feel intimidated by strong women. If a woman is found to be strong that somehow emasculates men. You can imagine that this would never have worked in pioneer days, but evidently many people find this state of affairs acceptable and amenable, and so it continues unabated from generation to generation (in places outside of the pacific northwest, Siberia and Lake Wobegon in post pioneer days).
Fast forward to today. You may be aware that Amish, Mennonite and Brethren denominations have some similarities and among certain local emanations of any or all of these religious groups the difference can be rather slight. For example, I attended a Mennonite church planting effort in Philadelphia where the missionary Mennonites dressed similar to Amish and preferred simplicity similar to them too. Despite such frequent similarities, my current church is Brethren and I am amazed at the difference between the Amish, who are generally pretty handy and self-sufficient, and this Brethren church. In my church here the men are so totally unhandy that in some cases I know more than they do about handy things, and that's pretty bad, because my handy knowledge is rather limited, despite the fact that I can wield a mean drill, which is packed in an underbed storage bin as I write.
So this raises a bit of a problem because if I am to ask for help, but women aren't allowed to be handy or strong (evident by the lack of women coming forward to offer to help me) while at the same time the men don't really seem to know more than me and in some cases and issues know less than me, I am stuck with potentially inadequate male help . In this scenario I am reticent to ask for help from church because the men will want to leave me out of it altogether (because of the aforementioned male-femaile gender issues), but will also rather go it on their own, even if I have some knowledge they might benefit from. Benefiting from my knowledge would be unmasculine, but doing it alone without me will also (even if they botch it in part or altogether) will boost their male ego and serve to "put me in my place" in relation to the male gender.
The only solution, it seems, is to either seek help outside of church or go it alone, along the lines of the famous Simon & Garfunkel song "I am a rock, I am an island." Of course, this song isn't the final say in things, because it falls somewhere below Scriptural teaching as being the end all and guide for living. Nevertheless, in reality, I am either forced to be a rock and an island or live in a male-dominated world where the men are strong and the women are good looking.
What say you fair sister to these things?
