Okay.

First off, photos have no connection to the text.


I just have been thinking and thinking, and some things I just need to say.


Popular, or not.

Many years ago, I worked in the paper mill.....I started there when my first child was just a baby, weeks old.

It was a good paying job, and it was awful.  Boring, repetitious, mindless, hard.

But that wasn't the half of it.  In the 8 years I worked there, I put up with a truckload of misogyny.

From snide comments, to inappropriate advances, pinches on the backs of my arms, it was never an easy place to work.  I used to be afraid to go upstairs to the break room/rest room, because meeting a man on the stairway once turned a little frightening.

And always, there was the undercurrent, that you were, after all, a woman.

Until the day that I was working on a paper line with someone I grew up with.  He was on one side of this huge pallet of paper, and I was on the other.  In conversation, it was revealed that he made $.50 an hour more than I did, and had been there a year less.

Thus began a year of fighting for what I believed was mine.

Equal pay.  Equal rights.

I was relentless, and my 72 yo self is pretty impressed with what my 25 yo self was willing to go through.

Eventually, with many, many meetings with the company, the union, and many letters to  the agencies that I thought would help me, I got my place in the line of progression that had previously been only for men,

Two of my friends went with me. 

All the rest of the women who worked there were afraid, and turned it down.

I made more money, had more interesting jobs, and I felt vindicated, but  I had to endure even worse 

treatment from the men who had antagonized me all along.

It was still worth it, every minute of it.

It may be that I grew up thinking that I was every bit as good as a man, because until I was about 13,
my father treated me like a son, and even called me "Tom".

So I expected to be treated well, and I expected to have every opportunity, and I believed  that I could probably do just about anything my male counterparts could do.

By the time my father realized, or had to accept, that he had just the one daughter, well, it was probably too late to change my attitude.

So anytime, I ever heard a man say that I could not do something, or that because I was a female, I didn't qualify to even try, my blood began to boil.

I am that way to this day.
I raised my daughters to that same standard, the "you can do whatever you want to do in this world" standard.

Okay, so all that prefaces my question, the one that is burning my brain up, night after night, keeping me awake, when I really want to sleep.

It's this:  

How can women in this country support a man in the White House, who is so blatantly a

MISOGYNIST??????

Hasn't every  single woman in the world, experienced these feelings, at some point in her life??

Haven't we all had that discomfort when we've been assertive?

Felt that our self worth was all tangled up in  our appearance, our sexuality, when in

fact, there is always so much more to us?

Haven't we all been pressured to conform to someone else's idea of what good little girls should be like?

Aren't we all kind of tired of it?  Less money, less opportunity, less respect.

I hear it all the time, "It's a man's world."

Well, F that.  To be real.  

I much prefer the sentiment in a birthday card L gave me.

"There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that two women can't do, before noon."

So there.  

Women, stand up.