As the revolutions in Wisconsin, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, France, Spain, United Kingdom, Yemen, Ohio, Ireland, Greece and hundreds of other places go on, another more peaceful revolution is occurring in the Tampa Bay area of Florida. This revolution is hardly being talked about by the media. It's totally grassroots, emerging all across the Tampa Bay area in the thousands, and best of all, it's mostly led by women!
In my second post for Creative Loafing I wrote about a move away from a dominator culture to a partnership culture. I spoke of how we live in a heavily patriarchal society where from an early age that culture conditions its people to think women are objects meant for sexual exploitation and violence. Sexual objectification of women is prevalent everywhere in our culture. Just the other day, while flipping through radio stations I came across 3 songs that talked about sleeping with multiple women with lyrics like, " I want to f*ck every girl in the world" (which is also a very popular song with well over 10 million hits on YouTube). The popular MTV show Jersey Shore displays men competing to see who can "smoosh" the most women in a night while they jump from bar to bar indulging in alcohol and getting into ego-lead fights. This is a total disconnect from reality of how men and women should interact. Sex, while surely a carnal satisfaction, is about an act of creation.
Our dominator culture focus on the carnal satisfaction of ego rather then the love and creation of something new that arises out of the act. Our culture deifies itself on how much it consumes, not on the results of what it creates. More than that, it's a total disconnect with the fundamentals of how life works. Life doesn't compete primarily for success, it collaborates and partners to create more life. A perfect example of this would be bees and flowers: Neither can live without the other, yet they create mutual beneficial relationships that enhance one another to gain a common goal of reproducing more life. Competition is a game played by the ego and the game needs to be changed. Women are the ones who will be that change. I'd say that a revolution is underway!
This article appears in Mar 3-9, 2011.