Golems in the closet

For some time now I have been preoccupied by and writing on the ordeals and atrocities women face, ranging from the banal which should never have become banal, to the downright inhuman. I wrote several pieces on marital rape, on the various trauma men inflict women, consciously or not, throughout their life. With this new series, Golems, I deliberately chose to always open each poem with the same line, and to always narrate the story from a male point of view not to highlight the fact that each issues tackled is the same or of the same importance, but that's it's a generic, standard masculine reaction.

Above all, I wanted to show how these behaviours, and most people's reaction to them, are normalised. Frequently people don't bat an eye when a women is raped by her husband. I've heard some men say that “a wife raped by her husband” is antinomic. Notice the 'some men'. Of course it's a minority which tends to exert its need to be vocal, but many men won't know the difference, and think consent once given is thereby always granted. I'm not saying a husband should ask his wife's permission to have sex every time he feels horny, but I'm saying that if his wife says 'no' then that 'no' shouldn't be debated, debatable. Same goes for unmarried couples, sex buddies, one night stands, whatever.

In my previous pieces women weren't the only focus though, as their fate is almost always entwined with that of their children. In these new instances I have tried to focus on women to shine a single light on their plight so we realise that their basic rights are regularly denied, that they always have to fight against something. We men have it easy, as we made the laws long ago, when our grip on women was even stronger than it is now.

We need more accurate, more targetted, more up-to-date, fairer laws addressing these issues, but in order to root out the problem we also need a different type of education. We perpetuate the stereotypes we are inculcated and it seeps through everything, it even infects our language, especially in French and languages which differentiate gender by using the male pronoun and nouns most of the time. We condition boys and girls alike, and funnel them into a frame of reference and a format which go against the notions of equality and of justice. We take it for granted that as our parents were this and that, we necessarily have to be this and that. Lots of balderdash to me.

I'm a man who was raised with these precepts. I do not remember any specific occasion, but I must have been guilty, early in my twenties, of importuning a girl when drunk, of making her feel uncomfortable, therefore abusing the position of power I didn't know I had. I am clean out of it, been so for more than a decade and a half. As a teacher, I participate in and witness slow but steady changes in mentalities, a slight shift of the paradigm, but it's much too slow to be effective. We need to address this frontally, we need to go nationwide, without taboo, and believe me: there won't be any nut-kicking (for most of us).

To wrap up this already-too-long post, I'll just say that the title to the series stands for all the various monsters we can encounter in mythologies and legends, and is very meaningful to me. I'm not going to break down each poem, or give an overarching analysis of the series, but of course they each do have a particular signification, as have many elements within the poems, their structure, their patterns. I do hope you “enjoyed” reading them, that you found them engaging enough, that they gave you food for thought.

For more comfort, you can access the series right here (start at the bottom).

Take care,

Rodolphe