It’s 8:30 in the morning but I’ve been awake and up sporadically since 2 AM. That’s a typical scenario for me the day after my chemotherapy session at the hospital on Thursday mornings. It’s the dexamethasone (a corticosteroid) that keeps me awake. The other meds just make me feel ill generally.

Being awake at 2 AM until 7 or so when Carolyn gets up has its perks. The rain showers were amazing last night. The rain just pounds on the steel roof above the bedroom and the harder it rains the more intense the sound becomes. The first one started at around 3 AM but only lasted for twenty minutes or so. The one at 4 AM was much more intense and lasted much longer. The rain will be steady today, and probably tomorrow and the day after. The Weather Network predicts that we might just see the sun again by Tuesday. We’ll see about that.

At around 4:20, just before sunrise, I heard a great horned owl shouting its call at the back of the property. The owls like to perch in the tall conifers at the back of the property and in the forest behind our back fence. They usually sound off earlier in the year as the mating season gets into full swing. This owl may just have been a little late getting itself going, like many plants in the yard. The wisteria is just starting to sprout and the honey-locust is still yawning its opposition to getting up and at it. The ferns, though, are as happy as pigs in a wallow. They like the cooler, rainy weather and they show it.

So, at 2 AM, wide awake, what could I do? Well, I could just lay there and stew, or I could pick up my Kindle and start reading. Of course, as soon as I start reading, the cat decides it’s time for me to pay attention to her so she walks right in front of my face, sticks her tail up my nose and generally makes a pest of herself. Notwithstanding the feline interruptions I often read novels that are on the humorous side from authors like Thomas King, Kurt Vonnegut and Christopher Moore. But I also read a range of books on ‘more serious’ topics like sex, misogyny and patriarchy.

Last night I continued reading a book I picked up recently by David Friedman entitled A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis (2001) that had been referenced in another book I just finished on a related topic: Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships by Christopher Ryan, Cacilda Jetha (2013). Like Sex at Dawn, A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis is a must read if you want to understand how the social and cultural relations we’ve built around sex is so out of line with our biology. After outlining some of the most egregious sexual cultural practices in the Middle Ages in Europe around sex and later witchcraft along with a compendium of culturally weird sexual practices all over the world and since recorded history, Ryan and Jetha get into some very interesting musings on the United States and its perverse official political views and practices around sexuality, many driven by religion and the drive for power by mostly white, Protestant men of a certain age. After outlining the horrendous treatment of Black people by powerful white folk and their less wealthy followers, their base in current language, during pretty much the whole of American history starting with the arrival of slaves from Africa to work in Southern plantations, they get into some more current issues, including the appointment of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. [He is a year younger than me] His appointment was very controversial for a number of reasons, the most important one being that he was (is) black. This is a long quotation, but it demonstrates clearly the issues at hand and the players that are still involved in government, including Joe Biden. It’s important to note here that Thomas had been accused by a fellow attorney Anita Hill of sexual harassment but he dodged that one. He had been nominated by George H.W. Bush. According to Wikipedia he’s widely considered the most conservative and ‘originalist’ of the Supreme Court justices. It appears that he hasn’t changed his tune at all since 1991. His views are anathema to me.

From Friedman:

“Six decades later, another black American faced a committee of white men agitated about his penis. For hours those white men listened, many of them visibly appalled, to complaints from a woman about the black man’s lewd behavior toward her, all of it, she said, unwelcome and unsolicited. They heard how he bragged about the size of his organ, comparing it to a supernaturally endowed porn star named Long Dong Silver. Now that same black man faced the same committee. Unlike Claude Neal, however, he was not dangling from a rope. Except, he said, metaphorically. “From my standpoint as a black American,” Judge Clarence Thomas told the senators considering his nomination to the United States Supreme Court, “[this] is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who … deign to think for themselves … and it is a message that unless you kow-tow to an old order, this is what will happen. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate, rather than hung from a tree.” (from “A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis” by David M. Friedman, page 129 Kindle edition)

and

“The exchange between Senator Hatch and Judge Thomas about racial stereotyping ensured that no lynching would occur, high-tech or otherwise. If nothing else, the all-white members of the Senate Judiciary Committee were determined to show this was 1991, not 1891. At 10:34 P.M., on October 11, when Senator Biden recessed the hearings for the day, the verdict was clear. The nominee, so close to political extinction, had come roaring back to life. When Senator Hatch left the hearing room, he was stopped by Nina Totenberg of National Public Radio. “Senator, you just saved his ass,” she told Hatch. “No, Nina,” said the Utah Republican. “He just saved his own ass.” What both probably knew, but neither could say, was that it was another part of Thomas’s body that had really been at stake all along.” (page 139 kindle edition)

I’m about half way through Friedman’s book, but so far it’s making for compelling reading. It was clear to me back in 2010 before I retired that as I was teaching a course on Love and Sex, that women had been subject to an intense misogyny for as long as recorded history and probably for as long as our species started walking upright on the African savannah. Actually, I was aware of misogyny long before 2010 but that’s when I began a more intense focus on its deconstruction. The focus of Friedman’s book, the penis, is a literary means of shifting the conversation about sex and procreation from the biological to the cultural realm. So far, I think that he’s done an excellent job of it. His analysis of Freud’s penis envy as a metaphor for the way women have been disenfranchised and generally kept out of the highest positions of business and government is particularly good and one I hadn’t considered before, at least not in the kind of detail Friedman goes into.

More on this later…as I read the second part of Friedman’s book and tie it into other books I’ve been reading, including one by Christopher Moore.