"Carol Bebelle, Executive Director of Ashé Cultural Arts Center. She is a native of New Orleans and a published poet and writer."
There are two kinds of men in this world: wee men, and real men. WeeMen experience only a partial initiation into this limitless sphere of Being Aware of Becoming, whose center is in each of us but whose circumference is NoWhere. WeeMen remain within the egocentric Ptolemaic cosmos of their infancy, trying to clear the world outside their skin of the demons they conceive within.AMY GOODMAN: Jane Fonda, remembering her first experience of The Vagina Monologues. Carol Bebelle, do you remember yours?
CAROL BEBELLE: Absolutely. We produced it last year. And though I had read it and I’d seen segments, I had never seen the whole thing. And it’s an absolutely exquisite piece of work. I come out of social service, and so the delicacy with which you get an opportunity to see both exciting and wonderful things about women, as they’ve related to, you know, their vagina and that part of their bodies, as well as the things that have been so distressing, that such a wonderful job has been done in terms of essentially helping the audience to understand how having to exempt that part of ourselves from ourselves in a certain kind of way lays the groundwork for everything else that happens for and to women. And so, it was absolutely very much like Jane Fonda says, that you laugh forever. You know, I mean, these are things that, you know, you sometimes don’t even talk about with your girlfriends. You know, you think about them in your head, and you kind of chuckle about them, and so to have it kind of right there and to be in a community who can kind of experience it with you, and they’re things that just break your heart, you know?
AMY GOODMAN: Like what?
CAROL BEBELLE: Well, when you hear about how women’s bodies are used as the battlefields in war, that these—that’s what’s spoiled, when they talk about the victor and the spoils. It’s the women. That’s one of the ways that the victor has it to be very clear that I’ve managed, you know, to kind of dominate you, is that their men are no longer able to be a protection to their women.
WeeMen who conceive of life as Holy War, and that includes most of us (war is what we do, there's even an absurd "coffee war" in Seattle) have claimed vaginas as occupied territory. WeeMen intend to plant the flag of Western patriarchy way up inside Gaia's innermost sanctuary. These cosmic pinheads conceive of the human self as a black hole, a mechanical receptacle into which WeeMen may pump whatever WeeMen wish or waste.
[(Male supremacy){NoMAN'S LAND, aka VAGINAS} (Female subjugation)]
beloved { UNION } Beloved is a more perfect Union
O sisters my Sisters!
O NoMan my NO 1!
I bow in the direction of New Orleans.
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