I never had a militant, Nazi feminist period: I never burned my bra, never prayed to Gloria Steinem, never marched for women's causes, but all anyone ever had to say to me or in my hearing was "women can't do that job" and I'd have to prove them wrong.
In one instance I applied for a job with a roofer who said he didn't think a gal could haul a whole bundle of shingles up a ladder by herself. "Oh, yes," said I. "Prove it,"said he. And could I really haul my ass and a bundle of shingles up a ladder? Oh, hell no--those damn things weighed a ton and, lucky for me, I didn't get the job. Unfortunately, for two of the lowest years of my life I worked for a chicken processing plant. Every job in there was (and is) designed to hurt a different body part--at least until you get used to the job. The work I was doing was hard enough but I bid and won (ha!) a job that paid a whole fifteen cents more an hour and only involved picking up fifty-five to sixty-five pound boxes and then tossing them about three feet to a conveyor belt. I struggled but ended up keeping that job for six months. Don't tell me a woman can't do that job, suckuhs!
And the point, of course, wasn't that a woman couldn't do the job but that she shouldn't do the job. A woman can't do everything a man can, not because men are smarter, something we all know is so not true, but because men, in general, have more muscle mass than women. Men and women both get hernias but men don't have a uterus that dangles by a few ligaments and is just waiting for a woman to lift that Heavy Thing one too many times so it can wave bye-bye to its normal anatomical surroundings and drop through the tormented cervix and into the vagina where Dr. GYN can reach in and yank it out. I lost my uterus during the Great Prolapse of 1983, I was only thirty for craps sake.
So why did I feel I had to be so butch? The current answer is I haven't been therapized enough to know. Perhaps I thought, I'll lift these sixty pound boxes all day and maybe I'll grow a dick and some balls and be able to piss standing up but, really, I never thought I was hankering to grow my own male genitalia. Perhaps my testosterone levels were too high (yes, Virginia, women do have testosterone) but whatever the reason my knees, ankles, hips, and back are suffering from whatever form of mental aberration I was afflicted with, a condition as yet unnamed, although D. U. M. B. comes to mind first.
It remains a puzzlement.
