A man with dreams needs a woman with vision…

Alternate verion: A man with dreams needs a woman who believes…

various scrotals take credit as their sex is wont to do, but original source unknown

Better and truer version: A man with dreams needs women’s unquestioning faith, undying and undeserved devotion, and endless free or underpaid labour to bring the dream to life… but it’s probably just better to put him down in the permanent sense, so that women can be free to pursue their own damned dreams.

Story Ending

Woman, I could get used to this quote reinvention thing! I might go down in history – kind of like Weird Al Yankovic with his song parodies! No matter. I’ll put this in the Conversations with Men series, although I’m writing of a general, repetitive, lifelong conversation that all women have with all men. I’ll give a few examples from my own life, but honestly, I see this form of male dominance in everything I experience. Women are just so used to it (and by my definition, exhausted by it) that they don’t realize all the time they end up devoting to men’s brilliant ideas and/or cleaning up after numerous failed experiments.

So the other day, after escaping from my most recent foray into exploitative work – wait, let’s call it what it actually was: work-based imprisonment of a foreign person through legal means – I started researching the country where I’ll be spending at least the next couple of months. Okay, let’s be honest here again, I was researching food because I like food, especially local specialties. And I noticed something. Most of these dishes and snacks and local basics that are must-eats when in this particular area have a man’s name attached to them. Men made famous by the creation of some spectacular edible. In the few cases where a woman was considered responsible for the dish’s creation, we have no idea who she was – some faceless, nameless wife. The story behind the dish often has the quality of a general myth: a woman wanted to please her new husband, sorta bullshit.

Anyhow, I started thinking about this, and it didn’t make sense to me. Given that throughout history, and continuing today, women have been the ones in the kitchens, the ones improvising dishes during hard times, the ones creating deliciousness out of 3 ingredients because hubbie has spent all the family’s money at the local watering or gambling hole or whorehouse – why is it that men are the only ones supposedly creating the famous, local, traditional foods? This doesn’t ring true for me. What I think has happened is that some opportunistic male who couldn’t get anything in his own life going, took his mother’s or his sister’s or his wife’s amazing creation and attached his name to it. Woman be damned. We’ve seen this happen countless times throughout history in the art world, in the scientific world – in every world and in every culture. Men steal. They steal from women. They steal their ideas, their labour, their inventions and discoveries, and they take credit in the form of recognition, money, future opportunities, and more. This is HIS story. She is erased. He lives forever. So I know the traditional foods I end up eating no matter where I go in the world have originally come from women, anonymous women.

I thought about the process of stealing. I thought about all the Great Men in the world, and the lesser men who have dreams. I thought about my own experiences with these ‘idea men’ thoughout my life. There have been so many. When I was younger and more naive and energetic, I fell prey to many of these guys. Sometimes, they have good ideas. But here’s the thing. Most of these men are not that bright, and are the laziest fuckers you’ll ever meet. They have grown up having their mothers do everything for them, and coupled with their inborn aggression and need to take, mom has nurtured and reinforced a sense of entitlement and deserving. By the time he reaches adulthood, the great man is well used to girls and women working for him to make his path easy, to make his dreams come true, to provide an endless well of ideas from which to take, and to give him some kind of legacy that they and he believes he deserves as a male.

You have, no doubt, encountered at least one of these guys in your life. It could be dad, but it could also be a teacher or mentor, a friend, a boyfriend/husband. You’ve been well-trained from birth to see males as insightful and brilliant, and you fall for male aggression or charisma really easily. Once charmed, you’ll do anything for them. They are soooo smart and creative and supportive of your desperate need to be a part of their crusade! Of course you want to sign on and help him realize his brilliant idea to change the world! See my post on friendship – specifically the section on Types of Friendship – to get some insight into how women get sucked into parasitical situations like this – hint: males see friendships with women differently than women see friendships with men…

I’ll give a few of my own examples. Note that I don’t fall for male bullshit anymore. I don’t give free labour to men anymore. Not that I’ve tried this yet, but I’d now go so far as to suggest that women steal men’s ideas and make them happen without sharing credit. Time to turn the tables, don’t you think? That’s for you to decide, of course. But I’m tired of promoting playing nice with our oppressors. We still aren’t free, but dammit, we’re ethical and sweet!

There is a male I’ve written about before. He is a standard lazy, useless, wannabe Great Man. He has spent decades generating ideas and then rallying gaggles of energetic and enthusiastic women to do his bidding. I was, at one point, one of them, until I saw the writing on the wall: I wasn’t getting anything but longer-lasting poverty from his project. And he got all the credit for the work I did. Not all of this guy’s ideas were bad, and he is actually aware he is a lazy user, and that it is women he almost exclusively exploits. But he talks about it laughingly, as all males do when they acknowledge bad parts of themselves (hahaha, I’m a womanizer; lol, I have a weakness for raping prostitutes for money; teeheehee, I just can’t help ogling women while you’re in the middle of telling me about your childhood incest). I eventually escaped this guy and moved on with other stuff. But I lost months of my life.

The most recent example of male dreams shaping the women they use and abuse came out of the recent job I accepted and just escaped from (alluded to above). Now, I was only able to escape because I’ve wised up to male tactics, because I don’t fully trust how Muslim males treat women (especially white women), and because I was put in a very dangerous legal situation that potentially could have seen me arrested, heavily fined and/or deported (yes, stupid liberal Americans, this shit happens to white people, too). Now, I’m not big on rules, as a rule, but I don’t actively fuck with governments. The school for whom I was working had told me weeks ago that they had finished the paperwork for my work visa, but had refused to take my passport – and you need the visa put INTO the passport to show legal status – even after I asked several times, and as the expiry date of my tourist visa approached, I wasn’t given any information about the status of my visa or the need for me to do a ‘visa run’ to a neighbouring country in order to remain legal. The only conclusion that could be reached was that a) they intended to put me into illegal status and thus control my movements since I couldn’t do anything without ID and proof of legal standing or b) they were holding my paperwork hostage, which was in fact finished, in order to control my movements. Without legal standing, one can’t leave the country, travel within the country on public transport, or even stay at a hotel within the country while on a school break. They were trying to hold me prisoner, in other words. This on top of the fact that I was forced to work 7 days a week, was faced with racism and xenophobia every day, and was dealing with growing anger and resentment from some of the women working at the school as I don’t act like a Muslim woman or even one of the non-Muslim hetero breeders or breeders-to-be. Needless to say, I was fucking depressed, constantly ill, and paranoid about being illegal.

But let’s get to the male dream – female slavery part of things. So the head of the school told me about his ‘dreams’ on a few occasions. He was thrilled to hire me as I am highly educated and experienced, and so, squarely on my shoulders, he placed his ridiculous and frankly impossible dreams about the future of the school. Honestly, I had better ideas for the school, but I wasn’t hired for my ideas – just my apparently endless female capacity for labour. So deluded and power-hungry as he was, he couldn’t believe it one day when he asked me if I had been out of the city to enjoy some of the beautiful scenery of the area, and I told him that it wasn’t possible as I was working 7 days a week, including nights. He looked at me suspiciously – I’m legally barred from working more than one job – and he asked where I was working. I looked at him incredulously and told him I worked 7 days a week at the school – days, nights, Saturdays, and full Sundays grading and preparing the hours and hours of lessons I had to teach. He ended the conversation right after that as reality is never part of a Great Man’s dream. He is responsible for ideas, and he doesn’t think about who has to suffer (women) in order to make these dreams come true. He had even admitted to me on a few other occasions that he was likely to move to a different school in the system in the near future, but he expected me to stay for at least 5 years to make his great dream for the program come true, and he definitely wanted to get credit for that!

Fuck that. I’m too old and open-eyed to fall for male abuse anymore. I almost wish I could go back in time and take back all the months and years of my life I devoted to furthering men’s careers and fattening their pocketbooks at the expense of my own career and bank account. All I can do now is to prevent it from happening to me again, and to put my story and warnings out there for younger women (or older women who haven’t figured out why they feel depleted and used and impoverished), so that they can avoid all the pain and focus on holding their own ideas sacred, and focusing on making their own dreams come true.

A woman’s dream should never be to let a man step on her in order to reach the top.

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