KG, New Friends, and Random Cats... Oh my...

Well, this morning was eventful. :-)

I had my garage sale.
Sold a very limitted number of things (almost all of them vinyl records, for 25 cents a pop), and managed to get... $10.90 (or there-abouts) in under-the-table proffits.
It's funny.
I had no less than three people come by and ask if I was selling my little wooden cabinet (which I was), but they all wanted the thing to have doors (it never did, and it's a good sixty or so years old).

But, still. Nice to have the interest. :-)
I told one couple to try out the Re-Store on Walkley -- not that I can give them dirrections, but I told them it was connected to Habitat for Humanity (I thought they might find a useable cupboard door for the cabinet there... We'll see what happens.).

I did a lot of singing -- mostly to atract attention. There were only three or four other people set up to sell stuff, and we were rather far appart, so I wanted to drag people over to where I was set up. It worked. Not that they bought anything, but they came and they saw, and sometimes they bought, so that was good. :-)
They could hear me out on Cahill avenue, which is on the other end of the condo-corp. Woohoo! (I've still got it!)

One of the people attracted to my singing was a lovely woman named Anita who I knew for a sci-fi geek as soon as I looked at her.
Turns out she went to my highschool (before I got there), and was in the Library Club. She knows Margaret, and she knows Grizzy. She may also have known Annie, but I suspect it was Deanna she was remembering.
She has a dog named Suzie (who is bisexual, apparently).
Anyway, assumign she calls me, we're going to get together and yack over coffee. That will be good. :-)


Anywhoo, in other news: Going to Kaleidoscope tomorrow (early-ish) with Marisol (and Kalisti, and some guy named Jesse). I will be handing 'round the business cards at the women's ritual. :-) Whee! :-)

I must hit a grocery store today so's as to collect some food for tomorrow. :-)
Maybe I'll go to the Fruit Market. That would be fun. :-)

- TTFN,
- Amazon. :-)

Women, Healing, Menstruation, and Women's Space

Okay...

Random, thesis-related stuff:

Susan Starr Sered (Priestess, Mother, Sacred Sister) says that Women's Religions[1] tend to focus *way more* on healing (and the maintaining of social ties/relationships) than they do on rites of passage, when it comes to the types of rituals they do.

A rite of passage is a ritual that officially transfers you from one social state of being to another.

E.G.: A funeral *officially* (as opposed to litterally) transfers you from One of the Living, to One of the Dead. Gets you moving in the right dirrection, if you will.
A wedding *officially* (legally?) transfers you from single-hood to couple-hood (and, occasionally, from childhood to adulthood, as I experienced about a month ago), even though you have, presumably, been *unofficially* out of single-hood for some time now.

See?

Sered suggests that Male Dominated (as opposed to Female Dominated -- see above) religions tend to pay a lot of attention to rites of passage in part, at least, because of blood taboos (menstruation, menarche, birth, menopause). And, perhaps, also because the male transition into adulthood is less physically obvious than the female transition into adulthood, and because there's no guess-work involved in figuring out who a kid's biological mother is.

Anyway.

So they tend to focus on healing (various illnesses, but also various relationships).

Right.

Goddess Spirituality *does* do Rites of Passage.
But, if you look at the menarche rituals, at least, (I've read a few descriptions in books, but I've never actually seen one) the underlying message is more about being confidant in, and not being ashamed of, your body -- rather than it being about 'You are a Woman Now' or what-have-you.
Similarly, there are GS women who undergo something like a menarche rite when they are decades past their first period -- because they want to clear out all the shame-shame-shame crap that they absorbed during their first 'go-round' with menstruation.


Also:

Sophie Laws (I may have talked about this before), she talks about public vs private space, and has this (paraphrased) to say:

One is not supposed to talk about menstruation in public.
One is not supposed to talk about menstruation in front of men.
("Talk about" extends to 'make reference to', 'openly discuss', 'openly display', 'acknowledge the existence of', etc.)

As such, any place where there are men, qualifies as 'public space' (at least in the context of menstruation and, possibly, (given the content of your average advertisment) women's bodies in general).

Consequently, one could suggest that "women-only space" = "private space" (even when there are, say, a hundred or more women in said space).

[There's some connective bit of information that I need to put here, but I don't know what it is yet].

If we look at those well-past-your-first-period "menarche" rituals as healing rituals (which, I think, is what they are), then one could say that...
1) All the "Menstruation is Evil" stuff as something brought on by a male-centric culture that views *all* bleeding as 'wound' bleeding.
2) That women need to recover from having absorbed all that stuff.
3) That, because our culture is male-centric and says "Menstruation is Evil", and because all male-containing space = public space = space in-which the male-centric status-quo is upheld (to at least *some* degree), then:
4) Women *need* women-only-space (= private space = space where the male-centric opinion of menstruation (or what-have-you) need not be upheld in order to maintain the social piece /social ties -- see above re: importance of relationships in Women's Religions) in order to hash out all this stuff, and come to terms with their own bodies on... a level playing field? Without interfearance from the status-quo? Something like that, anyway. :-)


Uh... yeah.

So. If that made any sense at all, comments would be appreciated. :-)