Collie's Bestiary

I apologize that, due to Wolf's writing resonating powerfully for me, I'm falling back on massive quotes more than I would like to. In my defense I will note that I feel she writes with more clarifying passion than I do, and I want to share that in its purest and clearest form with my [...]

In my last posting on Vagina: A New Biography, I closed with the virulently damaging effects of rape — physically, sensually, and emotionally — for women. As the author notes, there have not yet been any books written to study if men can suffer similar ill effects from rape — though some data seems to [...]

  In an instant, I realized that original sin did not, as the Judeo-Christian tradition has it, originate in human sexuality. Our species' original sin was in deviating from our earliest tradition of reverence for the feminine and for female sexuality, and all that it represented for us. Our original sin lies in five thousand [...]

Talking with male friends, the general consensus I hear seems to be that manhood is more about taking care of yourself so others do not have to do it for you, and then meeting all your other obligations as well – to family, to society, to work, and so on. What most strikes me about [...]

What's even more weirdly interesting is that we've seen this sort of social upheaval in gender roles happen before — though we didn't recognize it at the time – in the inner city black communities. It started in the 1970s as manufacturing started closing the inner city factories, and then too, "the men who lived [...]

Why did I find this book so disturbing? In some ways I completely agree with the author: "the picture emerging is a mirror image of the traditional gender map: men and [economic] markets on the side of the irrational and overemotional, and women on the side of the cool and levelheaded" (166; italics mine). If [...]

Required classes are over for me now — apparently I am now officially EBTD (Everything But The Dissertation) or ABD (All But Dissertation), depending on who you ask. Lucky me — as if I didn't have enough alphabet soup after my name already! Let's see, just off the top of my head, I can currently [...]

Here it is the first day of the newest and most recent world cycle, on the turning of the circular Mayan calendar. We get to start with a fresh new mindset today — let's make it something beautiful! My new worldview is to envision a world where we slowly but steadily shed the various oppressions [...]

I had to work my way slowly through Starhawk's The Earth Path: Grounding Your Spirit in the Rhythms of Nature; I find myself wishing this had been one of the first books assigned. Her description of finding a mostly-natural place for daily meditations is inspiring, especially the parts about using all one's senses to drink [...]

In a fascinating storytelling style, Medicine Story shares the startlingly successful program he and various other Native American elders created to assist incarcerated men. Initially it was just for Native Americans, and included women's circles, but over the years (due to a wide variety of reasons) the men's circles were the only ones that continued, [...]