On my mother's side, my great-grandmother was named "Molly." Sometimes I spell it "Mollie." She came to America as a stowaway, I'm told. Fleeing the violent ripples of Der Kristallnacht in what is now Russia. I don't know her real last name. The one before the American Immigration officials changed it.

Mollie gave birth to my nana, who has always been a strong woman. Nana is the one who told me Man Plans, God Laughs, and I've always remembered it. There are people who use this maxim who have never met my nana, but who have heard me say it. Nana was the one who always said "Just because you've already seen the movie, it doesn't make you smarter" when one of us kids got mouthy. When I was 19 or 20 and rutting the nadir of my own personal existential angst, she's the one who assured the rest of my family not to fear my suicide. "He's too in love with himself to kill himself!" she said, with love. That's just who my nana is. That's the fiery Isabelle.

Isabelle gave birth to my own mother, who as I recently wrote, was the strongest driving force in my own life. The one who provided a model of love and thoughtfulness and heart for me. The one who unintentionally ended up demonstrating to me the symptoms of a culture that loathes women. It hurt to see some of these things play out. And maybe part of me blamed her for showing me. When she was but another victim.

And this is how we sometimes learn. The hard, hard, hard way.

This culture of ours tears women down. It absolutely requires them and sickens without them, and yet refuses to honor them as they should be honored. Let alone honor, it denies them—we deny them—common respect and self-love. Our culture not only often hates women, it thrives on hating Woman. It drools after her, insults her, beats her, fucks her in ten different ways, and then when she finally falls, it calls her names and levels loathing on her "weakness." Never before in my life have I seen this more clearly than now. And the amazing thing is, for a long time, I didn't see it at all.

But ever since setting out on my own journey to become more aware of the oppression against The Brown™ (and to rise out of it as well as to cease helping it in any ways), I have been faced with this truth. I have been faced with it everywhere I look. Even looking closely at my own thoughts and actions. And so I find more work to do. Because it is of the same work.

The greatest honor and help I can give to women is not a day's blogging (although that doesn't hurt). It is what I already am doing. It is making this work to change myself. It is allowing myself to hurt in this effort. As I said in an comment thread recently [edited slightly]:

Bottom line: growth hurts. Those of us who hate losing power in a new dynamic will rail and squirm in many ways to avoid losing that power. Even when we don't see it. That also applies to people like me (male) who have to deal with seeing women as they should be seen. Scary, hurty stuff. TOO BAD for those of us interested in working against a long, painful status quo that harms others. Whether its big pain or little pain in our bellies, it can NOT hurt us more than our ignorance hurts the people we are working to understand and ally ourselves with.

So it is my work, now, to continue poring over my thoughts and actions with the mental and spiritual equivalent of the electron microscope (or a warmly sterilizing ray of sun, if you aren't into scientific metaphors) to weed out the poison that lies there, poison inculcated by this White-Male-Supremacist culture of ours, poison tainting my own self. If I can remove myself as any possible agent of harm toward women, or propagator of toxic thought and talk, then I have done a lot. If I can actually be good for them, then I have done what I ought. Because I am not only the son of a woman, I am housemate and lover and esposo to Woman; I am father to Woman; I am friend to Woman. She relies on me like I rely upon her. So this work is not a gift to her. And it is not her job to take it easy on my feelings when I attempt to be better in this way. It would be nice, but so what? Jelly moonbeam cookies delivered by the son of the Sun every evening would be "nice," too. Or a woman not fearing each man as a potential abuser would be "nice." But as "they" say: Life Ain't Nice. (That one's mine.)

We are, everything, interwoven—and we cannot love and respect and cherish and help a woman without doing the same for our world.

Happy Blog Against Sexism Day, Feliz Día Internacional de la Mujer, Happy International Women's Day 2007. Let's see how long we can make this day last!