Creating Themyscira

My birthday starts in an hour, and to celebrate I bought myself a Michal Golan evil eye necklace and a ticket to see Lindy West: The Witches Are Coming, and now as a free gift to myself,  I’m going to turn my Facebook experience into a first iteration of my own personal Themyscira. For however long it feels good, I will share my Facebook content only with women, I will only allow women to post comments on my timeline. I’ve created a special list just for this. I know, it’s only Facebook, but it’s a start, and it would be difficult to overstate how important Facebook has been to my activism and day jobs over the past decade. I’m old enough that my daughters have taken to calling me “MeeMaw,” and the young men who load chicken feed into my Buick call me “Ma’am,” so I’m not digital native, but I am one of the geezers who took Facebook over and used it for my own purposes (promoting civil dialogue, building an international network of gift economies, fundraising for nonprofits, that sort of thing). So this will be a big change for me. And I cannot wait.

When I can remember my dreams these days, they are always about anger. I find my dream self in humiliating situations over and over again, mute in the face of paralyzing shame and mortification. These are old dreams, a theme my subconscious has been exploring for decades now. But there’s something new: I am only temporarily mute now. Dream Rivka takes a few minutes to survey the situation and then she starts to smash things and kick and punch throats and yell, not the high shrill lady yells that men assign to us in their ventriloquist acts, but deep, strong, primal woman noise, with a resonating frequency that turns bone to milk, that flattens the world like the shock wave unfolding in front of a bomb. These dreams are powerful, yes, but I wake up exhausted.

I want a break from the world of men. I want to focus on the voices I most want to hear, the voices of other women, especially those women whose voices have been the most silenced under the white Christian supremacist patriarchy that I live in. The system that has infected my own reflexes, my self-image, my almost-everything. But not my core. I want to give this core of mine a chance to find its daytime voice, so I can stop dreaming about destroying the world because I’m too tired from building a new one, for real, in the waking right-side up.

I find that it’s not men who disgust me most, it’s myself. It’s the way that I cannot stop myself from suffering fools, from stroking fragile male egos, from always finding something nice to say when men inevitably speak up to center themselves, looking for validation and soothing and attention. I would like a break from this work, this caretaking of men who prove over and over again to be so deeply infected by the same systemic toxicity that they cannot see me as a human being with dignity and agency to equal their own. It’s not their fault, it’s not my fault, but it is our shared responsibility to step up and change ourselves and our systemic structures. And right now, I see a lot of women doing this work but very, very few men.

So until further notice, I’m going to create my own digital Themyscira, my own portal to the land of the Amazons. I’ll still see and talk to men at my day job, in my family, and the partners of my women friends, but that’s it. For a while, no more energy spent on any man without the courage, strength, compassion, and empathy to prove himself, through his own initiative, worth my life minutes. I’ve been listening to men all my life, I’ve learned to gaze upon myself through their eyes. Enough of that. I’m taking a vacation, to build a room of my own, to wash the patriarchy right out of my hair, to build a bit of Themyscira.