Running on Empty

Run, baby, run" - Sheryl Crow

Do men sprint faster than women? Anatomically, they have 2 yoyos swinging loosely and a distended rod to boot, a heavier package to carry around, if you ask me, so why do women breaking speed records subjected to gender speculations? As if it were improbable for females to race in Flash Gordon quickness.

There was Nancy Navalta of recent years. And the latest woman on the stake is South African athlete Caster Semenya. Or is it her family name, evoking masculine visceral representation? Semen, indeed, is a male thing.

Here we go again, back in the first paragraph, being pulled by the inanity of medieval ideas as if Madonna did not make us dance to "I made it through the wildnerness." It's been more than 7 hours and 15 days and yet it feels we have not actually move forward. Kabudlay, oi.

Women are already in the literature on positive politics of peace and being evaluated as a workable ethical model for corrective citizenship and yet, road blocks continue to delay the journey. I remember being asked in either a class report or was it a forum, how the experience of motherhood as distinctively female experience dictate how women engage themselves as political beings.

First of all, I don't subscribe to the notion that as mothers, women care for the world and the future more passionately than men. I don't believe that women crave for peace more than men. Perhaps, there is in our socialization a different perspective being molded but as a whole, I don't see civic participation as a function of gender.

Citizenship, as a masculinized concept, is intimately linked with patriotism. Sadly, patriotism in most cultures, is measured in military defense terms - how one gallantly takes a bullet for one's tribe/community/country and in the enduring age of imperialism, being in the forefront of expansionist projects camouflaged as pursuits of national interest. In short, citizenship is defined along the lines of glorifying the male warrior.

While men are born to run down enemies of the state and run political affairs, women are considered unpatriotic because they burn their bras or run naked protesting against wars of aggression, inadvertently getting in the way of men's preoccupation.Where do women camp out? Mostly they are at the forefront of peace and environmental movements, microfinance, solidarity-building endeavors. Some explain than since women are less exposed to violence or are not instruments of violence, they tend to have a different worldview from men. I beg to differ. Women across socio-economic cleavages get slaps, lashes, and whips for breakfast, and mind you, this is not of the kinky variety. How people readily assume women are less exposed to violence should get married and experience for themselves how it is to cohabit with males and their sharp instruments.

It is false to assume that women are remotely located in the radius of violence simply because they are not in combat gear and raining down bombs on some strange land and annihilating culture. Come on, women are collateral damges in any form of militarization, whether as a source of comfort to soldiers or are the ones massacred and raped. Perhaps, because of these experiences of war and violence that women tend to develop aversion to them and yearn for peace or are more open to dialogues of peace.

But as I said earlier, gender can be a booby trap. To accept the idea that nurturing is a woman's turf is to fall prey to the same socially-constructed binary categories of males vs. females, animus-anima, yin-yang. The machines of war march forward not because boys will be boys. Gender is not in the equation, not by a far shot. That's silly, as if war were some esoteric idea that is hard to explain. It's that simple:war is real, not metaphorical; war is physical, not metaphysical. To some, war is a neccesity to survive as an economy. War has become both a means and an end.

Meanwhile, there's a continuous revolutionizing of the means of production, the pressure of profit, the development of the production forces amidst repressive relations of power - gelling up to fuel more wars.

Yes, we are running, racing, speeding.....towards destruction.