<\/p>\n
Another comment, this one from Magni Olla, whose words, I sensed, fell on the group with some discomfort.\u00a0 I had no idea what she was saying but it sounded distinctly bitchy to me.\u00a0\u00a0 Linnlahkeh again faithfully translated, though I thought I read embarrassment on her face:\u00a0 \u201cMagdi Olla think the modern ways have make our daughters too\u2026 leisure?\u201d<\/p>\n She looked at me to provide whatever word she was grasping for.\u00a0 I looked back at her blankly, wracked my brain for possible substitutes.<\/p>\n \u201cLazy?\u201d\u00a0 I finally offered, tentatively.<\/p>\n Linnlahkeh smiled broadly.\u00a0 \u201cYes.\u00a0 That is it.\u00a0 Lazy.\u201d\u00a0 She dropped her voice a bit to add, \u201cMagni Olla also say this mean we do not have the true khekhli<\/i> now, either, she say young women like \u2026easy way, do not care about tradition.\u201d<\/p>\n Yes, definitely something snide there.\u00a0 But what did she mean by the khekhli<\/i>?\u00a0 I had to ask.<\/p>\n Linnlahkeh struggled to translate.\u00a0 \u201cWhat is your word for this?\u00a0 When the fhyllyana <\/i>is done most correct, when young woman is success, \u00a0have child inside, you understand?\u00a0\u00a0 She sacrifice herself for to get child, the he must serve his second purpose.\u00a0 This is the\u2026 pure?\u00a0 Puriting?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cPurification?\u201d I suggested, feeling a little queasy.<\/p>\n \u201cYes.\u00a0 Purification.\u00a0 You know this.\u00a0 A matriarch who do not do this allows the\u2026shame? The\u2026 taint?\u00a0 to visit their house into the next generation.\u00a0 It is for honor of the family, for honor of the young woman \u2026\u201d she struggled again for the right word, \u201cThe ancient teachings very clear.\u00a0 Male who serves first purpose must serve second purpose.\u00a0 It is sacred to our people.\u00a0 I am sorry you not come at a time when you can see a khekhli<\/i>.\u00a0 I would like to know how it is same or different than yours.\u201d<\/p>\n Linnlahkeh then quietly added something I took to be her own comment.\u00a0 \u201cMagdi Olla has those who follow her, who also believe the khekhli<\/i> that is done after the Magdena Magna\u2019s new ways to get child, that it is not right, not\u2026pure. They will not partake.\u00a0 There is some\u2026tensing?\u00a0\u00a0 Tension?\u00a0 Yes.\u00a0 Only an Elder of her stature could say such a thing.\u00a0 I hope you forgive the not pleasant talk.\u201d<\/p>\n I had absolutely no response to this tortured explanation.\u00a0 First purpose?\u00a0 Second purpose?\u00a0 It didn\u2019t sound like they were talking about heavy lifting.\u00a0 I had no idea what she meant by that word \u201cpartake\u201d, either, and the deeper we went, the less I trusted Linnlahkeh\u2019s translating capabilities.\u00a0 I took a long moment to sip my drink, trying to connect these dots.\u00a0 Childbirth.\u00a0 Ugliness.\u00a0 Modern fertilization.\u00a0 Ritualized impregnation.\u00a0 What the hell went on here?\u00a0 Either I was totally misreading things, or this culture was seriously, maybe dangerously, twisted.<\/p>\n My confused thoughts were interrupted by more questions coming from the ladies of the Circle.\u00a0 Clearly, this was all just the stuff of their everyday lives.\u00a0 Instead they wanted to know more about me\u2026 since I was never able to have children, then I had remained pure?\u00a0 Was that the source of my wisdom and old age?\u00a0 They greatly envied me.<\/p>\n My strength and power must truly be great, that I was able to be in direct contact with my manlings without their even being appropriately robed and veiled.\u00a0 Was I not repulsed by them?\u00a0 (more laughter) Did they require much beating to subdue their urges and make them serve loyally?<\/p>\n I was having to fight waves of panic now.\u00a0 What I thought I was hearing stretched my ability to believe.\u00a0 Surely it couldn\u2019t be that they used men for fertilization and then… that \u2018second purpose\u2019?\u00a0 Oh, god, this wasn\u2019t good.<\/p>\n Just where were<\/i> all the men here?\u00a0 Where did they keep them?\u00a0 And what did they do to them?<\/p>\n Yet, here were these perfectly bright, lovely, elegant women, chatting on amiably about a life that was obviously normal to them.\u00a0 While Linnlahkeh was talking to the others, my mind wandered off, and all too horribly, the memory of Rosie popped into my head.\u00a0 Rosie, from the Women\u2019s Shelter, in another lifetime, on another world.<\/p>\n Rosie was yet another abuse victim I counseled in that long-ago, far-away job.\u00a0 I saw her sporadically over several months, always when she ran to us after her \u201cfianc\u00e9\u201d had beaten her black and blue.<\/p>\n And every time, once she\u2019d had a chance to catch her breath, she would explain to me very calmly and logically how much he loved her, how well he treated her, how the latest injuries were only an isolated incident, and due solely to her own failure to please.\u00a0 Then she would go back into the same violent house, until she was back again.\u00a0 Until she just stopped showing up, and we never heard from her again, never heard whether anyone ever even found her body.<\/p>\n Talking to Rosie, trying to use my own logic in the face of her crazy rationalizing, was what finally convinced me that the world truly was mad.\u00a0 It was dealing with that madness that drove me on to my own inner quest, desperately seeking whatever I could find that would help me deal with the insanity all around me. I knew I either had to find something that made sense, or I would go mad myself.<\/p>\n That\u2019s what I was remembering now, that totally blank expression on Rosie\u2019s face when I tried to even suggest that what she called love was actually something far from that.\u00a0 Rosie simply knew what she knew.\u00a0 If love had always been delivered with a fist, then that\u2019s what love was.<\/p>\n That\u2019s what was hitting me right then.\u00a0 That sense of total disorientation, the realization that there was no communication here, translations or not.\u00a0 These women were worlds apart from me.\u00a0 This wasn\u2019t just a matriarchal society.\u00a0 It was misandrist.<\/p>\n Bet you didn\u2019t know there was a word for it \u2013 misandry – the hatred or dislike of men.\u00a0 The masculine version of misogyny.\u00a0 Not something we heard a lot about back on Earth, where patriarchal societies were still the norm \u2013 at least when I left, they were.\u00a0 I\u2019d stumbled onto the word years before, reading some of the more extreme feminist literature.\u00a0 All those extremists always gave me the willies. And boy, oh, boy, was I getting a grand case of the willies now.<\/p>\n My thoughts kept spinning back to Earth.\u00a0 I remembered how people in China, faced with a governmentally imposed one-child limit, would kill girl babies in hopes of having a boy the next time.\u00a0 I remembered how women were treated in such medieval ways in many parts of the world, things like honor killings, even in the 21st<\/sup> century.\u00a0 Was it really so surprising that somewhere in the universe there would be a world where they\u2019d simply flipped the sexism model?\u00a0\u00a0 Once a skewed viewpoint gets codified into ritual, cultures run off the rails everywhere.<\/p>\n The trouble was, that intellectual understanding did nothing to tamp down my rising fear.\u00a0 I\u2019d come here with three others, three men.\u00a0 And being a man on Ardros, I was starting to figure out, was a very, very precarious position.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n < previous\u00a0<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 next ><\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cSpeaking of my manlings,\u201d I said, rising from the low seat, \u201cI think I need to get back and keep an eye on them.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" < previous\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 next > \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 They were eager to give me the scoop on Ardrossian accomplishments.\u00a0 Women of the inner circle, they gushed, now had access to scientific fertilization methods.\u00a0 No one in the higher … Continue reading ![\"300px-The_Earth_seen_from_Apollo_17\"](\"https:\/\/hanilives.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/300px-The_Earth_seen_from_Apollo_17-150x150.jpg\")
<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 They were eager to give me the scoop on Ardrossian accomplishments.\u00a0 Women of the inner circle, they gushed, now had access to scientific fertilization methods.\u00a0 No one in the higher circles had had to engage in the ugliness for many years.<\/p>\n