There’s a guy in a yoga class I like to go to who is, like me, a faithful practitioner.
Probably I’ve known him for ten years in the way one knows people at yoga. The eight years of Obama, the two years before that which in retrospect seems like a sylvan time (relatively).
Everything now for me, and for most everyone I know, is a matter of before and after. The word prelapsarian just about says it all.
Before the fall of man (and woman) though it doesn’t mention the woman part in any dictionary I can find.
This guy has a beautiful practice, one he obviously takes very seriously. He comes into the studio, nips into the men’s dressing area, takes off his jeans, coils his luxuriant chestnut hair that falls down his back into a ballerina bun on top of his head. He reappears in an outfit I can only describe as a sort of adult one-sie. Unlike a baby one-sie, the chest is bare (and hairy), it doesn’t fasten at the crotch, and there are little thin straps. It’s kind of a combination one-sie and over-all made of some knit material. He has them in blue, black, red and green. Out on the street in his jeans with his long hair and beard, he looks like your basic long-haired beefcake. In his one-sie, however, he looks truly strange. Once years ago, when I saw him outside of class, I told him I liked his yoga outfits (because I do). He smiled and told me, “I make them myself.”
Why do I like his odd get-ups? He and they symbolize everything I love about having gotten away from a small town upbringing where a guy with long hair and a beard to this day, wouldn’t be all that comfortable being seen in public with his hair in a ballerina bun, wearing a one-sie made by his own hand.
In my neck of the woods, he can come to class and nobody bats an eye, anymore than eyes are batted when celebrities walk down the streets, or occasionally come to class, it’s part of the culture, part of the scene, we’re all cool, we get it.
The world according to the new regime never will get it. Because they don’t want to get it. They don’t want to yield power they feel they have already lost. Why male power somehow must be linked to control over women is a major problem in my book. But that’s the bottom line: the men get to tell the women what to do, when to do it, and with whom. Men are men. They wear suits, (not one-sies) and women, nice women don’t sleep around, (only men get to do that) and should be punished for pleasure, should smile and always be pleasing to the eye—the male eye—that is beholding them.
Our president elect ran on just such a platform and won. Against a woman, of course.
I was talking about this the other night at a party with a female a little older than my son. I asked her how she supposed just such a man won the presidency.
“Were you surprised?”
“No, not really.”
“Neither was I,” I replied. “But I grew up in the south and I’m more than twenty years older than you.”
“A lot of my friends,” she said. “Read the fifty shades book. Did you?”
“No,” I replied again. “A good friend of mine almost dropped me on account of my sarcastic remarks about that book, this was way before Trump, tell me what’s the connection?”
“The guy in the book, I can’t remember his name, gets to dominate her completely. He’s super rich, he’s super controlling, he ties her up, she’s his special one—and she’s a virgin. It’s his way one hundred percent!”
“I didn’t know the heroine in the book was a virgin,” I replied softly, really in awe of what she said. “But it makes sense.”
Gentle reader, think about it. The fifty shades book explains the 51 percent of the women in this country who voted for Trump.
“Thank you!” I told my younger friend. “You made my day.”
And she did. And she didn’t.
by 
