Gotta Keep 'Em Outa Equality

The voices of many Catholic men are tinged with a sense of fairness. It is hard to see such fairness, though, when they are so standoffishly aloof about celibate males, pricky or prickless as they may be, about looking up to women, through or around them.

What if they were to hold hands with a bunch of Nuns, try a folk dance in an old barn out in Rome’s suburbs, go one on one with one at a time for lunch, stroll a walk through the Vatican State, fiddle a game of checkers? What if, even when it cannot be imagined?

While working a lifetime in an office, I noted that bachelors had a tough time getting along with women on a casual basis. They either wanted to avoid them or bed them, once, perhaps twice, just to get the feel of what closeness was actually like. Gosh, just look at our poor fellows’ education, how we grew up. I never saw a girl or a woman in the classrooms of high school. Not until college in 1945, and then, they weren’t the cute and perky type at all, but Mother Superior wannabes out to give guys a rough one on one to see who would dance on the glass ceiling. Come to think of it, none of them played football, baseball, ice hockey, or God forbid wrestling in high school or college.In our befuddled youth, sports were similar to the halls of leadership.in the Church. For Men Only. We were it, but we liked girls.

What would ever happen were a bishop to ask an LWCR stalwart, “Come, dance with me.” Touch would be involved, and touch has a way of opening doors, cleaning window panes, shopping for groceries, laughing together at reruns of “I Love Lucy” rather than “Father Knows Best.” While in conference with other women bishops, how many bishops would drop habitual superiority in “Get me a coffee, please?”

When men admit that women are, in fact, superior human beings to their complacency of who’s got it and who hasn’t, then men and women can no longer claim equality. Women are superior. Such an outlandish inner knowledge is perhaps so alien to male mentalities that women are doomed to being accepted only for procreation and service to men. Proof? How often are we surprised, even astonished, when a woman succeeds in surpassing us in skills, maturity, good looks, and common sense?

Nuns are more than housemaids, washerwomen, dainty icons prettifying a male world. They is us, better than us, as good as us, and both of us know it darn well. The deepest masculine fear strikes when a woman gets her foot up on a glass ceiling, alone or holding hands with her sisters, and starts to walk around, realizing fjull well that she belongs. That ceiling has to crack, shatter, break open and the whole structure men have built will all fall down.

Litle wonder that men have a secret motto mumbling: Gotta keep them outa equality, not just outa power.