The rooster is
not competing with the hen when it crows. The hen is not competing with the
rooster when it makes a nest, lay eggs and rears chicks. For the rooster to
think it is better that the hen or the hen to think is better that the rooster
is just a waste of thinking. I spend time watching chickens. I admit it. I get
pleasure out of observing how they forage, how they chase the grasshoppers and
scratch of bugs in the pasture. I see how they run for cover when a shadow
passes overhead. I see how cocky the roosters are. I see how submissive the
hens are. It is incredible to see a broody hen in absolute and resolute determination.
It will not move from those eggs. She has the absolute strength of character to
do what it takes.
When the chicks are born, she will care for them to the point
where she will attack a dog ten times her size or a human 20 times her size in
order to protect her offspring. The rooster leads the hens. It will find food
for them, call he will call them. Step back and allow them to eat the prized caterpillar
he has found or the little snake that he has killed. The rooster will warn the
hens of danger, sometime false alarms, sometimes real threats. He will make the
rooster noises that mean “run for cover” and he will follow the hens in under
the awning or the shade of a tree. The rooster is full of colour, bright
dazzling feathers, a long sweeping tail and a mane of sorts around his neck. He
has a red crown on his head that is his comb, and extravagant jowls that hang
down like a beard. A rooster has two things on its find all the time: Fighting
and fornicating. Even when it wakes up at three in the morning crowing at the
top of its voice, it is thinking of fighting, or at very least trying to warn
other roosters in the vicinity that he will fight them if they come any closer.
Roosters are different to hens. They have a different energy. Rosters are
almost the opposite of hens. They are poles apart. We find the similar polarity
with bulls and cows. Dogs and bitches. Boars and sows. And you know what; our
species is not magically exempt from the law. We too are divided into man and
woman. Men have strong natural tendencies toward certain behaviours and women
have strong natural tendencies toward certain behaviours. But, why am I taking
time to point out such an obvious fact? Why am I taking time to dwell on
something we all know? I suppose because the modern urban life that we have all
grown up in has begun to send us mixed messages that have confused some of us. Our
system has, since the sixties, at least begun to hint that men and woman are
the same actually, and it’s just that they have become conditioned differently.
The feminist movement all over the world is an essential mobilisation against
oppression of people using a gender based philosophy. In the same way there has
been an essential mobilisation against race and class based oppression. So it
is very unpopular, even now, to begin to suggest that men are different to women;
that they are not equal in every way. This is obviously because people
generating arguments justifying inequality are very often trying to defend acts
of oppression against the female part of the population.
A broody "Venda "hen |
What I am advocating
is different to this and quite apart from the discussion of how to confront the
oppression. What I am practicing in my own life, is an awareness of my own
gender. My aim every day is to be conscious of my thoughts, habits and
behaviours. Not necessarily to change them or feel guilt for them, but rather
just to observe them, as a spectator almost, as a loving interested party. My
attempt is not to measure my male thoughts and energy against some standard of
correctness, but rather to try to feel that male energy more deeply. Every one
of us, has inside us, some male energy and some female energy. After all, half
of our genes come from a man and half come from a woman. Of course each of us,
man or woman, is free to explore more of our male energy or more of our female
energy. For me though, in my life, it makes sense for me to feel my “maleness”,
to laugh at it when it comes up with silly suggestions, but to play along with
it where its suggestions seem reasonable or fun. There is nothing in this approach that
leads me to think that I am in competition with the women around me. There is
nothing in this approach that causes me to believe that I am superior in any
way to the women around me. There is nothing in this approach that causes me to
want to go out and be oppressive to the women around me or to any other members
of my species.
But I have seen
in my own life, as I am sure that it is true in the lives of so many others,
that I have caused myself pain and distress, when I have come to see my male
energy as un-progressive and backward or felt guilty perhaps of the kinds of
“boorish” ideas my boy brain may come up with. This censoring of self has lead,
in my mind, to an exercise of "will" over "passion", becoming polite, politically
correct and sanitised in order to live up to a standard of “civilisedness”.
This attempt to be polite and correct has in the past made me weak, it has made
me ill; it has made me to withdraw and become depressed. I will have it no more
in my life. The rooster does not feel guilt for his rooster thoughts and I
would guess that the hens around him are more fully hens because of this
mind-set that acknowledges Law of the Farm number 18: “Roosters will crow and hens will make nests”