About ten years ago, one of my then oldest and closest friends phoned to tell me that she had joined a women’s support group who were all going to make a lot of money in an investment scheme. Men were not allowed into this warm supportive sisterhood, just investment-minded, supportive women. It cost a few thousand upfront to join, but she would earn back seven times her original investment. She invited me in.

When she described how this was going to work—every member inviting two new members to ‘invest’ until the person at the top ‘earned’ the big payout, I naturally denounced it as a pyramid scheme, and advised her urgently that it was not only immoral, it was also illegal, and she should have nothing to do with it.

My friend was unmoved. She assured me that it wouldn’t be illegal because they had taken specific steps to bring it within the letter of the law. On the issue of morality, she argued that the women who gave her money would subsequently be able to recoup their money and more when they came to the top of their own pyramid. I pointed out that this could only go on for a limited time before everybody at the bottom lost out. She could not or would not absorb this.

So we began to pressure each other—she even promising to pay the original ‘investment’ for me if I would only come along to the meetings, I to insist that it was wrong, especially as she was somewhat of a public figure and that would surely be an influence on anyone who was invited into the scheme. People would feel flattered and trust her because of her fame, and could she not see it was wrong to take advantage of that?  She, meanwhile, kept begging me to please let her pay my share and just turn up at the meetings.

The conversation ended in a draw. Later I learned, from a mutual male friend who had also tried to reason with her, that men were excluded from the group because they had an uncomfortable habit of pointing out the logical flaw in, and the illegality of, pyramid schemes. The sisterhood didn’t like that.

I was reminded of this incident yesterday when a friend responded to the above post on Facebook from a friend inviting her to join a ‘sisters’ Christmas group. Send just one gift to someone, and receive from 6 to 36 gifts in return! Christmas cheer! What fun!!

Yes, dear reader, yes, I posted a comment that it was not possible for this to happen without a clear loss to all the ‘sisters’ at the bottom of the pyramid. The original poster replied that it wasn’t a pyramid scheme,  but ‘more like a chain’.  And it was, she informed me sulkily, designed to ‘spread a little cheer’ at this season.

I replied that there wouldn’t be much cheer for those who lost out, and posted a link to a description of a pyramid scheme. It was quickly deleted. I posted another comment: “Welcome to the capitalist mindset: 36 for me; none for 36 of you.”

That was deleted, too.  Meanwhile several other women happily posted that they wanted to join, and a little search informs me that this scam has been ricocheting around the net since October.

Yes, I know that for many people ten dollars plus postage isn’t that much. But for some, it might be a lot, and nowhere do I see an admission that, far from 36 or 6 or even one, you are vastly more likely to end up with no gifts at all. And especially at Christmas that could seem pretty cheerless for some.

What’s going on with people’s minds here? This is the third time I’ve run into this strange, very particular denial mindset. Back in pre-internet days, I remember getting a letter from a cousin inviting me to join a ‘women’s support group’: all I had to do was send five dollars to the name at the top of the list and add my name at the bottom (along with a mention of the personal goal I was hoping to fund from the inevitable generosity of strangers), send the list on to the requisite number of women friends, sit back and await a mailbox full of five dollar bills.

So:  the repetition of this curious tripod—the exclusion of men; the mantra that the scheme will ‘help women’; and the extraordinary ability to simply turn a blind eye to obvious facts (even when they are being loudly pointed out to you) and tell yourself that you are being sisterly and supportive while in fact you are aiming to rip other women off, gives me, as the man said, furiously to think.  What allows someone to delude herself like this? How can any woman pretend to herself that the scheme will help ‘sisters’, when the only woman she is thinking of is, clearly, herself?

I suppose most of us, at least those of a certain age, were invited into product pyramid schemes in the days before they were made illegal; I was invited at different times to sell soap, diet powder and cosmetics on such a scheme. And of course those inviting you, men and women, will appear to be thinking of your well-being—I earned money, you can, too!—though no doubt they are primarily thinking of their own good, building their little fiefdoms though ‘bringing you on board’ so you can load up your garage for the foreseeable future with two cubic metres of stuff which is never going to move till you finally toss it. Apart from the fact that here there is actually a product (other than sisterhood) changing hands, self-conscious self-interest of this kind needs no explanation: we know all about that. It’s the apparent total unconsciousness that mystifies me, the sisterhood thing that I can’t get my head around: women using terms like sisters and women’s support group, and apparently really letting themselves believe it. They blind themselves with thoughts of their own goodness in the teeth of the facts—and react with resentment, not comprehension, when anyone tries to pull off the blinders.

Which no doubt is why it’s important to exclude anyone who isn’t so prone to the blinders called sisterhood.

And the blindness doesn’t stop even with public exposure, apparently. Because of course it all blew up in my old friend’s face: in the end her fame counted against her, pretty hideously. But even as she stood refusing to give the money back because the women had signed a legal document gifting it to her, even as she read the exposés in the gutter press, she never faced the truth of her behaviour. She retired behind a self-righteous indignation that anyone could call her motives into question—she, the indefatigable charity worker, she the vegetarian, for God’s sake!—she, as always, had acted from a pure selfless regard for others, even paying to bring needy friends into the scheme in order to help them make a little money.  She was a good, caring, generous person and she therefore could never have ripped off anyone. And anyway, it was all legal.

And this morning, in spite of several warning posts and links about the illegality of the scheme from various people, my Facebook friend has signed up to the secret sister scheme to put a little fun into Christmas and reposted the above invitation. She messaged me that she was just showing support for her friend’s initiative and planned to give any gifts she received to a women’s charity.

Curiously, there’s a major precedent for the mayor’s ban in the 20th century history of Iran: under the Pahlavi Shahs, wearing hijab or chador was first discouraged and then, in the late 1930s, banned. Yes, I know you can’t believe it. But. “Removing hijab became mandatory toward the end of Reza Shah’s rule and the Islamic hijab was considered reactionary. As a result, removing women’s covers by force had become part of routine duties of the Iranian police.” http://www.iranreview.org/content/Documents/The-Removing-of-Hijab-in-Iran.htm

So if there’s no objective reality to these attitudes to women’s bodies, what’s going on?

Coincidentally, I have just begun editing THE MALE CHAUVINIST for re-release in ebook format. I wrote the book in 1983, and here’s my opener:

The sea was calm today. Two sandy-haired, naked children were digging a hole to China with bucket, spade and their bare hands. Kate had seen them before, sitting primly at a table in the taverna with their parents, and they had then been totally unremarkable. Now their unconscious delight in their nakedness, their abandonment, transformed them. They pressed their wet bodies into the sand, they sprawled, they ran, they fell laughing into the sea, quite unaware of any taboo prohibiting the joy they experienced from their bodies. There was no self-consciousness about them, no sly awareness of their bodies as wrong or sinful. Just innocent delight.

 

Which was perhaps not the only sign that the world was changing. Up and down the beach, women of all ages and shapes went topless, demanding and achieving a new freedom— or the illusion of one, Kate reminded herself cynically. Because on most of the beaches of North America and England, these very same women would be protected—relatively decorously— by the now discarded tops of their brief bikinis.

 

As she would herself. And why was that? Why was her freedom being dictated like this by a simple question of geography? And since it was, could it be called freedom? Perhaps it wasn’t a question of emancipation at all, but of fashion? Perhaps she and all the other topless women along the half-mile stretch of Mediterranean sand were simply succumbing to a different style of fetter?

 

It was something to think about. Maybe something to write about, when she could manage the objectivity. For she didn’t want to believe that the freedom she felt in being able to swim or lie on the beach nearly naked and yet unmolested by strange men was only a conditioned response. For years she had felt hampered by the moral code that dictated the particular parts of her body that must remain covered in her particular society; she had felt it alien to herself. No inner voice had ever told her that certain parts of her body were shameful. She had always felt the arbitrariness of it, right from a child, exactly as she would feel now, if a missionary group from a distant planet had insisted that she wear coverings on her knees, or her ears, or her neck. And presumably all these other women now stripping down to the one essential covering still demanded by society felt the same?

 

So, if it was not instinctive in women, which could be proven a thousand ways here in Greece alone, by reference to the ancient Greek glorification of both male and female nudity, what had caused the taboo in the first place? Or who?

 

Well, monotheistic religion, for a start. Judaism, Christianity and Islam all seemed to have gone a little rabid on the subject of female modesty. But of course all the great monotheistic religions had more in common than the One God: they were all also fiercely male-supremacist.

 

Men. Would it always come down to men, in the end? Men, who, in the modem world, saw only certain areas of the body as sexual and therefore insisted— through the power of their ownership over women’s bodies— on their right to keep their possessions hidden from public view?

 

Was that why women of every age and shape grasped this new freedom so determinedly? Because it was more than just the freedom to swim unhampered by an extra bit of cloth? It was women’s staking out of a new territory of ownership over themselves, their own bodies.

 

Worth an essay, anyway, she thought. And how interesting— if predictable— it was, that men responded by de-sexualizing the breast. On this beach, anyway, the female breast was no longer an erogenous zone. The only men who looked more than once, even at those women who were obviously alone, were the old Greek men wandering up and down selling oranges, figs and cherries on the beach.

 

So while women saw this new trend as establishing ownership over their own bodies, men were simply abandoning the importance they had previously given the area called breast, and were satisfied that their ownership was still signified by that one area of the body still left covered. And presumably, if women began stripping completely, men would shift again, taking comfort in some other area of exclusivity, like cooking or sex—giving up territory in one area only to grab it in another, but always, ever, with the determination that women would not be free.

 

If she stripped off the tiny piece of material that lay between her and total nudity now, Kate supposed, she would immediately be plagued by stares and advances from all the lone male cruisers. It would be a sign of some sort, some sort of signal that she had abandoned the right to privacy, that she had no current “owner.” Yet if she moved one-half mile down the beach, to the so-called wild beach, the nudist beach of Corfu, she would attract no more attention than she did now here. Or, if she could go back five years in time, she might be arrested on this beach for having disposed of her bikini top. And not a few of the women now themselves going topless would be sniffing in outrage over her “behaviour.” Five years in the future—well, the trend then might be a continuation towards total nudity, or it might have leapt backwards to conventional modesty; she might get arrested five years in the future, too.

 

And the same people sniffing in outrage. Not, as they thought, because she was indecent. But because she was operating outside of the current trend.

 

I’d never heard of the Iranian ban on chador at the time of writing the above. If it occurred to me while writing to suggest that one day modest dress would be banned, I suppose the idea presented itself only to be dismissed as too far-fetched. Which perhaps only shows how difficult it is to think outside your own box, even when you think you’re doing so.

But I do have one thought on the subject, which I’d like to toss into this very mild-mannered, very Canadian (but nonetheless deeply felt) debate. A clue to what really happened in Parliament at the moment Justin strode so purposefully across the chamber, and it is this:

It’s like going home at Christmas, people. You know how you arrive back at the family homestead a solid, functioning adult with a career and a life, and within half an hour, there you are sulking in your old bedroom, having just shouted obscenities at your sister/brother/mother that haven’t passed your lips since last Christmas?

Activating old patterns. If you tell me it’s never happened to you, it’s because you’re an orphan only child. We are none of us immune to old patterns.

And that would include the Prime Minister. He’s a schoolteacher, innit, folks? He saw this adolescent fracas with some bullying developing, and as he watched, the august parliamentary chamber melted away and through the mist there arose a schoolyard. He was not, of course, the only one who saw it. But in him it triggered an old pattern and he went over to put a stop to the nonsense before it got out of hand.

And that, I put it to you, is it. But like any schoolyard fracas, it’s got the rest of you taking sides, and being true Canadians, I hear, most of you are taking the teacher’s side. (“What do we want? Peace, order and good government!”)

Meanwhile, people, what has happened to the bill that was supposed to offer horribly suffering people an escape from their misery?

My friend John was a good man, the kind the Prophet, if you cared about such things, would have approved of. He was generous of spirit, a proud but open and thoughtful man with an often self-deprecating sense of humour. Highly intelligent, too. He had led a varied and adventurous life, but of all he had achieved, he was proudest of his two daughters. He, you see, was a father of life, not of death.

This is the man you killed. Because you wanted money.

When we were eleven years old, John and I were close friends. My friend Joanna was John’s girlfriend, and my boyfriend Donald was John’s friend. Together we were a gang of four, the popular kids in our Grade 6 class. We ruled benevolently, however. We were inclusive, not exclusive.

I don’t remember now how it came to begin, but we four wrote cryptic love notes to each other. Joanna and I would create a cryptic code, and each send a letter in that code to our own boyfriend. John and Donald had to crack the code, and then they would send letters back in a different code, which we had to discover. I think the attraction in the idea was that we could say what we felt, safe in the idea that the code would never be cracked, and yet knowing it would be. The sweet contradictions of young love.

It was a wonderful year, the best year of my childhood. And then, sadly, I moved away, and never saw any of those friends again. Until one day in my last year of high school, there was a picture of John in the newspaper—he had come to my city to attend a school there. I phoned the school and left a message for John. We dated for awhile.  I still remember that first evening, as we left my home, my sister reminding me, in French, that I had to be in by midnight. I don’t know why she believed that any Canadian high school student would not understand her textbook French. Later that evening, John said to me, “So I have to get you home by midnight.” I was beyond embarrassed, not least because midnight was such a pathetically early curfew, but John’s smile took the sting out of it.  He could have humiliated me. But he was generous, the man you so viciously killed on Monday.

Then we lost touch again. And then, many years later, as is the way of the internet, we connected again. Over many long emails we reminisced, and we caught each other up on our histories and our present. What a life he had led! So full of travel and adventure and courage and daring! Not much left on my bucket list, he said. He had visited, lived and worked in so many countries, so many dangerous and beautiful places. The only country he really wanted still to see was Argentina. And yet he was proudest of his daughters and the chance he had given them in life, raised in so many different places, seeing so much of the world and how others lived. He had given them open minds.

John insisted on reading one of my books and took the trouble to give me a serious critique. So many people don’t read a friend’s book, nervous they may not like it and won’t know what to say, or because they just can’t be bothered, or, in my particular case, because they ‘don’t read romance’.  John had no such inhibitions. He told me he had ordered more of my titles because both he and his partner enjoyed them.

But he did wonder “why sheikhs?”.  I’m guessing he’d have wondered that even more, facing your villainy every day for seven months. Ya sheikh!  But you give everything you touch an evil name. Islam included. You and the executioner you are father of.

I know that other of his friends could give a much fuller, richer picture of John, but whatever else they said, they would attest to his kindness and generosity, his sense of adventure, his intelligence, his humanity.

But you wanted money. So none of that mattered.

There is one more thing about John, however. I wonder if he told you, I wonder if he tried to warn you…did he? Is that why you seemed to single him out for especially vicious, merciless, clumsily brutal treatment? Did he protest that you were in danger from him?

Only a short while before you kidnapped him for money, John had been diagnosed with tuberculosis. He was astonished, of course. People like us just don’t get TB. He complained that he would have to take the drugs for nine long months before he could be considered cured. Did you know that? Did he warn you that he needed his medicine? Perhaps you didn’t pay attention.

You should have.

Tuberculosis. Did he cough and sneeze during those seven months when you held him prisoner and so bravely stood over him with guns and machetes—father of executioners that you are—when you brutalized him? Did you care? No? But you should have cared. Even if you never came nearer to him than to bathe your hands in his blood when you murdered him, you should care. Because everyone who breathed near him now has the bacteria in their lungs. And sooner or later, one in ten will develop the disease.

I know that you are the one. I know it. You have the disease now, and it will manifest—oh, soon! You will think it is flu, probably, but you are a dead man. Oh, yes, this is a disease that will kill if it is not treated, and how will you get treatment, a wanted man, a hunted killer? You will not even know you should try.

But it’s not only yourself that you have killed in killing my friend. Oh, no, for you are truly Father of the Executioner, Father of Death! You bring death to all you meet now. Do you breathe on your wife when you climb on her like the mule that you are? (For I am sure that you ignore the Prophet’s instruction to ‘send a kiss as messenger’, as you ignore all his precepts.) Then you have also killed your wife. Do you exchange caresses with the one whom you call your friend, whom you love like a brother and more than a brother? You have killed him, too. Do you kiss your mother? Your father? Your daughters? They are dead already.

And this is most certain of all—your lovely, sweet son, the child you dote on more than anything else in life, the one who carries your bloodline into the future—will you kiss him when at last he is born? Stroke his beautiful curly head? Carry him against your neck?  That sweet boy—you are his murderer as surely as you murdered John. And that, I know, will hurt you more than mother, father, sister, brother, daughter, friend, companion and wife together. Your son is the joy of your heart, isn’t he? The jewel of your soul, your all. He is dead. By your own hand, oh Father Executioner, Father Death.

You will have time to say goodbye, probably. None of John’s family or friends had that, but you will be able to watch your lovely boy begin to cough, to sicken, to become weak. Probably before you die of the disease yourself, you will be able to see him fade away, hold his hand on his deathbed as the blood comes coughing up, and know that it is you who have killed him, that it is your touch, your kiss that has dealt this blow.

Will you see the justice of it, I wonder?

Lo, you are become Death, the Destroyer of your own world.

Hey–I’m doing a virtual book tour at the moment. You can enter to win some lovely bubble bath to use while you are in the bath reading this…
goo.gl/ZwBUKY

Get your copy at Amazon:

Amazon US

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I also discuss what I’ve been reading lately, in both fiction and non-fiction. Rachelle also had a brilliant question for me: If you could go back and change the ending to any novel you’d like, which would it be and what would be the change?

Head over to Rachelle’s Window to find out more…

Katheryn also asks me about my current projects, one of which might surprise you.

Please head over to Katheryn’s blog to read more.

My hero is a Canadian Indian, from an invented tribe called the Chopa. I can’t remember now how Johnny Winterhawk came into my life. I only know that it was several years before I could feel I understood my hero and his background well enough to embark on telling his story–and even then I wasn’t sure I really got him. Re-reading the book as I prepared it for eBook release, I realized that my difficulties arose whenever I wasn’t listening to what my character was saying, what he was trying to tell me about himself. There is, I’m convinced, no more lethal mistake a writer can make. So now I’ve done some fairly substantial rewriting, and I think I’ve found my way to the real Johnny Winterhawk and his story at last. He has waited a long time for it.

The story was fuelled by Johnny’s rage against the injustices suffered by his people at the hands of the ruling class in Canada, and by my own. And lest you think that the issues presented in SEASON OF STORM will have undergone a sea-change in the past thirty years, this just in—only 3.8% of the population of Canada is aboriginal, but nearly half of the 30,000 children in foster homes are aboriginal. And nearly a quarter less money is spent per aboriginal child in welfare services than is given to others.

I fear that the biggest change may have been in nomenclature—the the Department of Indian Affairs is now called the Department of Aboriginal Affairs.

Some people, I know, don’t like the term ‘Indian’–but as far as I can make out, most of those who shy away from the word are not actually themselves Indian. Certainly in the days when I was researching the background for the book, no Indian told me the term was offensive. I have retained the term Indian because the book is of its time: the story takes place in 1982. The term First Nation had not yet been coined, and ‘aboriginal’ was, I think, then used only of Australian first nation peoples.

I’ve said a lot about editors, here and there, so now I have to say this: my editor on this book was a better editor than I let her be at the time. I didn’t listen to her any more than to Johnny Winterhawk.  As I read the book and saw places where I’d gone wrong, I could hear her voice again, suggesting changes at some of those very points.  And I could hear myself  dismissing her.  I’m really sorry for that, Laurie. But I have, belatedly, taken your points on board.

So here at last is Johnny Winterhawk’s story—it will be up on Amazon very soon. I hope you’ll enjoy reading it.  He’s a lovely guy.