The Cannon and the Lady

From the Dreamweaver archives…an exploration…
originally posted June 5, 2011

They were just snapshots, really, the first few were, taken with a good camera but still more snapshots than anything… maybe with just tiny touch of naughty to them, the playful kind of getting away with it in public since the only person who saw anything was this very old man who'd been staring anyway, the one who got a bit of a laugh for the expression on his face after he'd blinked twice and got his eyes uncrossed only to discover what he thought he'd seen wasn't to be seen anymore. You know, the kind of pictures a couple of high spirited girls bring home from a holiday by the sea. I glanced over the first few, and smiled, my friends were having fun.

The setting for this good humored mischief was a place I'm sure had seen its' share of drama over the centuries, most fortresses have. There were stone battlements, and a huge cannon pointed out to sea, a monster of its kind. Just from looking I'd say in the ratings of the day at least a forty pounder, a big, big gun. Early on they'd been climbing on the cannon, playing on it, but later in the set the tone of the pictures changed as the girls went to work to say something serious. They sparked a thought in me, they are way good at doing that, a deep thought having to do with the nature of the world we live in, a possible answer for that hardest of questions… why?



Alex is a fine photo model when she wants to be, when she puts on an expression it is total, seamless, all encompassing. In several images she posed beside that monster cannon, almost caressing it, with an expression on her face so powerful, so totally different from any I'd ever seen her wear it captured my total attention. For all that her stance was that of a caress the eyes she showed in those photo's were the eyes of a gunner standing beside that cannon with the full intent of blowing five hundred souls into hell and damnation along with their ship. I thought in the moment "ah, so that's what she looks like when she's really angry, when she's ready to go to war." I thought that, and something in the back of my head kind of went "click" and the wheels started turning. It took a bit, but a couple of hours later the thought finished surfacing through the layered resistance of social and gender stereotypes.

Most folks would say a cannon is a masculine thing, phallic, symbolic of powerful anger, but what dawned on me (so slowly, so late to the day… damn but I'm dumb sometimes…) it can equally be set as a female thing… the chamber set as the womb, the barrel as birth canal, the projectile as the new life to be ejected. Stating the obvious, of course… but all life begins with woman, woman has primary input into that new life… what percentage of mother's don't actually birth their sons but fire that new life as a projectile against a world they don't like?

Everyone says, assumes, that the male of the species propagates the majority of the violent aggression, and everyone equally says the male of the species is also more prone to be influenced by logic, the rationality of the causal. Hmmmm… If neither are true statements then I'm totally lost in the weeds… if both are true then there has to be a third element in play but utterly unknown which allows two such diverse, almost antagonistic things to co-exist on the same platform. Still and all though the fact is the world does suffer greatly to violent aggression, and the standing observation is it is an almost exclusively male thing. Further, it is an equally valid observation the mature male, even and especially the combat veteran are those who as the poet observed truly do pray for peace. It is not the men who desire to be involved in war, it is the boys, the emotionally immature (to what ever cause, and suddenly I'm wondering about the profile of the average politician) male… chronological age no issue. This long standing state of affairs, the perennial impotence of all common sense to effectively moderate such destructive aggression gives ample clue there must be at least one power player not even fully identified yet.

Is there a component to the male aggressive not accounted for? It is a well established thing no one is 100% one gender or the other, take any of us apart to catalog how we're put together you'll find a blend of attitudes, characteristics, assigned male or female making up the functional components of our psyches, which leads me to the point about Alex and the cannon… examine the component labeled 'aggression' in men… what part does the feminine components of anger and aggression play… the feminine components of truly feral anger and aggression the male is almost certain to carry, but may not even know is there, never acknowledges, because it is sheltered from his sight behind the boundaries of being heterosexual? Could it be those feminine components of anger and aggression are of such vast emotional power that if ever once activated by propaganda or pride the emotionally immature male is unable to control them by intellect? The girls are more fierce than the boys, they really are. They normally only give battle in defense of home and offspring as in all other species, and like all other species when they do fight they are fierce far beyond the male.

What if it is the utter ferocity of the feminine components of human aggression that takes the male beyond his ability to stop making war?