Ends and Odds: The Ravings Of an Old Man by Dave Jaffe. What Women said To Me . Part One

   What Women Said To Me by Dave Jaffe. Part One.




        Once upon a time I was an abuser. In fact from my mid teens to my early 30's, I abused women. I never raped, abducted, stalked or incested women. Two or three times I touched and kissed women when I shouldn't have.
     Still, no woman then or now was or is any danger from me. Yet I did say some horrible things to women. Then I went into therapy and tried to gag my abusive mouth. And for the most part I did succeed. Still, as the old  saying goes, "What goes around comes around."
      In the early 1970's the second wave of feminism surfaced. I remember when 25,000 women walked out into the streets of New York City in the summer of 1970 to demand equality. I thought that this was a great event which did move me. At first I supported this movement totally.
"Feminism is a great thing," I told quite a few people.
     Yet the I ran into some young feminists who were extremely abusive. I just responded to them the way the treated to me. I was abusive as they were. "You were crazy back then," one of my co-workers in the early 1970's told me years later. He was right. Back then I was a short, quasi-psychotic very muscular man who was both sad and angry and potentially violent.
     Then in 1975 I started years of therapy. I emerged from therapy as a much thinner, quieter person but full of anxiety. Now I met women who may have seen me as a potential verbal punching bag. They said horrible maybe true things to my face and I didn't argue back.
    "Mister," one visual artist said, "all you do is copy. You don't have an original bone in your body." Another woman, a powerful art bureaucrat didn't like me at all. And she let me know it. "You are one of the most pompous and derivative artists I've met," she said.
   Outside the art world I met other women who insulted me. "You are weird," a neighbor of mine in a housing co-op said. "You are the weirdest person I've ever met." Her view of me, she told me, was held by most people in the co-op. She was probably right about me. I'm an eccentric and always have been.
   In the religious world women also took verbal pot shots at me. One woman in her late 40's erupted in a fury when I put down the late American evangelist Billy Graham. "How dare you insult Billy Graham,"  she just about screamed at me. "This man was my idol when I was young. I listened to his sermons and loved them."
   She went on for about ten minutes praising Graham and trashing me. I just smiled all the time as her rant unfolded. A few months later I left the worship house where this woman unloaded her anger on me and never went back. Her outburst played some part in me leaving that religious place.