Uncharacteristically kind words about Tennessee

As most of you reading this know, I have certain "issues" with the state of Tennessee, god's gift to the collector of human oddity. For those of you who don't know, these stem almost wholly from my experiences with the Tennessee Stage Company.

This group produced my play The Girl in the Boat in 2003, and thanks to some diva actors and an amateur director, screwed it up all to hell. In these things, I take as my role model Sweeney Todd: He never forgets and he never forgives.

Hence, on occasion, I've been known to be a tad knee-jerk, some might even say blanket judgemental, in my remarks about the state. However, when I can, I do like to acknowledge the one or two good things (apart from the music) that have come out of the duck-humping, racist, rock-stupid, anti-sex, hillbilly, legalized wife-raping...sorry.

Anyway, one of those good things is bloggers, specifically female bloggers. I've linked to the Tennessee Guerilla Women many times, both here and on the old blog. Today they led me to a new (to me) blog called Tiny Cat Pants where I found this saddening, but probably not totally inaccurate, monologue headlined It Starts When You're Always Afraid:

This brings me to the second (the first being that our very bodily incarnation is seen, rhetorically, as some kind of appropriate insult), but closely intertwined way we live lives very different from yours: We don't trust you. We trust particular individuals of you, more or less, but in general, we don't trust you not to hurt us.

Here's why. You've raped or almost raped one in six of us and two-thirds of us knew you when you did it. When we love you, we have a one in three chance that you're going to beat us up at least once.

Another good blogger with the misfortune to live in Tennessee (Knoxville, yet) is hanging up his spurs, so I suppose it's good to know women like these have it covered.