That’s not important — I know nothing about Uzbek culture — but it’s what I used symbolically in a dream.  I was on a train, and I watched a young woman dying by poison.  At the end, she had seizures and flung herself through the window onto the ground outside the train.  People laughed, and I realized that’s the part every viewer looks forward to (the seizures, as entertainment).

Then I was gripped by the poison.  I was so surprised!  I had only a few moments, felt the poison killing me, didn’t understand why it was my turn, and then acceded — said to myself, “Oh well, that’s what happens when you’re an Uzbek.”

Awake, I think I was dreaming about the power of belonging.  We don’t know who we are unless we’re a member of something.  Since my “something” gave me a reduced and lonely idea of myself, I’m still struggling to withdraw my identity from that small group (my Uzbekistan, my family).

Do I — do I — agree with my local culture?  Is it okay for me to belong in something like a group that administers death and laughs?  No.  I have to shift some of my identification out of my group and onto myself.

Especially since I come from a group that barely registered my reality, it’s a challenge.  I’m still pale, compared to my vivid awareness of them.  I need to pay more attention to my feelings, what makes sense to me, what I prefer — and then trust those perceptions, base my life on them.  The hardest part is believing me instead of the group will.  I think it’s an act of faith, and practice (making it familiar) will help.

I’m starting to believe I’m not an Uzbek.  I need to get off that train.

We confuse the baby and the bathwater in two pervasive, important ways.  One is (feminine) beauty, and the other is sexuality.  Both involve men as the bad guy, but that’s not right, either, because the men who swim in these distorted waters also lose parts of themselves.

Beauty affects us all.  We cherish a vase, a painting, or jewelry made yesterday or thousands of years ago.  We invest billions in making ourselves more beautiful.  As Archie the cockroach (of “Archie & Mehitabel”) wrote: if the butterfly people swooned over in the elevator had been a cockroach, they would have stepped on it.  We care about and respond to beauty.  We can’t help it.  It pleases us.

That same beauty has been co-opted by romance and male preferences, right?  Men won’t look at us unless we’re nubile, have the perfect body du jour, wonderful hair, etc.  That makes some women (including me, historically) decide to ignore their own physical self.  I’m damned if I’m going to please some man, the way my male-worshipping mother did.

But the problem is the male-worship, not the beauty.  My mother mis-used beauty (as do millions of other women) in a power relationship.  More beauty = more power to attract.  Yes, that’s often true, but it’s about power — and not really about beauty.  Beauty becomes a tool, a means toward a pre-selected end.  Beauty is so much more than that.

I wish early feminism had made this distinction.  Many of us deliberately didn’t beautify ourselves, because beauty was contaminated by the historical injustice of male authority.  I want beauty back without caring whether it pleases some male.  If he likes it, or dislikes it, is peanuts compared to its real importance.

Then there’s sex, again in the realm of power.  Any female who’s been sexually exploited feels the predominance of power in a realm that should have nothing to do with power.  Sexual connection is a grand thing, celebrated by poets and other artists for centuries.  It has its own beauty, immense and profound.

I meant it when I wrote that the men suffer, too.  Men who view beauty as a commodity aren’t able to wash in its soul-restoring waters.  Men who see sex as an outlet for their own urges don’t experience the earth-centering connection of a sexually sharing relationship.  They’ve been as brainwashed as the women.  It’s a shame.  Everybody loses; even the folks who sell us ways to be more beautiful or more sexy, because their souls are corrupted.  And our culture loses, because we squander some of our richest human resources.  Look at the ugliness we create . . . .

So enjoy beauty, your beauty, the beauty of others and of the world.  It isn’t guilty or shallow or frivolous.  It’s eternal.  And if your sexuality has been exploited, take it back; it’s too precious to leave in the hands or mind of someone who doesn’t even know what he was playing with.

Beauty or sex, we need to save the baby.  Toss the dirty bathwater, but keep what matters.

P.S.  I write using the dominant male-female relationship paradigm; the same values apply regardless of gender.