Just another misogynist story

I'd wanted to write something more involved and quote-heavy for tonight, but I'm not feeling up to it. So you'll get the rant about gender ambiguous characters in webcomics in a few days probably. For now you get an anecdote. For some who run across this page, it will sound like I'm belabouring the mundane. Others may just be annoyed at me for telling it. Either way, I'll bet you wouldn't have considered the story worth telling.

 

I was spending some time out in the country, at around... six? The oldest boy would have been around eleven. Another a year younger than me. It was morning. The men were long gone to work the factories or fields as the case may be. We sat down, seeing another couple of locals approach across the fence, in the neighbouring yard. A nine year old was leading his little brother, younger than any of us. Four years old? Three? Tottering, still. Tottering more than usual. They stopped by us and we crouched in the dirt or cement path respectively so he could show us his little brother's legs, half-annoyed, half-joking. See what he did? See what he did now?

I honestly don't remember what the littlest boy's crime had even been. What's important is that it had pissed off his grandmother. So she'd beaten him with stinging nettles. All across his legs up to his butt. His thighs, most of his lower half was covered not just in the usual switch-marks but a nearly continuous rash and raised welts from the toxin. He'd stopped crying, a bit sullen, breathing heavily, face contorted in concentration, not very talkative but glad at the attention we were all giving him, though his brother had to keep slapping his baby-fat little hands away so he wouldn't scratch. It was obvious our criminal didn't quite understand the whole sequence of justice administration. Our oldest representatives, the ten-ish year olds, tried to say something mature and authoritative about minding your elders but it didn't quite come out right, garbled itself past their lips. All us boys had a nervous, forced half-laugh at the whole thing through the fence, then both groups got up and went our separate ways, and that was the beginning of another summer childhood day.

 

Not the usual whippin' but still falling within the scope of the great burden of the nesting instinct. Commonplace. Unremarkable. Happens a hundred million times a day all over the world.

Do you find yourself automatically workshopping excuses for the grandmother in your mind? Would you suffer that effacing, revisionist impulse if the gender roles were reversed?

Matriarchal benevolence.

We've all just agreed not to keep track.