The Problem of Powerful Women

Why we need to stop apologizing for being strong

My lower lip is crispy. I burned it riding a fine horse for eight unbelievable days in the Maasai Mara with Offbeat Safaris just recently. That entailed crossing a roaring, hippo and croc-filled river, by horse, twice.

Shortly after that, I was in another part of Kenya on rhino patrol with armed guards, striding through the tall grass at the rhino conservancy Ol Pejeta. The Kenyan photographer leaned over and whispered, “If the rhino charges you, run up the nearest tree.”

We both looked around in all directions. There were three rhinos. One small tree; a very very very long way away tree, through armpit-high grass, which could hide lions, cheetahs, jackals and much more. There were four of us, and the tree we spotted might hold one.

An adult rhino can run 31 mph. The world’s top Olympians, which kindly, I am not, can get up to 27 mph at best, and that’s not while dressed in camo gear, heavy hiking boots, on uneven ground, through armpit-high grass.

The photographer and I grinned at each other. Fuck it. We cracked up and kept striding through the tall grass, sweating rivers in the hot African sun. Kindly. You get my drift. Happily, nobody got pissed, nobody got trampled.

But I got a reputation.

On the way back to Nairobi, Simon, my ETrip Africa guide, told me that the people I’d spent time with at the cow corrals, herding the animals into a spray shed for tick-borne disease prevention, out on rhino patrol, out riding, and all the rest all commented on how strong I was. I was up around 3:30 every morning raring to go. I often skipped meals because the adventure was coming up too soon, happy with half a banana because animals don’t bloody well wait for you to finish your French toast.

Simon told me that other people — especially Americans, especially my age- and even more, especially older American men — can’t be bothered to go look at these miracles of nature if an omelet is in the offing.

Will you honestly. You spend ten grand to get over here and an omelet is more important than witnessing a crocodile leap out of the water at a gazelle?

My endurance is legendary. So is my emotional strength, my character backbone, and my commitments. So are all my favorite female friends, and the male friends I treasure. That’s not bragging. We’ve all paid a very, very high price to get to this point.

Toughness: emotional, mental, physical and spiritual, are built, not born into most of us.

Medium peep Vanessa Torre, who is one of my favorite writers, penned a piece that I found utterly delightful but at the same time deeply annoying because I can relate all too well, titled “Why Should I Care If I Intimidate Men?”

My favorite quote from her piece is:

“I’ve found that many men will tell you they love a strong woman up until the moment you demonstrate said strength and then you realize they do not, in fact, love strong women.”

I can’t count the times over my good long life that I’ve run into precisely this.

The last BF was all agog about my muscles (we’re both bodybuilders), my epic adventure trips, and so very much more. However, when he moved in, he was full of suggestions about how it was “time for me to stop doing all that” (and what, Sparky, clip your fucking ingrown toenails for you?) and was super-critical about just about everything else.

I didn’t bother to ask him for help when I single-handedly moved a very, very heavy sleep couch from a front room to the garage, sorting out all the complex angles, weights, and all the rest to get said couch into the garage. Yes, I fucked up my kitchen linoleum, but I had replacement tiles. I had more fun giving myself a pat on the sweaty back that I didn’t need help from him or anyone else, to wait for it meant a long delay.

Back in the 1980s, a lovely female bodybuilder who got me even more committed to the sport was dating a fellow bodybuilder. This was a 5'10" Amazon of a woman, hugely powerful. I watched her ask (unnecessarily) for help, feign weakness, and primp in front of this guy. They got married. Now they’re not. I don’t know this, but I suspect that my buddy got tired of having to sell herself down the river to bolster her husband’s delicate ego.

I am tired of men who find fault with the fact that not only did I do 100 men’s pushups on my 67th birthday, but I have repeated that feat several times since then.

I am sick and tired of baby men who attack me on online dating for doing what I do for the love of it because I can. I do the work, train hard, eat smart, and put the time in. I work my butt off for the right to climb huge mountains, kayak the Arctic ocean, and river raft Class V rapids on the Nile in Jinja, Uganda.

I would like to see the man who can, as I did, at 62, fall down some 32 concrete stairs, smash my pelvis in two places, sustain a serious concussion (my 16th at the time), break an elbow and a wrist, then get the fuck up, throw my luggage into my car, walk up those same steps while spraying blood in all directions, get to the hotel reception desk, ask for an ambulance, walk up another two flights of stairs, then sit laughing my ass off in a spreading pool of blood until the EMTs got there. Because it was funny as shit.

The EMTs were laughing as hard as I was when I told them why (and then I got my morphine, which made me laugh even harder, but that’s another story).

Show me the man who can do that in his sixties.

And even better, show me the man who has the balls to hang out with a woman who can do that and not feel the compulsion to control, put down, criticize, mock, stop or otherwise demean that strength.

I’m not out to prove anything. This isn’t about being better than or stronger than. This just happens to be my life, what I love to do, and how hard I’m willing to work to have this life. I don’t have any control over someone else’s insecurities. If guys take my inherent strength as an insult to their manhood, then I might posit that said manhood is in serious need of the Little Blue Pill indeed.

My last BF had a gorgeous bodybuilder’s body and was physically strong. He had the emotional strength of an earthworm and had a lovely habit of wriggling out of every single situation that required emotional strength. Sex? Sure. The worm showed up. Character? Personal responsibility? Bass bait.

Vanessa is right when she said that what she wants, and what I have wanted, and what all the potent, powerful, strong women I know also want, is a man who has big muscles in his emotions.

While I love nice manners, I could care less about Hercules. I am not the girl who will kneel on the ground hanging on to Conan’s bulging calf, thank you.

I do my own mountain climbing, pitch my own tents, chop my own wood, and if necessary, can tend to my own wounds.

Because sometimes I have to. I rode for four days across dusty, dirty Tanzania on the back of my camel Dominique, escorted by four Maasai and a Meru man, with three large holes in my right side caused by my Kinesio tape. I had to keep those holes washed and clean, we had no bandages, and all our cook Raymond had was a tiny bar of pink hotel soap. I can’t even see the scars anymore, but boy those big holes hurt like hell back then.

I can easily pick up a hundred-pound barbell if necessary. I will not ask for help if I don’t need it because I need to stay strong, as age does what age inevitably does — it demands that I keep working and pushing harder and harder to stay strong.

The sad part about this is that so many men believe that simply by virtue of being male that means they are stronger — yeah, dude, like my aging father, who was so terrified of his aging process that he insisted repeatedly that I arm wrestle him (how puerile, but that’s my point). But he didn’t possess the moral strength to agree to treat me like an adult after I turned 35. Growing up was just too hard.

Well, as I age towards 70, I’d have much preferred that the ridiculous arguments about strength, what that really means and in what context, be over and done with. But with Dumpf in office, the issue is bigger than ever, with masses of baby men terrified of the hordes of women who, because of how we are designed, are often better endurance runners and rock climbers.

That’s going to continue, boys.

We are often better managers, doctors, lawyers, CEOs, across the board. I am not going to apologize that you feel threatened. Sometime in kindergarten, you were taught to share. That didn’t suddenly stop at puberty. The good guys get it. The baby men don’t.

This isn’t about competition. It’s about recognizing that some women are geared this way naturally. Just like some men are more geared towards home duties, child-rearing, and cooking. We like what we like, and we are good at what we’re good at. Assigning gender roles is imprisoning, belittling, and demeaning. Accusing a man of being less than a man because he makes a terrific parent while his wife is a badass CEO is just so twentieth century.

Having lived through half of the last century, I think I can speak to what it’s been like trying to struggle into the new one while still hamstrung by the last.

I might heartily invite men to find new ways to grow up, rather than bank on their dwindling bank accounts of physical strength. When I had rotator cuff surgery shortly after the ex moved in back in May of 2018, I was in agony. All I asked him for every so often was a hug, for drugs did nothing for the pain, and there were horrific complications.

That was WAY too much to ask. It wasn’t long after asking for what I really needed and being told I was too clammy to hug (we often can be when we’re in terrible pain) that I realized that the Hulk in my home was a Helpless Baby Man when it came to anything other than writing code or slinging iron. Or fucking.

On the last, he fell precipitously on that account as well, as increasingly he couldn’t be bothered even to watch me take care of my own needs since he had never bothered to learn how to do it himself. Too much work.

I no longer wonder why I am alone at 67.