Lilith un-fair-ly treated

September 23^rd – Not in the slightest controversial today; all is harmony…you wish. We all know that ladies wash their hair more than six times a day and spend the rest of the time swinging their head about,  if the amount of adverts on TV surmises correctly.

Lilith. Now there’s a name to conjure with. See, I always thought that God made Eve for Adam by taking one of his ribs and creating a partner for him ‘cos, well, ‘cos he whinged on about being lonely and that, at the very least, he needed someone to iron his loincloth; but apparently not.  In the Hebrew/Jewish folklore it was Lilith who was his partner, and she was drafted in from a list of monsters and animals to become thus. The tale was softened somewhat to make better copy by having Lilith created from the same soil as Adam but she got seriously pissed off when he wanted her to become subservient to him. Why? I mean, someone had to be boss and by that end free someone else up to do the cleaning. I’d call it magnanimous of us chaps to take on that role. You?

What followed that little contretemps between A&L will be a familiar story to all those who watch any of the five-billion crappy soaps that fill our TV screens…when the shampoo ads aren’t playing that is… Lilith refused to come back into the Garden of Eden and instead went off and banged the archangel Samuel…and if that’s the source material you can wonder no longer why humanity’s in a hand-cart to hell and that equality is as distant from women as it was 5000 years ago.

Let’s face it, when you’re condemned to be the goddess of the night, banished forever into the company of jackals and satyrs who the Lord decrees

…shall possess her forever, and dwell there from generation to generation

well…lets just say that gaining equal pay for equal work is gonna be a big ask. Rock’n’ Roll: In the words of James Brown; it’s a man’s world.

Just like everything else…but not for long, buster.

might be the rejoinder to that.

What I’m trying to put into place here is why things turned out the way they did and why it seems to be such a struggle to turn these things around.  I mean, we’re not quite so believing in fairy stories now, are we? We do know that satyrs didn’t exist, that Adam wasn’t created by God out of soil and that EVE (Lilith) wasn’t the first woman created out of the same soil by the same God…we don’t still believe all that stuff…do we? Well, unfortunately we do, or at least our inner consciousness does and that suits the processes and the organisers of those processes fine.

Religion has been around since some smart arse wanted to seize power and then, to retain it, had to frighten people into submission with tales of the Booger-Man, and yet still, still, women (created out of the same soil by the same God and so equal in the eyes of God) are denied the opportunity to practise the religion of their choice at the highest order; still.

In a round-about way that was the central tenet of the Lilith Fair, founded by Sarah McLahlan and held for the first time outside of the US, at the Albert hall, on this day in 1998, but brought bang up to date and into the rock ‘n’ roll era. As pissed off as Lilith was about being expected to hold a subservient position when she considered herself to be of equal worth and so be held in identical respect, Ms. McLahlan set up this touring rock show in order to get around the unwilling, uncooperative, largely male dominated concert promoters and radio-show hosts who had, up ‘til then, refused to present two female performers in a row. Against all the advice she organised an all-woman concert, later named the Lilith Fair, and goofed them all with its success. In its first 3 years it raised ten million plus dollars for various US charities; so, a complete flop then? And what did the male promoters and agencies do in order to support what was 1997’s top grossing show? Why they did the only thing an intelligent workforce would do when confronted with a success story; why, re-brand it of course; they renamed it The Breast-Fest. See? Us guys, we know how to apply an intellectual approach to things that don’t fit the rules…our rules.

The Lilith Fair went on until 2010 but was discontinued after Ms. McLahlan considered the event had outlived its usefulness because the changing roles of women were no longer reflected in the festival’s format. So, after building it up against all odds she closed it down and took the huge amount of heat that came her way because of that…you know, like blokes do in the same situation………

See, equal world now; all treated the same, all goals met, all targets achieved, all pigs fuelled and ready to fly.