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// a socio-linguistic reframing of gendered power structures

 Pavel Gitnik is a multidisciplinary writer, speaker, and artist-scientist. He examines and promotes ideas in the fields of linguistics, narrative, and the relationship between reality and expression. He also solved the chicken-or-egg problem.

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(Dedicated to my mom, grandmas, sister, and all the women in my life)

I asked my grandma if we lived in a patriarchy.

"No," she said.

"Because that's what they're saying"

"You're not right," she said, disbelieving me.

"We don't live in a patriarchy. They don't say that."

"Then what then?"

"They say, the man is the head and the women is the neck. Where the neck turns, the head will look."

She said this is a common proverb in Russia.

A I couldn't ask for a better visual metaphor.

I honestly didn't know what my grandma was going to say to my cheeky but serious question. As a strong woman, I knew she'd have firm opinions and she wouldn't be afraid to voice them, so I knew I would get an honest response.

But this was such a pithy one!

And one with such physiological and empirical "apparency".

Even for the thinking brain, such logic through literary technique of vivid metaphor scaffolds geometry and mathematical rigor back onto the proverbial terrain.

With one swoop, my grandma made her point about the power of the matriarchs most poignant.

This wielding of language, a female superpower, is precisely how the neck turns to make the head look.

It is our linguistic frames and prowesses that sense-out values and meaning from otherwise shiftless material.

The mythological and, at the same time, most earthly proverb of "neck and head" to illustrate how women direct the attention and interpretation of events, and therefore reality itself, is a model exemplar of this very prowess.

One of communal narrative-weaving and the reconciliation of logical and emotionally-evocative through empirical parables of lived life.

The "neck", my grandma's wielding of linguistic and world-shaping abilities, thus demonstrates in so factum how it cuts through performative "logic ceremonies"  of endless detail and ennui and uses instead the pure "empiricism of the senses" to bring back even the most left-brain skeptic to the truth.

It's somatic grounding in physiological "obvious" reality resonates as truth, as does its application to commonplace observable reality of gender dynamics.

The geometric pattern creates a symmetry that resonates as a standing wave that reinforces itself recursively. Your body informs you of the apparent truth. You body resonating with both the bodily metaphor and the perfect overlay on your sociological experience where mom decided what was what in your house too.

This both explains how your lived reality does have formal linguistic framing.

It allows your to relax and trust your senses, not in small part, but because your mother says it's not only okay, but the good thing to do.

The true matriarchal power of sculping values, crafting stories, and framing linguistics to then teach those same skills to children is what makes or breaks a cultural civilization.

My grandma recognized this formally. It is well-known that women decide what is normal, what is "risky", what is beautiful and elegant or polite in a shared space.

They do it though language.

~
My grandma and her neighbor, who at ages 70 moved from Russia to the States, learned English, while their husbands struggled to pick up a new tongue.

Biology encourages we encode our most valuable scripts in resonant forms to pass down to our children: Proverbs, Songs, the Poetry of an academic paper --these all construct how we see and feel the world, on a meta-narrative level.

It's the words we choose. The repetition. The tone.

Voice takes us from the somatic into the metaphysical realm.

Where is the neck turning?

So beyond the superficial narrative, there is a message being sent to us:

When we hear the word "patriarchy" voiced in enchanting rhythm over and over, we can rest assured that we can hear between the lines, to the "true" call devoid of the distorted context -- for fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons to return.


- Pavel

 // a feminist deconstruction of the Patriarchy

Pavel Gitnik is a multidisciplinary writer, speaker, and artist-scientist. He examines and promotes ideas in the fields of linguistics, narrative, and the relationship between reality and expression. He also solved the chicken-or-egg problem.

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(Dedicated to my mom, grandmas, sister, and all the women in my life)

The TV says we live in a patriarchy, but when I was growing up, my mom ran my house -- my grandmas and aunts ran theirs, and the men worked to provide for what was needed.

Now as an adult watching the media tell our stories to us, I'm not sure I like it.

First, I'm not sure their story about men and women is true. I think all real-talk agrees who is the real decider.

Second, I just don't 'like' it.

Honestly, it's really not that good.

Ok, so the monster is chasing us and it's gonna eat us and watch the rest of the movie to see how it's gonna eat us?

The monster -- being the "conflict".

The worst thing about current "patriarchal society" framings is not the insidious disservice it does to both women and men alike, disempowering one while villainizing the other.

The worst part is how we frame the conversation itself.

This isn't a debate --
we have to sleep in the same bed tonight.

So let's get something to drink that we both like, turn on some new music, and sit down and figure out what's bothering us.

// "we miss each other" //

// "we feel like we're failing at what we're supposed to be good at" //

// "and what we promised we'd be good at" //

// "we're afraid 'you'll leave me'" //

// "i'm not really mad at you" //

// "i love you" //

// "but i'm scared" //

// "i'm just really scared" //

Current media discourse unfortunately doesn't contain this valuable code.

This is how a good movie could go.

Something to for life to imitate art by.

But currently, outside of fictional context, reality is presented very simplistically and lacking in catharsis. When people think of "the real world", the mostly calculate based on non-fiction/news/commentary sources and not reality gleaned through film. However they watch the "real world" unfold before them on the television in similar cinematic ways. Conflict and excitement with anticipation of relief.

However, does relief come at the end of their movie?

The story on the TV doesn't seem to push us in the right direction, but it doesn't mirror reality either because it doesn't align with how we feel on the ground.

How a man loves a woman. How a woman loves a man. So deeply, we could not even fathom.

When my dad passed, my mom would water the grass by his monument, for years she would tend to it herself, despite the staff at the memorial park.

Yet the headlines will have us believe we "hate each other".

That we want different things.

When what we want most lies in one another.

Have we empirically become so near-sighted?

Looking at our phones up close has led us to forget that the goal was to look through those devices, at the actual world. They're supposed to help us understand at least something, not confuse us for confusion's sake. Not make us sad at the end of it.

The TV is here to make us better.

- Pavel

// by Pavel Gitnik

It was around 1996 -- we were living in a suburb of Tel-Aviv called Ramat-Gan at the time -- and my dad brought this odd product home from work he said they were testing out.

It was called an "iPhone".

A flat white phone with a screen, a stylus, and a keyboard that slid out.

You could do phone things on it -- but it also had a built-in modem that connected to the internet -- email, browsing (and naughty pictures that loaded super slowly on a black and white screen).

My dad worked on testing the first model and then developing GEN 2.

The company's name was InfoGear, a small Israeli-American startup that was later bought by Cisco. That same year, in 2000, Cisco moved us from Ramat-Gan to Cupertino -- that's how we ended up in the States.

A few years later, Apple licensed the "iPhone" trademark.

My mom still uses the 2nd generation InfoGear iPhone (Black) in her kitchen.

This article was written from my personal perspective. For more backstory and details about Cisco/Linksys iPhone rebranding etc, as well history of predecessor "internet appliances", see below.

Further Reading:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linksys_iPhone
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InfoGear
- https://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2015/06/the-forgotten-story-of-the-iphone-released-in-1998/
- https://www.slashgear.com/the-1998-iphone-you-probably-didnt-realize-existed-26704115/

The first installment of the Work & Purpose project is now in the store.

It features two of the motifs from the collection -- the big man and the sailboat.

Get them on 8 casual fit tees in black and white.

Future drops will feature other images from the collection on tees, sweaters, vans slip-ons, digital wallpapers, wall art, mugs, and eventually plush toys.

Digital wallpapers featuring the big man and the sailboat are going on sale next. You can also sign up for the early adopter list and get the pack for free:

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