About
The current description of this site says:
I grabbed this blogspot URL spontaneously because it's the same as my original very first hodgepodge website. I had ZERO plans for what to do with it when I grabbed it. I briefly contemplated using it as a sandbox for figuring out how to comic and then decided to write about something that I was thinking of in terms of female sexuality and empowerment.
It is in part a tribute to a Middle Eastern man with whom I had an intimate relationship and the previous Intro plus the FYI it links to both go on at length about why the site is called CalifMichele and attempt to explain why I hope you will take no offense to that if you are Muslim.
He was an educated man and older than I and had been a political activist at one time and possibly still was. I came to have a deep respect for him and through him respect for a culture frequently maligned as extremely oppressive of women by the Western world where I live.
This site is an emergent phenomenon. I didn't know where it was going when I started it. The piece about My Background was added around the time I added a Courts tag.
It has been rattling around in my head for decades that women need rights more than money per se, that men have money because they have rights and this space about female empowerment has organically drifted into talking about law because of that.
The West maligns the Middle East as oppressive of women in an attempt to say "We in the West are enlightened and doing it right!" and that's not really true.
Probably no one is getting it right but what I personally learned from this Middle Eastern man is that the Western emphasis on earned income for women comes at the expense of caring for pregnant women and caring for children and comes at the expense of sexual dignity for everyone.
The Middle East seems to generally treat women better in terms of taking care of pregnant women and infants. I know this not just from him but also from conversations with other people.
I had a long emotionally important relationship with this man who gave me his time and attention for about twenty hours a week almost every week for a few years. Most American men seem wholly incapable of giving a woman that kind of attention.
In practice, that means most American marriages are not genuinely intimate relationships and I have come to believe women are biologically wired to need that emotional connection to have a satisfactory sex life.
I was a bright child who had more formal education in some subjects when I graduated high school than many people with Bachelor's degrees. I grew up in the Deep South and was married to a man who read the Bible cover to cover three times before quitting Christianity at age twelve. I had an illicit affair with a married minister under circumstances where the law considered me to be his victim and I had a relationship to a Middle Eastern man who was educated and well read and from a devout Muslim family, though he also gave up religion long before he met me.
I also have a genetic disorder and have two children born well before I was diagnosed. Reproductive morality was a hot button topic on CF lists back when I participated. In addition to the affair with a minister, I kissed a friend goodbye who happened to be my physician and it got a little out of hand. I later tripped across his distinctive name on the Internet and he probably went to jail for similar activity involving a different patient, which inspired me to write this piece: Consent and a Few Devilish Details
I've probably talked both here and certainly on a site called Feminine Character Works about incidents on the job at Aflac that didn't result in disaster when I had friction with men on the job over the issue of them finding me attractive. Plus simply working in insurance is an education in dealing all day, everyday with the threat of being dragged into court through no fault of your own.
I've had a couple of college classes in Environmental Law but I don't really have some kind of law degree. I've not really spent a lot of time in church either, but I seem better versed in the Bible than some people who attend church.
I got divorced without a lawyer. My divorce was amicable and articles suggested going the DIY route in the state of California at that time likely saved us $40,000, money we didn't have to spare. I really needed to leave him to save my life and there were many reasons that shouldn't have been possible at all, including the high cost of divorce if you both lawyer up and battle it out in court.
What I'm trying to say is I'm a former homemaker who spent years homeless or living in poverty housing trying to eke out a living as a freelance writer. I appear to have ZERO professional credentials for talking about legal and religious frameworks for human sexual morality and human rights.
But my personal life has repeatedly exposed me to men with a depth of knowledge on certain subjects whom I knew well and for a long time and to incidents that gave me reason to think long and hard about stuff like "Was that overly enthusiastic goodbye kiss a crime or not??!!"
I have a track record of close calls that could have been a scandal in the headlines and weren't in part because I'm a survivor of incest twice over and spent a lot of time sorting that, so I am super picky about consent, both MINE and that of other people.
I've been extremely careful and thoughtful about how I handled situations and I worried not just about what's in it for me but also about the men I knew and anyone in their lives who might be impacted by his relationship to me, even if that relationship was completely innocent.
One of the big bosses at my corporate job was probably sweet on me, possibly during a medical crisis in his wife's life and trying to keep his emotional equilibrium while terrified of losing her. I fretted a lot about making sure there was no appearance of impropriety.
I was Internet acquainted with a self-made millionaire and also went to enormous lengths to protect him from potentially disastrous consequences though he also had done nothing illegal nor immoral and was basically guilty of crushing on a woman while thinking about leaving his unhappy relationship to a woman he had not married. I again tried to shoot for no appearance of impropriety as my goal.
In a heteronormative world where men typically initiate and typically make a lot more money than women, the rules are different for men and women and the Western practice of trying to give women access to male-coded career success isn't getting results that I like or approve of. I want something better and I don't think the way most people are pursuing solutions really get us to a future where people have more civilized lives and are more free than they are currently.
I don't really want to trade the current general expectation that women are chattel property for the glorious opportunity to sleep my way into a job and then be sexually harassed or assaulted every time I turn around for trying to further my career.
And I don't think blaming men for this mess is a solution either. I don't identify as a feminist and I generally don't agree with the stuff I see a lot of women do that seems to be about taking their anger out on men in place of creating a better world.
Some really bad things happened to me and some really incredible men helped me get over it. I've also benefited from the work of some incredible women and/or my personal association with them.
This space seems to have organically become a place for me to search for the words for that idea that women need rights more than money per se.
Slaves had "jobs" but the value of their labor accrued to their owner. A woman can now have a job without her husband's permission and have a bank account in her own name, yet the entire world assumes she's morally bankrupt if she doesn't put her children's welfare and husband's career ahead of her own ambitions.
One outcome of this is that men complain bitterly about having to pay alimony and child support while no one says one word about how TERRIBLE it is that having a child tanked her career which is why she needs his money after they split.
Something that frustrates me enormously is that Western feminist goals do not promote rights and better quality of life for all women. They promote careers like a man for a small subset of very privileged women who make that work by expecting other women to raise their children and clean their houses and cook their meals.
The women's work in the lives of upper class American women is still done mostly by women, just not her, and those maids and nannies are not likely to ever have spiffy careers with respected titles and big money.
To my mind, this means feminism is utterly failing it's stated goal of rights for women. It's not even really trying to serve all women. It is enthusiastically ruining the lives of some women to benefit a small sliver of the female population.
It's a global humanitarian and economic crisis that we are failing to figure out a paradigm for genuine female empowerment that allows women to reproduce and have financial independence.
I spent time with a man whose life context was substantially different from mine. It helped me see that Western male-coded careers are not the only way to live life even for men and that helped me clarify in my mind that Western attempts to give some women lives modeled after male paradigms of success is a large part of why my life doesn't work and can't seem to be made to work no matter how hard I try or brilliant I may be.
30 April 2026
A former middle-class American housewife takes a jaundiced eye to heternormative American culture and its ugly roots behind closed doors.I've just reread a piece called My Background and corrected a grammatical error and it says NOTHING of what I imagined I wrote.
I grabbed this blogspot URL spontaneously because it's the same as my original very first hodgepodge website. I had ZERO plans for what to do with it when I grabbed it. I briefly contemplated using it as a sandbox for figuring out how to comic and then decided to write about something that I was thinking of in terms of female sexuality and empowerment.
It is in part a tribute to a Middle Eastern man with whom I had an intimate relationship and the previous Intro plus the FYI it links to both go on at length about why the site is called CalifMichele and attempt to explain why I hope you will take no offense to that if you are Muslim.
He was an educated man and older than I and had been a political activist at one time and possibly still was. I came to have a deep respect for him and through him respect for a culture frequently maligned as extremely oppressive of women by the Western world where I live.
This site is an emergent phenomenon. I didn't know where it was going when I started it. The piece about My Background was added around the time I added a Courts tag.
It has been rattling around in my head for decades that women need rights more than money per se, that men have money because they have rights and this space about female empowerment has organically drifted into talking about law because of that.
The West maligns the Middle East as oppressive of women in an attempt to say "We in the West are enlightened and doing it right!" and that's not really true.
Probably no one is getting it right but what I personally learned from this Middle Eastern man is that the Western emphasis on earned income for women comes at the expense of caring for pregnant women and caring for children and comes at the expense of sexual dignity for everyone.
The Middle East seems to generally treat women better in terms of taking care of pregnant women and infants. I know this not just from him but also from conversations with other people.
I had a long emotionally important relationship with this man who gave me his time and attention for about twenty hours a week almost every week for a few years. Most American men seem wholly incapable of giving a woman that kind of attention.
In practice, that means most American marriages are not genuinely intimate relationships and I have come to believe women are biologically wired to need that emotional connection to have a satisfactory sex life.
I was a bright child who had more formal education in some subjects when I graduated high school than many people with Bachelor's degrees. I grew up in the Deep South and was married to a man who read the Bible cover to cover three times before quitting Christianity at age twelve. I had an illicit affair with a married minister under circumstances where the law considered me to be his victim and I had a relationship to a Middle Eastern man who was educated and well read and from a devout Muslim family, though he also gave up religion long before he met me.
I also have a genetic disorder and have two children born well before I was diagnosed. Reproductive morality was a hot button topic on CF lists back when I participated. In addition to the affair with a minister, I kissed a friend goodbye who happened to be my physician and it got a little out of hand. I later tripped across his distinctive name on the Internet and he probably went to jail for similar activity involving a different patient, which inspired me to write this piece: Consent and a Few Devilish Details
I've probably talked both here and certainly on a site called Feminine Character Works about incidents on the job at Aflac that didn't result in disaster when I had friction with men on the job over the issue of them finding me attractive. Plus simply working in insurance is an education in dealing all day, everyday with the threat of being dragged into court through no fault of your own.
I've had a couple of college classes in Environmental Law but I don't really have some kind of law degree. I've not really spent a lot of time in church either, but I seem better versed in the Bible than some people who attend church.
I got divorced without a lawyer. My divorce was amicable and articles suggested going the DIY route in the state of California at that time likely saved us $40,000, money we didn't have to spare. I really needed to leave him to save my life and there were many reasons that shouldn't have been possible at all, including the high cost of divorce if you both lawyer up and battle it out in court.
What I'm trying to say is I'm a former homemaker who spent years homeless or living in poverty housing trying to eke out a living as a freelance writer. I appear to have ZERO professional credentials for talking about legal and religious frameworks for human sexual morality and human rights.
But my personal life has repeatedly exposed me to men with a depth of knowledge on certain subjects whom I knew well and for a long time and to incidents that gave me reason to think long and hard about stuff like "Was that overly enthusiastic goodbye kiss a crime or not??!!"
I have a track record of close calls that could have been a scandal in the headlines and weren't in part because I'm a survivor of incest twice over and spent a lot of time sorting that, so I am super picky about consent, both MINE and that of other people.
I've been extremely careful and thoughtful about how I handled situations and I worried not just about what's in it for me but also about the men I knew and anyone in their lives who might be impacted by his relationship to me, even if that relationship was completely innocent.
One of the big bosses at my corporate job was probably sweet on me, possibly during a medical crisis in his wife's life and trying to keep his emotional equilibrium while terrified of losing her. I fretted a lot about making sure there was no appearance of impropriety.
I was Internet acquainted with a self-made millionaire and also went to enormous lengths to protect him from potentially disastrous consequences though he also had done nothing illegal nor immoral and was basically guilty of crushing on a woman while thinking about leaving his unhappy relationship to a woman he had not married. I again tried to shoot for no appearance of impropriety as my goal.
In a heteronormative world where men typically initiate and typically make a lot more money than women, the rules are different for men and women and the Western practice of trying to give women access to male-coded career success isn't getting results that I like or approve of. I want something better and I don't think the way most people are pursuing solutions really get us to a future where people have more civilized lives and are more free than they are currently.
I don't really want to trade the current general expectation that women are chattel property for the glorious opportunity to sleep my way into a job and then be sexually harassed or assaulted every time I turn around for trying to further my career.
And I don't think blaming men for this mess is a solution either. I don't identify as a feminist and I generally don't agree with the stuff I see a lot of women do that seems to be about taking their anger out on men in place of creating a better world.
Some really bad things happened to me and some really incredible men helped me get over it. I've also benefited from the work of some incredible women and/or my personal association with them.
This space seems to have organically become a place for me to search for the words for that idea that women need rights more than money per se.
Slaves had "jobs" but the value of their labor accrued to their owner. A woman can now have a job without her husband's permission and have a bank account in her own name, yet the entire world assumes she's morally bankrupt if she doesn't put her children's welfare and husband's career ahead of her own ambitions.
One outcome of this is that men complain bitterly about having to pay alimony and child support while no one says one word about how TERRIBLE it is that having a child tanked her career which is why she needs his money after they split.
Something that frustrates me enormously is that Western feminist goals do not promote rights and better quality of life for all women. They promote careers like a man for a small subset of very privileged women who make that work by expecting other women to raise their children and clean their houses and cook their meals.
The women's work in the lives of upper class American women is still done mostly by women, just not her, and those maids and nannies are not likely to ever have spiffy careers with respected titles and big money.
To my mind, this means feminism is utterly failing it's stated goal of rights for women. It's not even really trying to serve all women. It is enthusiastically ruining the lives of some women to benefit a small sliver of the female population.
It's a global humanitarian and economic crisis that we are failing to figure out a paradigm for genuine female empowerment that allows women to reproduce and have financial independence.
I spent time with a man whose life context was substantially different from mine. It helped me see that Western male-coded careers are not the only way to live life even for men and that helped me clarify in my mind that Western attempts to give some women lives modeled after male paradigms of success is a large part of why my life doesn't work and can't seem to be made to work no matter how hard I try or brilliant I may be.
30 April 2026