Category Archives: learning curves

female related

frida

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“I used to think I was the strangest person in the world but then I thought there are so many people in the world, there must be someone just like me who feels bizarre and flawed in the same ways I do. I would imagine her, and imagine that she must be out there thinking of me too. Well, I hope that if you are out there and read this and know that, yes, it’s true I’m here, and I’m just as strange as you.”

On gender and Power politics

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“The difficulty for me is that I believe in permanent revolution. I believe that once you change the power structure and you get an oligarchy that is trying to keep itself in power, you have all the illiberal features of the previous regime. What has to keep on happening is a constant process of criticism, renewal, protest and so forth.”

I SO get this!! Very important words from the time when such gender struggling was important and relevant in the west. Some times its SO important to read stuff from an extremely different opposite point of view. Not to get hurt or be angered by its obnoxiousness but just to be able to see where you stand and how deep you are in it. I learnt this to  differentiate between eastern soul of thinking and western approach to dissecting and analyses. I think you learn to deconstruct and classify information like this.

The Female Eunuch (excerpt)

Greer (Germaine Greer: the saucy feminist even men liked) argued in her book that women do not realise how much men hate them, and how much they are taught to hate themselves.

Christine Wallace writes that, when The Female Eunuch was first published, one woman had to keep it wrapped in brown paper because her husband wouldn’t let her read it; arguments and fights broke out over dinner tables and copies of it were thrown across rooms at unsuspecting husbands (Wallace 1997). It arrived in the shops in London in October 1970. By March 1971, it had nearly sold out its second printing and had been translated into eight languages.

“The title is an indication of the problem,” Greer told the New York Times in 1971, “Women have somehow been separated from their libido, from their faculty of desire, from their sexuality. They’ve become suspicious about it. Like beasts, for example, who are castrated in farming in order to serve their master’s ulterior motives – to be fattened or made docile – women have been cut off from their capacity for action. It’s a process that sacrifices vigour for delicacy and succulence, and one that’s got to be changed.”

Two of the book’s themes already pointed the way to Sex and Destiny 14 years later, namely that the nuclear family is a bad environment for women and for the raising of children; and that the manufacture of women’s sexuality by Western society was demeaning and confining.

Girls are feminised from childhood by being taught rules that subjugate them, she argued. Later, when women embrace the stereotypical version of adult femininity, they develop a sense of shame about their own bodies, and lose their natural and political autonomy. The result is powerlessness, isolation, a diminished sexuality, and a lack of joy:

The ignorance and isolation of most women mean that they are incapable of making conversation: most of their communication with their spouses is a continuation of the power struggle. The result is that when wives come along to dinner parties they pervert civilised conversation about real issues into personal quarrels. The number of hostesses who wish they did not have to invite wives is legion.

Greer argued that women should get to know and come to accept their own bodies, taste their own menstrual blood, and give up celibacy and monogamy. But they should not burn their bras. “Bras are a ludicrous invention,” she wrote, “but if you make bralessness a rule, you’re just subjecting yourself to yet another repression.”

While being interviewed about the book in 1971, she told the New York Times that she had been a “supergroupie.” “Supergroupies don’t have to hang around hotel corridors,” she said. “When you are one, as I have been, you get invited backstage. I think groupies are important because they demystify sex; they accept it as physical, and they aren’t possessive about their conquests.”

We are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;—
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.

~Arthur O’Shaughnessy, “Ode,” 1874