Letters to the Editor
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4 brightstar
I get that you're wounded. Some woman done you wrong. But woundedness isn't argumentation.
Okay, so you haven't made an argument, so forgive me--I can't help myself. I'm going to psychoanalyze you. (Even though it makes me feel cheap and Freudian.)
You hurt. So does the woman I'm writing about. The Southern novelist Julia Peterkin, whose husband and father (a physician) decided after she bore her first child that she wasn't "fit" to have another baby and, while she was unconscious and without her consent, sterilized her.
So Julia Peterkin hurt. So does the woman up the street from me--a functional paranoid schizophrenic who sings to the music in her head and walks, walks, walks, all over town, up and down our street, never looking anyone in the eye.
She hurts--so does everybody. The family of the volunteer firefighter stabbed to death by a drunken frat boy in my town. The returning Iraq veteran recovering from 3rd degree burns and the knowledge that he's fighting in a useless war and his family is going bankrupt from the medical bills. Me, too. I hurt.
So what? Pain is universal--the human condition.
Most of us get that. And some of us even get this vital distinction, that who we choose to BLAME for our pain is another matter.
It's normal to be mad at any human who has done you wrong. But to blame for your invidual pain a whole class of human beings who didn't have anything to do with what happened to you and who wouldn't know you from Adam's housecat--well, when those human beings are ALL women we call that MISOGYNY. (Just like if they were all blacks or Hispanics or Jews or Mormons or Pennsylvania Dutch or the Tooth Fairy, for Chrissakes, we'd have names for that, too... Okay, maybe not the Tooth Fairy.)
Get therapy. Really.
This news alert has apparently escaped your notice, but feminists do not run the world. And "fighting back" against them may provide you, and your buddies who enjoy that kind of thing, with some kind of thrill, but it doesn't change the conditions of your oppression.
Why? Because the rich and mostly (definitely not all) white men who run the world don't know that you exist. And if they did, they would be pleased, so pleased, and so amused at your naivete, because your obsession with the feminists who are allegedly ruining your life keeps you from focusing on them.
Not that you could do anything about them even if you focused on them. which is why of course many people hate feminists who have no personal experience of them and no reason to hate them except the fact that somebody told them they should--because it's just so easy.
It beats thinking. Totally. Not thinking about feminists, of course--who wants to do that? But thinking about the conditions of your oppression.
Get therapy. Really.
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@Brightstar
Oh, Brightstar, Brightstar, Brightstar...
But I, unlike you, am just not a pushover idiot eating up gleefully and uncritically every piece of garbage women spew in the name of feminism.
See? Here it is again. Because I agree with the tenets of feminism I'm a "pushover idiot." Why not just tell me that my dick is tiny and get it over with. Stand up and beat your chest and show us all what a manly man you are.
You see, I understand that I am ALSO a part of the human race, even though I posess a penis.
And I know of no feminists (and I know quite a few) who would say you weren't. Tell me, do you ever actually read what these women are saying, or do you just react with a kneejerk and a misogynist comment or two?
All you know is your fraudulent and man hating position gets you more sex with women.
*laughing - hard* Gosh, you're right, Brightstar. We better not tell my boyfriend about all the sex I'm getting with women because I'm profeminist! (I'm so "man-hating" I sleep with them!)
Now you sound like you need to get laid - maybe you should try giving up the misogyny. Women might like you more. (And you can always try boys if you hate the girls so much. *laughs again*)
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Is this story covered in the book? Or is it just an urban legend?
I heard some second-hand stories about "no abortions performed for (x-number of days) after Sept. 11." Which if true could be explained one of two ways:
(a) Potential patients suddenly became "life-affirming" as a way of getting back at the terrorists;
(b) Clinics set up a temporary policy of putting all operations "on hold" so that nobody would be making a rash decision about getting an abortion, then changing her mind as things calmed down.
Or something else?
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For the first 300 years or so,
America was a frontier nation. That is our history and it is our single defining myth. Our conscious mythmaking started early, as Faludi notes, but it only really became obsessive at the closing of the frontier toward the end of the 19th century. Then came the wave of novels by Owen Wister, Zane Grey, Louis L'Amour and countless others which have sold vastly more than any other genre. After that came the movies, first silents, then talkies, and again the western genre far outsold all others. Finally came TV which again saw westerns garnering Nielsen ratings far above any other type of programming. As U. of Chicago psychoanalyst Franz Alexander foretold in 1941, we are fixated on our lost frontier. That is why we mythologized it so doggedly over almost a century. And that is why we were in Viet Nam and are in Iraq. The movies (and novels,and TV) posited every enemy as implacable evil which had to be defeated and could only be defeated by a white male hero of moral clarity and steadfast determination. That is why we elected Bush the Texan and not Kerry. Bush the mythical figure (obviously not the actual man) is John Wayne, al Qaeda is the Apaches and Osama bin Laden is Geronimo.
Our history formed us and our mythology instructs us - wrongly of course but there it is. We will see this again and again. The western cowboy may have been replaced by the urban cop (see, Jack Bauer) in our dominant mythology, but the theme remains. (Kiefer Sutherland for President?)