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Originally Posted by Jess
Thanks. I'm sorry that this "battle" is not a metaphor and it is very much reality. I didn't mean to pry. To me, the broadness of your earlier post felt much more ethereal than a situation such as this.
I hate hearing of the countless stories like this. I am never sure whether to light a candle and send out positive thoughts into the universe or to gift wrap a Louisville slugger and send it to you.
Thanks again, take care.
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by Kobi
Chazz,
I, too, was hoping it was a metaphor. I'm sorry to hear it is not. Can send positive thoughts , offer a ear, and a shoulder if you need it.
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Thank you, my Sisters.
As to my "battle" - all women's "battle" - being reality or metaphor..... All women's "battles" are both at once. This is what breeds (in "us") complacency, resignation, defeatism, self-disavowal, self-loathing, self-negation, mindless self-preoccupation, depoliticalization - and, horizontal oppression. Many times, all at once.
The "battle" with misogyny is the one-on-one of it, as in: I'm dealing with a misogynist individual.... The "battle" with patriarchy is the systemic front of the "battle". Misogyny begets patriarchy begets misogyny begets.... it's an endless loop of self-reification that is so pervasive many of us cannot look it in the eye, or take its full measure on a macrolevel. It's too much to process or bear. So we deny it, bargain with it, concede to it, or glimpse at it with one eye that is, itself, half shut. A body has gotta survive, after all.
I, like most female human beings who strive for some measure of peace and serenity, want to believe things have gotten better in the sexism department. Superficially, they have. People have become adroit at using PC language and gestures, usually when the stakes are low. That is the public face of
benevolent sexism.... But when the stakes are high(er) and something of genuine value is on the line (i.e. wages, a promotion, a legal decision, equal rights legislation, budget debates, a child....), all pretense of parity and gender equity goes out the window.
Think, I mean REALLY think for a minute: "Who's interests are
most at risk (REALLY, REALLY) in the budget debate? Women and children's - that's who. The services and programs most essential to "us" are the ones taking the biggest hits. (Marginal men's, too, but to a lesser degree.)
Look around.... state after state is tightening the restrictions on abortion. Why should I care, I'm a butch.... I care because "when they came for the gypsies, "I" said nothing....".
To the extent that we have all become so self-preoccupied with our gender identities, labels, neologisms, and wars.... we have abdicated our obligations to ourselves and one another. The System doesn't care what pronoun you or I use. It still sees us as
children of a lesser God because we're woman or para men (in its mind).... It thinks this even as it (patriarchy) smiles in "our" faces and says otherwise, but only, when the stakes are low.
Feminism, NOT gender theory, addresses these things. Feminism canonizes "us" over "I" --- gender theory canonizes "I" over "us". The later leaves us standing alone in our consecrated subjectivity or, at best, marginally unified in some version of
"Im okay, you're okay", but don't you dare ask too many questions 'cause we've got a "tent" to erect. (Tents, big or small, do not offer good cover in a war.)
Patriarchy has every tool at its disposal - it owns the System. It's perfected its dominion over our lives and our minds. Its most effective backlash against 2nd Wave Feminists was to turn women against Feminism (i.e. ourselves) and give us gender theory - a self-negating ideology that leaves us elbowing each other for a higher place on a mythical hierarchy for a bigger piece of the patriarchal pie. Ya gotta give it to patriarchy - it's brilliant