Sometimes an issue doesn't go away and the post on rape went beyond that into broader issues in the comments section. I'd like to add a little more to that.
There was a general agreement that there is a lot of genuine rape but a lot of bogus rape and false accusations too. The real rape has its causes which the post and comments did not go into and which could be debated. William Gruff touched on some of the reasons and maybe we can blame the new, uneducated culture for the falling away of societal constraints on behaviour.
Another element was brought in by Welshcakes that:
There was a mistaken movement calling itself "feminist" in the late 70s/early 80s which preached that women should not love men, in any sense of the word. It upset many of us who were fighting merely for women's rights, as in equal pay and opportunity.
Yes, it certainly turned the majority of men and now a growing number of women off the feminazis, let's give them their designation, people like Alison Jagger and Gloria Steinem. I commented [and please forgive me for doing the unforgivable and quoting myself]:
I personally think it suits the political book of certain people through the past decades that something which has always simmered below the surface - the misunderstanding and annoyance at times - should be blown out of proportion.
I was referring here to both sides of the coin - that there seems to be great distrust and so many are concluding it might be better to be alone. That is another extreme reaction and in this thing we have extreme reactions - it seems to be a motif in this discussion.
Now that the pendulum has swung the other way with 'positive discrimination' and women are now moving towards an over-equal position, by numbers, in the workplace, except at the very top where Them still hold their places and won't relinquish those places, then I am reminded of my mate's model of the situation he is wont to tell me. To paraphrase him, it goes like this:
It's a model of a ship going down a wide canal, swinging wildly and crashing into the bank one side, then swinging wildly over to the other side and crashing into the opposite bank, all the while going down the canal and damaging itself as it goes. It never gets its act together and moves in a stately manner down the centre, avoiding destructive knee-jerk reactions on the steering wheel.
Ditto in politics, I'd say.
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Yes, women's lib was important, but feminism was something else.
ReplyDeleteThat last statement does describe politics very well.
ReplyDeleteRight.
ReplyDeleteI've been 'out of the loop' for so long, and my memory is now so bad, that I cannot remember the term I need (though I'm sure it will come to me at some wholly inappropriate moment) but there's a long discredited, and still annoyingly pervasive, perception of human history as essentially developmental and tending to perfection. Stripped of pseudo-scientific bullshit the 'deconstructivist' critiques of the flawed lineal 'art-historical' methodologies that were expressed in such ideas are invested with a good deal of forceful argument, which, if carried through, tend to support the view that 'history repeats itself' (it doesn't but that's another argument, arcane and pedantic).
ReplyDeleteHerstory sees a massive historical conspiracy to deprive wimmin of the freedom to scream, shout, moan, groan, orgasm, bitch, bite, menstruate, shit and generally indulge themselves in any fleeting fashion that impulse impels them at the moment, whenever and wherever they please, and the liberal view of history (if that is actually the term I'm searching for) is, unconsciously and without any intention of irony, used as the frame of their arguments.
It occurs to few that we, by which I mean humans, may very well, in our sixty five thousand or so years, have been in the predicament we in England are now in many times before, and developed ways of preventing such circumstances from developing again.
The masculine conspiracy of feminist fantasy is no more than the triumph of experience over hope. We've lost sight of that and we, that is men and women, regret it.
I still give up my seat to a woman and hold doors open, and I've only once, in my 53 years, been rebuffed, and I still insist that Mrs Gruff walks on the inside, and will continue to do so. In reducing things to their absolute minimum one risks being typecast but risk is a man's lot, and more 'savoury' than aversion, so I'll indulge myself, as women are wont to do, and say that although I enjoy the company of women, and am happy to squander money on them, and see much in women that is both admirable and desirable, I know that when the call to arms is sounded there isn't time to fret about whether one's bum looks big in chainmail.
Wow - that last paragraph in particular!
ReplyDelete