Given the justifiable adverse reaction to the Missouri Republican candidate for US Senator's shocking statement and equally shocking "correction," I was pleased to come across a recent reprint in "Mother Jones" of and article by Rebecca Solnit. In her article she highlights a manifestation of millennial long ignorance and resulting repression by many if not most men of women as not being fully human.
I have written at length regarding the ten millennium subjugation of woman (Here and Here). I even, only half-jokingly, suggested that, given the fact that we men have so placed humanity's very survival in jeopardy, our survival may require men stepping aside in favor of woman assuming control our species destiny.
In another post, I suggested that the current US presidential election could represent the last hurrah of the white male (Here). Perhaps, despite the fact that no woman heads the ticket of either party, instead it could be looked at as the election in which the continuing emancipation of women is at dire risk, given the stark differences in approach on gender issues between the two parties.
In the 1930s the NAZI’s had a number of simple solutions to the problems rampant in German society at the time. Among them was to cure the unemployment situation by sending women who had entered the work-force had jobs back to their homes.
Among the simple solutions proposed by the radicals in the Republican party for addressing the difficulties facing US society today, is the return of women to the role as mere machines for reproduction.
In her perceptive article, Rebecca Solnit focuses on how even the most accomplished women are not so subtly silenced and ignored by many men. In that article she commented:
“A Freudian would claim to know what they have and I lack, but intelligence is not situated in the crotch—even if you can write one of Virginia Woolf‘s long mellifluous musical sentences about the subtle subjugation of women in the snow with your willie.”
When I wrote the above in another context, one of my conservative Republican correspondents responded that perhaps women should repay men for all the money men have spent upon them throughout the millennia.
Imagine, if you will, if the situation were reversed and men had been subject to thousands of years of slavery, subject to assault and even death for expressions of independence, kept merely as instruments for procreation and much worse. They finally rise up seeking their independence only to be presented with the demand that they repay the second-rate meal they were begrudgingly subjected to in an attempt to get into their pants. Why I predict the response of the men would be revolution. Wait, wasn’t that the usual response whenever the repressor demands repayment for the supposed benefits of subjugation?
For at least 10,000 years or so virtually every political system, economic system and religion has been designed by men for men. There is no natural or divine law that requires any of these structures to be designed in the way that they have been. During those same 10,000 years every justification of those structures have been developed by men to benefit men.
__________________
TODAY'S QUOTE
On the Role of Civil Society:
Why would anyone be morally bound or wish to be morally bound to a civil society that does not share the goal that it’s citizens deserve a fair distribution of wealth, income and power? If the civil society is not dedicated to that end what else could it possibly be dedicated to? What is freedom, to those without wealth, income or power?
TRENZ PRUCA