Saturday, June 03, 2006
On Evags and Feminism
Ever have one of those short conversations where you only realize a few hours later how offensive the other person's statements were? I'm still a bit worked up over something that happened to me almost a month ago, so perhaps I've got a hair trigger. Men can be quite irrational when we feel that our honor, or that of our women, has been disparaged. Allow me to elucidate, since I gleamed significant insight into the lives of evag women yesterday afternoon.
Towards the end of the work day, I was working alongside co-worker K. Shooting the shit, we rambled from movies we had seen lately, to a dislike of Sarah Jessica Parker (on K's part, not mine), into the DVDs for 'Sex in the City.' Here's where things morphed into the twilight zone.
"Yeah," K said, "my father-in-law came over the other weekend, saw those DVDs and just flipped. He just chewed me out. 'You're the man of the house now, and it is your duty to keep filth like that out of your home!' I mean he just chewed me out."
I have to say that I couldn't tell if he was joking or not. Just like when I first meet young evag men I can't always tell if they are gay or straight. They tend to stand a bit too close, and make eye contact a bit too readily. That's totally another blog. I told him that the nearest I've ever come to strong words with Cindy's father was when I caught him cheating at cards. Anyways, that should have been the end of it, but us seekers just never know when to quit.
"Dude, that's just so far out of my realm," I rhetorically jabbed, "Sometimes when I talk to you guys I just can't get my head around what totally different worlds we live in. Like, when Cindy was in college, if she brought a guy home for the weekend, her father would ask her, 'one bedroom or two?"
I had to explain it to him a bit, then after a fair pause he said, "Wow. Can you imagine how embarassing it must be for a Father to have to say that?"
"Um," clearly needing to clarify, "I don't think you are seeing it from his point of view. I think he might have been pleased to be able to say that, it was a clever way to show how liberal and open-minded he was."
His final statement be where I felt the knife of religious dogma twist in my guts.
K continued, "I think if a girl's father said that to me when I was visiting from college, I'd loose all respect for him. You have to stand up for your daughter. You have to show that your daughter is worth something."
Like all amateur philosophers, I'm a bit slow on the uptake. Or, perhaps a better way to put it is that I'm too distracted from my immediate emotions by the abstract analysis of how the world works. Third try; I'm too conditioned as a 'good worker' to upset the workplace environment by knocking this guy on his ass.
The best I could do was to assure him that if he had met Cindy back during her college days, she would certainly not have been taking a guy like him home for the weekend.
Many critics of the religious right in America identify the oppression of women as a key component of the movement. I guess I've always spent more time dwelling on the irrational stupidity of their dogma and their hyperfocus on 'feeling good' rather than critical thinking. This aspect to how they treat their daughters and their wives - and that's a big fucking point, there is no other role for women in that weak culture, they will live their entire obedient lives under one of those labels or both.
The father did not yell at his daughter for liking content such as 'Sex in the City,' which clearly lies outside of their puritanical world-view. He yelled at K, stating in no uncertain terms that he as the 'man of the house,' needed to control what she had access to. When he made that comment about 'showing that your daughter is worth something,' he implied that she was property that had to be protected from depreciation. A human being either has inherit value - like we stated in our liberal founding documents - or they don't.
The parallels between this thinking and the bass akwards tribalism of the cornors of the world where a rape victim is murdered by her family for being 'damaged' cannot be underlined enough. This is a pathetically childish view of the world.
When Cindy's father would make his quip about 'one bed or two,' he was showing respect for his daughter. She was an adult, and she was raised with enough wisdom to now be able to make her own damn decisions. If she felt that a guy was one bed material, that's her descision to make. It's her body, and it's her life.
There are a great number of 'big lies' out there that just piss me off. Evag's have produced a whole crop of young women who think Feminism means dedicating your life to murdering your own babies.
I hate to speak for Feminism; I'm just so manly of a man, I always feel absurd. But the bottom fucking line of that movement is that women are human beings, not property. Just like a young man at 18 can tell his parents to get stuffed and join the navy if he wants, a young woman has the same rights to control their own life. If she wants to be sexual active, that's her choice. If she wants to get married and spend her next two decades perpetually preggers, that's also her damn choice. They have the same rights to vote, own property, and exercise free speech as those of us with testicles.
I'd say that raising a daughter to accept that level of authoritarian control of her life will some day be considered a form of child abuse. A woman who not only has had her access to the world cut off and controlled, but a woman who willingly submits to that kind of treatment - that's not the kind of woman I want to spend my life with.
Comments:
<< Home
i like your blog, funny but with content. being an atheist too, and with pious friends, i like to make a point that atheism does not equate to good or evil. i feel that i'm a 'good' person, with more compassion than some who quote from the bible. anyway, props for standing up for cindy.
Post a Comment
<< Home
