If you were walking down the street one day and saw a man striking himself in the head with a hammer, cursing himself by all the gods and smearing his body with feces, I am sure that you would agree with me that he needs professional help.
What then, of men so ignorant and mentally unbalanced as to take pleasure in demeaning and oppressing Women, his Sisters in humanity?
Isn't it so much more pleasurable, my fellow men, to uplift and cheer on these divine beings -- to rejoice in Their every success, to stand with Them and assist Them to achieve Their unfathomable potential?
I went to a website the other day in which some lowlife was trotting out the usual misogynistic stupidity and I upbraided him, far more gently than he deserved. Of course it's true, as he stated, that much of the world's architecture and achievements have been made by men. That only stands to reason since men have spent most of history overtly or covertly suppressing and destroying the achievements of Women -- from the public burnings of the poems of Sappho to the centuries-long attempts to keep Women from gaining an education or voting.
Under such conditions, it is amazing and wonderful that we have as much from the hands and minds of Women as we do.
Today I discovered another gem of Womankind, whom I will blog about later, Hildegard von Bingen.
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Inexplicable misogyny
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4 comments:
It is delightful to read a man whose views on women are not arrogant, short-sighted, mean or sexual in some way. I find the advertising media does everything possible to demean woman ranging from the latest car to toothpaste - for we all know, now don't we, if you buy a certain brand of toothpaste or shampoo or car or jeans or whatever that the woman of your dreams will suddenly descend into your life and you will live happily ever after - uh - not! Where is our mindset that we allow such filth to clutter our TV's, newspaper, magazines etc?
Ok I've rambled enough here :)
Look forward to reading your post on Hildegard von Bingen - a very special woman to be sure.
Misogyny, quite simply, is waste of horrific proportions.
Roughly 50 percent of all the human brains on the planet belong to Women.
50 percent of the voices, hands and feet do, too.
To disparage those minds, voices and hands is as stupid as if a man were to amputate half his own brain, cut off his right hand, sever half his own vocal cords.
What joy can there be in it? What possible joy?
Women have so much to offer literature, art, science and every other field of human interest.
I could write for a long time on this. But given my long absence, it would be ungracious of me.
Your question is profound and eternal. But I think at the base of it is this: How we see ourselves greatly, if not wholly determines how we treat others. If we feel threatened, we subvert that which threatens us. The question is WHY do many men feel threatened to the point of having to push women down? Why does the human mind perceive different as inferior? That mindset is true of gender, race, color, creed, anything. Mankind has ranked these things hierarchically since time in memorial, seemingly incapable of placing anything on a horizontal line.
Rebecca: Since I have also been absent from Your page for quite some time, I certainly would not dare to call a lengthy post from You ungracious. I would not do it anyway.
You have done a very good job in Your comment of placing the gender war into the larger context of the human war against anything that is different. Good food for thought.
Women are definitely different from men. Obviously, on a biological level first and foremost. Cultures from Israel to Hawaii historically feared and punished Women for those differences, even for Their natural Female biological processes.
Anthropologists and pyschologists have had a field day researching that subject.
We know now that Women and men possess different chromosomes, too, that They process some chemicals differently and even utilize their brains differently.
But in no way, shape or form are Women's differences a sign of inferiority. In some of them, in fact, Woman comes out slightly superior.
She hears better, She processes certain types of knowledge better, She lives longer -- and there has to be a reason why, now that most artificial barriers have been removed, Women are beginning to outnumber men in college and other fields.
I long to see the day when misogyny is as extinct as fear of solar eclipses, where each and every Woman in the world -- no matter Her perceived physical attributes, weight, background or anything else, is celebrated and revered from the day that She is born until the day that She leaves us and then even so in memory.
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