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WayHome -> RE: Misogyny (8/19/2004 3:37:01 PM)
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No, it's fine, jump right in when the flow suits you. Jump back out when it doesn't. Glad to have you around.
Perhaps it's just your manner of communication, but that doesn't sound very sincere. You proclaim to always say what you mean but that doesn't seem to be the case.
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A woman could, I guess, be so cynical as to preach equality and then put men in a yolk and harness their strength and agression to do the ugly work of war for them. They can, that is, if they have some good men protecting them while they do it. I'm not sure why you, as a man, would accept such a yolk willingly. Maybe it's something you learned from the bonobos, or Dr. Farrell.
You snipped that a little short. I fixed it for you. So you responded:
No. You did not "fix" it for me. I cut it where I did so that you might look at the relevant part of the statement. The first part, "A woman could, I guess" could be replaced by "A man could, I guess" or "A government could, I guess" or any other ruling entity you chose and it will make the same amount of sense as when the subject is a woman, which is not much.
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Surely you wrote this in haste. Any warrior of principle accepts such a yoke (nothing to do with eggs) whether it be that of a man or a woman or of a principle. Not do do so is simply to be a thug or military dictator. I'm sure that's not what you are advocating but in your haste to belittle me you have painted with a rather wide brush. Why would a "real man" warrior like Stormin Norman or Patton yoke himself to the whims of a civilian congress when he has the power to dominate. Because he is a man of principle, that's why.
No, I didn't write hastily, but I think that you might have been skimming for something to attack, rather than thinking. I'll be more explicit. If a woman spends her life condemning male dominance and agression as evil, equating men who display those traits with rapists, and then turns around and sends you to war, using the very traits that she condems when it suits her, that would be rather cynical. If you were to suffer that kind of action gladly, first accepting that those things in you were evil, and then taking on the yoke that this woman would put on you as an unworthy dumb brute that is only fit for cannon fodder, you wouldn't be a warrior of principal, you'd be a slave. There is honor in allegence. In slavery there is none. It's alright, the difference is lost on most men these days.
We weren't discussing, "a woman (who) spends her life condemning male dominance and agression as evil, equating men who display those traits with rapists", we were discussing women who were leaders and societies where women were in charge. I will agree with you that a woman who makes a career of bashing "maleness" would be a hippocrit for then "yoking" that force to the task of defending herself. But a woman (or women) who rules a tribe or a nation and appoints the men to the task or war for which they are best suited bears no dishonor whatsoever. A patriarchal society which relies on women to produce and raise offspring so that society can continue to exist is likewise not to be faulted, for that is the way of things.
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You have mentioned bonobos many times since I first brought them up, still without understanding enough about them to utilize them as a representaqtion of anything.
I happily confess to knowing almost nothing about them except what you have said. They live in female dominant societies where sex is the currency of power, not violence. In other words, they are absolutely nothing like us. They are just another specious example of what we "should" be like that you bought. If they were like us, we would have the celebacy penalty, instead of the death penalty, and a good number of Iraqis would be still be around. They'd just be really horney.
That's funny. The point of bonobos is not that we are more like them than like chimps. The point is that they are more like chimps than we are and yet have a vastly different society, so we should not expect our society to conform to chimp standards any more than theirs does. Your comments on Iraqis are not really relevant to what it is we learn from bonobos, but clever none-the-less. I suspect that if our society had a more bonobo-like model then we wouldn't have issue in Iraq in the first place. Chimps often engage in war and vengance and all sorts of things that a lot of aging hippies like to attribute only to the sins of man. While bonobo society does have violence, it does not have violence towards bonobos. Chimps have constantly changing tribes and borders. Their equivalent of nations rise and fall as fast as ours. This is not true of bonobos.
Despite my arguments I actually agree with a lot of what you have said. Maleness has been demonized in our society and that is a shame. Feminity has also gotten a black eye in the process and that is equally shameful. Being a "housewife" should not be embarassing, but neither should it be the only option. The survival strategy of the human species for the last 50k years has been flexibility and diversity. There is far more diversity within each sex than than between them, thus I feel it is best not to attribute an ideal role to anyone based simply on gender.
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