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mad as hell
Feb. 18th, 2007 09:19 pmThis post over at I Blame the Patriarchy sent me into a full-on yelling freak=out. I'm not sure why it got to me so completely. It's about a book called "Babyproofing Your Marriage," aimed at women of course. A taste of its wisdom:
"The book is full of helpful tips - one of the most notorious being the ‘Five Minute Fix’ - how did you first come across this useful tactic?
Well, it’s not as if we invented it! We just realized that, as sex acts go, this one was totally undervalued by women. It wasn’t until we became overworked, time-starved mums that we saw the obvious benefits. You don’t have to take your clothes off, the time you spend on it is minimal, and your husband thinks you are a Goddess! When we mentioned the idea at one of our men’s focus groups and got a gob smacked, “Good God, that would transform my marriage” reaction, we knew we were on to something."
And just, the casualness of it. It made me want to scream. Because clearly, the way to save a marriage is for women to perform sex acts they don't enjoy on their husbands, cause that's the only reason why they keep you around. Love doesn't matter. And god only knows that female sexuality doesn't matter. It doesn't even seem to exist. No one is going to tell men that they need to give their wives oral sex everyday for the first year of any given offspring's life, or else their wives won't love them any more. It's socially accepted prostitution, and it's sickening.
I hate that women are the ones who have to take care of things. I hate that it's the wife's job, the girlfriend's job, to keep it all going. And I adore The Boy, but this kind of shit makes me absolutely terrified of getting married. Because how can we hp[e to make anything pure in such a toxic culture?
I'm writing a paper on the impossibility of love in George Eliot, and it's becoming scarily clear to me that things haven't changed as much as I would like to think since she was writing. The world still does everything it can to choke love off, covering it with priviledge and cruelty and subservience and ownership until it becomes so hopelessly hard to find anything good. Maggie Tulliver has to die before she can find perfect love. In a flood.
"The book is full of helpful tips - one of the most notorious being the ‘Five Minute Fix’ - how did you first come across this useful tactic?
Well, it’s not as if we invented it! We just realized that, as sex acts go, this one was totally undervalued by women. It wasn’t until we became overworked, time-starved mums that we saw the obvious benefits. You don’t have to take your clothes off, the time you spend on it is minimal, and your husband thinks you are a Goddess! When we mentioned the idea at one of our men’s focus groups and got a gob smacked, “Good God, that would transform my marriage” reaction, we knew we were on to something."
And just, the casualness of it. It made me want to scream. Because clearly, the way to save a marriage is for women to perform sex acts they don't enjoy on their husbands, cause that's the only reason why they keep you around. Love doesn't matter. And god only knows that female sexuality doesn't matter. It doesn't even seem to exist. No one is going to tell men that they need to give their wives oral sex everyday for the first year of any given offspring's life, or else their wives won't love them any more. It's socially accepted prostitution, and it's sickening.
I hate that women are the ones who have to take care of things. I hate that it's the wife's job, the girlfriend's job, to keep it all going. And I adore The Boy, but this kind of shit makes me absolutely terrified of getting married. Because how can we hp[e to make anything pure in such a toxic culture?
I'm writing a paper on the impossibility of love in George Eliot, and it's becoming scarily clear to me that things haven't changed as much as I would like to think since she was writing. The world still does everything it can to choke love off, covering it with priviledge and cruelty and subservience and ownership until it becomes so hopelessly hard to find anything good. Maggie Tulliver has to die before she can find perfect love. In a flood.