mad as hell
Feb. 18th, 2007 09:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lotesseThis 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.
Re: The icon is to remind us all why we love the male gender.
Date: 2007-02-19 05:23 am (UTC)I love my boy to heaven and to earth, and we're trying to make this egalitarian thing go right. but it's hard, because we don't really have a cultural script to fall back on. We're making it up as we go along. And he was raised in a very conservative home, and has blind spots that he can't help but that drive me crazy anyway.
We're making a real go of it--we're both undergrads, but we've been together since our teens, and marriage is in the cards. Babies are something I want desperately, and soon. I think stuff like this actually freaks me out more because of the relative traditonal-ness of the life I want. I want to be a wife and mother in a world that's got some major issues in those areas. I want that sort of love without subservience. That scares me so bad.
Re: The icon is to remind us all why we love the male gender.
Date: 2007-02-19 05:39 am (UTC)My sons are 33 and 36, and so in the middle here- raised by a card-carrying feminist in the 70's but prey to all the attendant larger influences none-the-less. But they can talk about it, they know it's to struggle with and learn about. And that makes all the difference. Their dad thought I was nuts, and his dad thought I was foolish.
Re: The icon is to remind us all why we love the male gender.
Date: 2007-02-19 05:54 am (UTC)Seriously, thank you for helping to raise a generation of more-feminist men. I and the girls of my cohort are eternally grateful to all the women like you.