Whew, Josephine, are you really trying to line up with the Moral
Majority... I don't think you could be quite so insouciant if you
were living in Africa -
A
>
>And while we are talking about Utopias (I found a number of
>major flaws in the original model, I might add) the other
>thing we need to do is reduce the world's population by 75%.
>WHich is what I thought mother nature was trying to do when
>she designed aids.
>
>
>
>J
>
>Alison Croggon wrote:
>>
>> At 4:00 PM +0000 3/12/2001, Christopher Walker wrote:
>> >Against that view of the world in which the US is both the actor and the
>> >audience, in which the rest of the world is reduced to a sort of disposable
>> >stage set, assertions (joking or not) that women (or persons
>>over, or under,
>> >5'6" tall, for that matter) would do better if only they were in power do
>> >seem to me rather odd. They're no solution to what is a figure/ground
>> >problem with moral implications, the only change being along the
>> >(rhetorical) axis of (in)visibility.
>>
>> If there were something that could be practically done by poets to
>> address the US assertions of power, I guess we'd be doing it. Tell
>> me, what can poets do? Write poetry. Will that make any
>> "difference"? No. Did Neruda's poem about Nixon make him apologise
>> for the assassination of Allende? No. Has any poet's condemnation
>> of war stopped war? No. Etc. Is that a reason not to write poems?
>> No.
>>
>> Untangling what is possible out of the impossibilities of reality
>> might be something a poet could imagine. So why not imagine a world
>> where men and women are equal? It is harder than you think - for
>> example, to imagine thus can not assume that women are simply victims
>> of men. (I am thinking here of Gillian Rose's objection to feminism:
>> that it does not acknowledge the power of women). One of the poisons
>> of contemporary bourgeois psychologising (a phrase of Barthes' that
>> at the moment I find useful) is the sanctification of victimhood: one
>> who has the status of a victim may be excused everything. (The US,
>> as a victim, may be excused the horrors that is being done under the
>> eyes and bombs of its army.) Victimhood somehow elides moral agency.
>> It also cheapens the situation of those who are real victims (those
>> who actually died in the WTC, for example) by equating their reality
>> with a negative emotion which is really a covert assertion of power.
>>
>> To return to my point: by this I mean that in this world, with the
>> power relationships which we generally experience, the negative power
>> associated with victimhood is one commonly asserted by women (but not
>> only women), as the only option open to them. I remember my mother,
>> for example, instructing me that I must never undermine the authority
>> of a man; nor must I ever show my intelligence to a man, because men
>> don't like intelligent women; women must be "feminine". Instead, a
>> woman must exercise power indirectly, by manipulation under a cover
>> of weakness. So indeed feminine power has always existed, and can
>> indeed be tyrannical, but it is always covert. Female power that
>> asserts itself overtly as a desire _not_ to manipulate, as a desire,
>> perhaps, simply to _be_, is not only discouraged but attracts
>> hostility from both men and women, as being "unfeminine". The
>> punishment for both men and women for flouting those stereotypes has
>> always been a kind of social desexing.
>>
>> Since my mother's generation there has opened another option, which
>> is for women to copy traditional masculine norms of power. This is
>> the option which people often point to to show that women now have
>> power. Yes, that is true: and it's quite true that women are no
>> better than men when exercising this power, and might even be more
>> ruthless, because it's harder for women (still) to get there.
>>
>> I realise this analysis is somewhat Nietzschian, not to say
> > simplistic. But obscurely behind this surely is something else,
> > another possibility, of which these expressions of power betray the
>> lack. Our understanding of power is that it is measured by "power
>> over" something or someone, the ability to coerce. What if power
>> wasn't construed this way? What if instead power was the ability to
>> create a whole and dynamic self, the ability to nurture other selves,
>> if strength was measured by gentleness rather than brutality (and I'm
>> not talking here of a "feminine" construal of power, since restraint
>> has been also considered a masculine virtue). When I have tried to
>> imagine a society where men and women are equal, the first necessity
>> has been to remove both the masculine and feminine definitions of
>> power, and also to remove the gendered assignations of human
>> qualities (intelligence = male, gentleness = female, etc etc). If it
>> were possible, then, men and women might be able to perceive
>> themselves more clearly, both their differences and their
>> similarities, without needing to derogate either sex in order to
>> assert their own superiority. In such a world, brutal assertions of
>> power of any kind could only be seen as weakness.
>>
>> Would be ok, perhaps. Anyway, back to the real world, where of
>> course this solves nothing.
>>
>> Best
>>
>> A
>> --
>>
>> Alison Croggon
>>
>> Home page
>> http://users.bigpond.com/acroggon/
>> Masthead
>> http://au.geocities.com/masthead_2/
--
Alison Croggon
Home page
http://users.bigpond.com/acroggon/
Masthead
http://au.geocities.com/masthead_2/
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