Hi Mark - I said my sketch was schematic. I accept your caveats
without hesitation: I also think that it doesn't really change the
gist of what I'm attempting to say. There is a factor I forgot to
mention, which is the role of education.
At 7:19 PM -0800 1/8/03, Mark Weiss wrote:
>It's a terrible way to achieve it, but it
>seems clear that in many many cases victimhood increases the woman's power
>within the family polity, and I can tell you that in more than a few cases
>this appeared to be sufficient reason for the woman to stay. Clearly
>profoundly pathological, but the choice of a man who abuses, however
>constrained, is often the product of a pathology as profound as the man's
>and always worth questioning.
Yes; again. That pathology in its less extreme form was what I was
attempting to indicate in this:
At 11:05 AM +1000 1/9/03, Alison Croggon wrote:
>So the issue of complicity is a real one. I was raised by a woman
>who told me that one should never challenge the authority of a man;
>that in order to get what one wanted, one used manipulation (not
>that she called it that). This is the classic tactic of the
>powerless; it's also in its own way quite successful, although I
>think the effects of this are almost wholly negative, since it is
>basically a counsel of despair, a kind of awful realpolitik which
>falsifies any possibility of honest relationship between men and
>women. I found it a horrific idea, and still do: I have a violent
>allergic reaction to those ideas of being "feminine" because of that
>conditioning. But this is how these complicities are transmitted.
OK. back to work...
Cheers
A
--
Alison Croggon
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