>From Tracy, not John:
>Secondly I see Diana as having become (consciously or not) a renewal
>of the earth goddess displaced by masculine myths in so many
>mythologies and religions, particularly the Protestant, and which
>themselves underly what is wrong with technology and modern life (its
>masculine-abstraction and denial of feelings and of things earthly as
>divine).
I sure as h*** hope someone's being facetious here. A lot of us
women (& yes, some of us are even feminists) don't see any advantage
to the wallowing in supposedly "feminine" myths over and above the
supposedly "masculine" ones. I certainly didn't see any more male
"denial of feelings" going on about this whole business than I did
female. What I have seen is, to my mind, just another hysteria, but
one peculiarly troubling from a feminist viewpoint (among others)
because of the model of femininity that is being touted and
practically worshipped. Almost every vox pop comment I heard on the
first day (after that I tuned out, being more prone to abstraction
myself, sorry!) said, chokingly, "She was... so beautiful" (read
"charming, lovely, gorgeous, gracious, classy" etc). The supposed
good works are appended to spiritualise her--they are not the
real focus, else we would have seen the same "grief" over Mother
Teresa who got about 40 seconds in the first reports I heard. Earth
goddess crap (and I think it is even a wrong choice of goddess
here, it doesn't match what is being constructed out of Diana) is
just as patriarchal as any denial of feeling, and we won't be any
better off if people start regressing to mother-worship than if they
live in fear of daddy. Beauty-worship is also pretty sickening to
my mind: surely we should be striving to be agents and not objects.
We might all like to look at a pretty face, even if we disagree on
what's pretty, but must we deify it??? Next thing people will be
saying how gracious of her it was to sell off those supremely
self-indulgent expensive dresses which should never have been
bought in the first place. Acting in the world seems to me the very
opposite of what emotionally-wallowing people have been doing in
the last few days. What has gone on seems to me like a massive
substitute for action, even a means of quelling it.
>Yes, I agreed with Lawrence Upton's criticisms when I first saw them
>but it was Karlien van den Beukel's comment that provoked me to send
>this.
Which just goes to show that it's also a *man's* prerogative to
change his mind... In addition, I think you may be doing a disfavour
to Karlien as what she said wasn't that far gone. I don't have her
posting any longer to re-read it, but I'm pretty sure she wouldn't
want to be advocating some kind of essentially-superior female
possible world. Karlien???
Tracy.
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