The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> Feminism

Feminism

Posted by pancho (Guest) - Monday, March 24 2008, 21:11:21 (CET)
from 12.199.144.42 - mail.shpl.org

Non-Profit Organizations -

Linux -

Mozilla
Website:
Website title:

Through a lucky accident I read the first issue of Ms magazine in 1973 and like so many thousands of women and not a few men eagerly looked forward to every month’s issue after that. It’s the only magazine I read from cover to cover each and every time I picked it up. Feminism, the realization of the oppression of women and it’s seamless introduction into world history is the most mind-expanding and self-revealing liberation of all. We’re all born into this world to slave-mothers, boys and girls alike and it’s the first taste of life and oppression we encounter and in whose shadow we are force-fed a “self”. Even before we are taught language, nationality, ethnic pride, racism or religion, we’re told what a man is and what a woman is. Boys and girls alike are introduced to and made to serve Patriarchy and its need to perpetuate itself stunts and deforms us all…but women most of all.

I was a regular reader for the first two years, supplemented by books such as “The Second Sex” by Simone de Beauvior, “Sexual Politics” by Kate Millet, “The Female Eunuch” by Germaine Greer…and others I can’t recall the titles to. One felt the scales falling away from one’s eyes….things mysterious made sense through this new vision…if women were “made” into women, then men were just as much a creation of the Patriarchal system in place since the dawn of history. Sexual liberation preceded in significance racial liberation…to liberate oneself completely, as near as such a thing can be done, one had to go to the root of identity, before even Black or White….rich or poor…before everything came the kind of man or woman you were and Feminism provided the most insightful explanation of how we became either and why and in whose interests this was.

As much as politicians and the power structure has been terrified of Black and Brown and Yellow people toppling the white power structure, they’ve been more afraid of rebellion in gender roles. The ultimate Boss is the white male and in his mate’s self-awareness and rebellion he faces the greatest challenge to his continued rule.

The best way to beat it back was to co-opt people…the people discriminated against…white males realized they had to use women and Blacks and Browns and Yellows, to win them over, to keep them loyal…even as they turned the screws tighter. Hence we have the women politicians who feel they must act as men would…or the Clarence Thomas and Colin Powel or Alberto Gonzalez eager to believe that race and color doesn’t matter to white Republicans who seem willing to overlook such things, allowing Condi Rice into the Country Club if she plays her role properly…they use them and ruin them and discard them…just like white men always did back to the Plantation days when some Blacks were “privileged” to touch the Master’s body and eat in his kitchen…something they saw conferring status on them, elevating them above the common slaves who suffered the lash and rape and lived the real life of Afro-American.

When you look around and wonder how we got into Iraq after Vietnam…how religion seems to be taking us backward to a more cruel and uncaring time…you don’t see a backlash against Feminism as the cause….but Gloria Steinam does….she, the co-founder and editor of Ms magazine and a champion and tireless worker in so many causes but in women’s liberation first and foremost. In a biography titled “The Education of a Woman”, Carolyn Heilbrun writes;

“All of these aims (of Feminism, mine) will be hard fought by a worldwide backlash against feminism and against any weakening of patriarchy, whether defined by established religions or neoconservative ideals. How to counter this backlash, particularly in light of its extensive financing and influence on the media, is the major question women the world over face now.”

…men too.

---------------------

- BACK TO INDEX - REPLY - QUOTE - EDIT - DELETE -

The full topic:
No replies.

Content-length: 4221
Content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Accept-encoding: identity,gzip,deflate
Cache-control: max-age=259200
Connection: keep-alive
Cookie: *hidded*
Host: www.insideassyria.com
Keep-alive: 300
Referer: http://www.insideassyria.com/rkvsf5/rkvsf_core.php?.46Qd.
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.13) Gecko/20060501 Epiphany/1.6.5
Via: 1.1 localhost:3128 (squid/2.5.STABLE13)
X-forwarded-for: 127.0.0.1