Reflections Of A Good Nazi
Nov. 14th, 2004 10:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poliphiloIt's only a hundred years or so since men in the West stopped regarding women as property.
Of course I'm talking Law here. In private lots of men still do regard women as property. We've learned to be shocked by slavery, by genocide, but the overwhelming horror of a set-up where one sex dominates and abuses the other hasn't quite hit us yet. We're recovering, we're in denial. The thing is too huge and we're all pretty much incriminated.
So when we sail into third world countries and beat them up for not being like us, we tend not to put women's rights very high on our agenda. Damn it all, you will have a democracy! But the burkha, female circumcision, forced marriage, the denial of education to women- these are all cultural phenomena and maybe it would be a little racist and imperialistic to criticise.
Where women are concerned all men are nazis. Some of us, perhaps, are good nazis.
Of course I'm talking Law here. In private lots of men still do regard women as property. We've learned to be shocked by slavery, by genocide, but the overwhelming horror of a set-up where one sex dominates and abuses the other hasn't quite hit us yet. We're recovering, we're in denial. The thing is too huge and we're all pretty much incriminated.
So when we sail into third world countries and beat them up for not being like us, we tend not to put women's rights very high on our agenda. Damn it all, you will have a democracy! But the burkha, female circumcision, forced marriage, the denial of education to women- these are all cultural phenomena and maybe it would be a little racist and imperialistic to criticise.
Where women are concerned all men are nazis. Some of us, perhaps, are good nazis.
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no subject
Date: 2004-11-14 01:14 pm (UTC)Nazi? Well I was trying to be provocative. But I think I'll stand by it. The oppression of women by men is a colossal evil that has been going on for all recorded history- and we're largely blind to it. We don't have a language to pin it down. The 70s terms of abuse- chauvinist, patriarchal- have been defused and turned into joke words. And so one reaches into a depleted arsenal for terms that will still deliver a sting.