Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
poliphilo: (Default)
[personal profile] poliphilo
It'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.

Date: 2004-11-14 10:16 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] besideserato.livejournal.com
I have always loved him, too! Fabulous strategist and elegant soldier. I am thrilled silly that he was born on the same day as I.

Date: 2004-11-14 10:20 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] poliphilo.livejournal.com
The only thing I can remember about my birthday- Jan 21- is that it was the day Lenin died.

Date: 2004-11-14 10:29 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] besideserato.livejournal.com
Well, on January 21, 1976 the first Concordes took flight (from London's Heathrow Airport and Orly Airport outside Paris). As you mentioned, in 1924 Vladimir Lenin died. In 1793, King Louis XVI was executed. And in 1867 French General Maxime Weygand was born...

Date: 2004-11-14 10:34 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] poliphilo.livejournal.com
Ah, yes- the execution of Louis XVI. Had I been around then (and who knows, perhaps I was) I would have been a Jacobin.

General Weygand?

Date: 2004-11-15 04:22 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] besideserato.livejournal.com
He was one of the commanders who accepted the German surrender at the end of the First World War only to advise the French to surrender to the Germans early in World War II.

I am over-simplifying... more here. Hopefully more in-depth and accurate. I am so tired and drunk, if I don't go to bed, I may pass out at the keyboard. Good night!

Profile

poliphilo: (Default)
poliphilo

December 2025

S M T W T F S
  12 34 5 6
7 8 9 10 11 12 13
14 15 16 17 18 19 20
21 22 23 24 25 26 27
28293031   

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Page generated Dec. 28th, 2025 12:15 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios