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Feb. 21st, 2002 01:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
botias
My computer is alive again. The hard drive decided to take a sabatical, unwind until it was feeling reformated again. It left all its paperwork behind, so I didn't lose any data. This forced Alan to gift me with a better hard drive from his stash. They really shouldn't have put that boy in charge of hardware. I'm sure he didn't actually steal anything per se, but I know that deals were made and 'scrap' piles were raided.
I haven't listed any reading material in a couple of weeks, but that's not because I've given up the habit. I'm both spending less time reading and spending most of my reading time gnawing my way through my last listed book: H.G. Wells' autobiography. (It probably doesn't help that I've been reading too much of it out loud to Alan.) I'm grateful to have been born today, and not in his generation or (horrors!) his parents' generation or in any of those many parts of the world today in which daily life makes theirs look like one of ease and enlightenment. It tickles me too the things that are the same. He has that same male fantasy that I have seen regularly in 'men's' fiction:
"Regardless of every visible reality about me, of law, custom, social usage, economic necessities and the unexplored psychology of womanhood, I developed my adolescent fantasy of free, ambitious, self-reliant women who would mate with me and go their way, as I desired to go my way. I had never in fact seen or heard of any such women; I had evolved them from my inner consciousness."
Later in his life, as the feminist movement emerges, he relates his hopes of finding his dream women, at last, among their ranks and his ultimate disappointment.
"There was a growing demand on the part of women for economic and political independence, and at first it seemed to me that here at last advancing upon me was that great-hearted free companionship of noble women of which I had dreamed from my earliest years.
As the hosts of liberation came nearer and could be inspected more accurately I found reason to qualify these bright expectations. If women wanted to be free, the first thing was surely for them to have complete control of their persons, and how could that happen unless Free Love and Neo-Malthusianism [birth control] replaced directed and obligatory love and involuntary child-bearing, in the forefront of their programme... These things and not any petty political enfranchisment, I reasoned, must surely constitute the real Magna Charta of Women... That feminism had anything to do with sexual health and happiness, was repudiated by these ladies with flushed indignation so soon as the suggestion was made plain to them. Their modesty was as great as their boldness. Sex--what was sex? Get thee behind me Satan! They were not thinking of it. They were good pure women rightly struggling for a Vote, and that was all they wanted."
(I apologize for any missed words etc. I am being attacked by a toddler as I type.) Oddly, this sort of denial was present in the feminist upsurge of the seventies and probably still is. When Nancy Friday began work on 'My Secret Garden' she thought that she would receive every support from her contingent of feminist collegues. Instead, responses to her work were often cold and discouraging. It seems there is still a part of feminism that sees sexual liberation as incompatible with their movement. *pause while I have a smoothy with said toddler* Ms. Friday's hypothesis, as I remember it, is that sexually satisfied women are not perhaps not adequately angry and resentful; basking in the afterglow being apparently considered inconducive to activism. For myself, I think that a lot of it might be that many women are still made to feel very uncomfortable with their sexuality. These women would perhaps rather resolve the inequity by reining in the sexuality of men then expanding the freedom of women.
I haven't listed any reading material in a couple of weeks, but that's not because I've given up the habit. I'm both spending less time reading and spending most of my reading time gnawing my way through my last listed book: H.G. Wells' autobiography. (It probably doesn't help that I've been reading too much of it out loud to Alan.) I'm grateful to have been born today, and not in his generation or (horrors!) his parents' generation or in any of those many parts of the world today in which daily life makes theirs look like one of ease and enlightenment. It tickles me too the things that are the same. He has that same male fantasy that I have seen regularly in 'men's' fiction:
"Regardless of every visible reality about me, of law, custom, social usage, economic necessities and the unexplored psychology of womanhood, I developed my adolescent fantasy of free, ambitious, self-reliant women who would mate with me and go their way, as I desired to go my way. I had never in fact seen or heard of any such women; I had evolved them from my inner consciousness."
Later in his life, as the feminist movement emerges, he relates his hopes of finding his dream women, at last, among their ranks and his ultimate disappointment.
"There was a growing demand on the part of women for economic and political independence, and at first it seemed to me that here at last advancing upon me was that great-hearted free companionship of noble women of which I had dreamed from my earliest years.
As the hosts of liberation came nearer and could be inspected more accurately I found reason to qualify these bright expectations. If women wanted to be free, the first thing was surely for them to have complete control of their persons, and how could that happen unless Free Love and Neo-Malthusianism [birth control] replaced directed and obligatory love and involuntary child-bearing, in the forefront of their programme... These things and not any petty political enfranchisment, I reasoned, must surely constitute the real Magna Charta of Women... That feminism had anything to do with sexual health and happiness, was repudiated by these ladies with flushed indignation so soon as the suggestion was made plain to them. Their modesty was as great as their boldness. Sex--what was sex? Get thee behind me Satan! They were not thinking of it. They were good pure women rightly struggling for a Vote, and that was all they wanted."
(I apologize for any missed words etc. I am being attacked by a toddler as I type.) Oddly, this sort of denial was present in the feminist upsurge of the seventies and probably still is. When Nancy Friday began work on 'My Secret Garden' she thought that she would receive every support from her contingent of feminist collegues. Instead, responses to her work were often cold and discouraging. It seems there is still a part of feminism that sees sexual liberation as incompatible with their movement. *pause while I have a smoothy with said toddler* Ms. Friday's hypothesis, as I remember it, is that sexually satisfied women are not perhaps not adequately angry and resentful; basking in the afterglow being apparently considered inconducive to activism. For myself, I think that a lot of it might be that many women are still made to feel very uncomfortable with their sexuality. These women would perhaps rather resolve the inequity by reining in the sexuality of men then expanding the freedom of women.
