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Men Are Scared of Women
May. 14th, 2014 09:06 amJim C. Hines has a number of cogent thoughts on the case of the 17-year-old kicked out of her prom because the fathers were lusting after her. It's well worth the read, if only for lines like:
Trying to maintain my dignity as a teenage boy was like a neverending game of whack-a-mole…
Because apparently seventeen-year-old girl legs are made of man-kryptonite.
We blame and punish the women, because it frees men from responsibility.
But the last-quoted line is the one I want to riff on. "We blame and punish women" is true. I'm not as sure that's because it frees men from responsibility. It seems to me that, when you consider the extremes that men have gone to veil women, there's an element of fear involved. (BTW, it's not just the Taliban and the burka - think Victorian England for example.) It's as if certain men fear the "man-kryptonite" of women.
Just a thought.
ETA: A certain Professional Crank on the Internet (PCotI) is arguing today that there is no such thing as martial rape. He's basing it on "Christianity" and a ruling by an Indian court in which a woman claims she was drugged, forcibly "married" and then raped can't claim rape because she was married.
The comment thread on that post is thick with hatred about women and a distressing lack of Christianity (at least the kind of Christianity I learned at my Catholic grade school). I think the posting and the comment thread proves my point above.
Trying to maintain my dignity as a teenage boy was like a neverending game of whack-a-mole…
Because apparently seventeen-year-old girl legs are made of man-kryptonite.
We blame and punish the women, because it frees men from responsibility.
But the last-quoted line is the one I want to riff on. "We blame and punish women" is true. I'm not as sure that's because it frees men from responsibility. It seems to me that, when you consider the extremes that men have gone to veil women, there's an element of fear involved. (BTW, it's not just the Taliban and the burka - think Victorian England for example.) It's as if certain men fear the "man-kryptonite" of women.
Just a thought.
ETA: A certain Professional Crank on the Internet (PCotI) is arguing today that there is no such thing as martial rape. He's basing it on "Christianity" and a ruling by an Indian court in which a woman claims she was drugged, forcibly "married" and then raped can't claim rape because she was married.
The comment thread on that post is thick with hatred about women and a distressing lack of Christianity (at least the kind of Christianity I learned at my Catholic grade school). I think the posting and the comment thread proves my point above.
