Phanto

A bit of advice ... Ease up on all the psychobabble. You may get a kick out of pointing out people's deep, dark, existential identity issues, but it's really just an insidious form of abuse.

Personally, I prefer outright abuse to being 'meaningfully psychoanalysed'. At least outright abuse is more honest.

These articles and comments are always interesting to read, solely to see what the latest is in "feminist studies". They're still stuck in their Foucauldian and neo-Marxist analyses of history and society, not daring to step outside these paradigms for fear of losing their narrative they've built up over the past few decades.

It's lost on them that looking at history through the eyes of a 1960s theory of power relations doesn't actually tell us much about history. In fact, it's a very lazy approach to history. Gone are the thousands of nuances between cultures and their values and morals. Gone is the actual understanding of the social, religious, political, and economic conditions of the time and how this contributed to values and morals. Instead, all we get is some simplistic theory on oppressors and oppressed and that the oppressors where always bad and the oppressors always good.

It's an economic and intellectual crime that this approach is the dominant one in Humanities and Social Sciences departments. An economic crime because it's a waste of tax payers' money, and that the majority of this money comes from the people they hate - men; and, an intellectual crime because of the disregarding of trying to understand actual history - how cultures/people actually lived.

A historian should try to transport themselves back to the time they are writing about, and communicate this to the reader, and not use some post-structuralist philosophers who have an anger management problem toward men and power.

The last line in the second paragraph should say "oppressed always good".

aristocrat

'A historian should try to transport themselves back to the time they are writing about, and communicate this to the reader, and not use some post-structuralist philosophers who have an anger management problem toward men and power.'

You and phanto should do lunch.

Killarney,

I don't underestimate "true ‘capitalist’ reasons"....I'm fully aware that women were "emancipated" for that very reason, so much so, that these days a woman almost has to excuse herself if she's not "in the workplace" juggling home, kids, work and generally being driven to manic distraction. However, she'll probably have an outside entertaining area, a people mover, a Thermomix and map of her local IKEA permanently seared into her memory.

"While women have made what is patronisingly referred to as ‘great strides’, especially in terms of consumer spending, the matrix of power remains firmly in the hands of men..."

Let's say a masculine system dominates in Western industrial society.

Paglia:

"All the genres of philosophy, science, high art, athletics, and politics were invented by men...."

"...Men bonding together, invented culture as a defence against female nature. Sky cult was the most sophisticated step in this process, for its switch of the creative locus from earth to sky is a shift from belly-magic to head-magic. And from this defensive head-magic has come the spectacular glory of male civilisation, which has lifted women with it. The very language and logic modern woman uses to assail patriarchal culture were the invention of men.

"....Woman, at first, content to accept man's protections but now inflamed with desire for her own illusory freedom, invades man systems and suppresses her indebtedness to him as she steals them..."

I fail to really understand what it is that feminists want...the system is "male". The system has allowed women a certain autonomy not available in less developed, less Western societies. The system also rests on a foundation of aggression. 20th century modern industry and farm practices emanated from and really amount to peacetime applications of wartime technological advances - and they are now employed to manipulate/attack the earth...and from whence humanity began to get really out of balance with its ecosystem (but that's another story)

Western woman have been lifted, entangled as the genders are, by a male system - and simultaneously feminism derides the very paradigm that bestows it a voice.

Killarney:

My ‘psychobabble’ has obviously hit a nerve with you. Why not just ignore it? It is not abuse to suggest that someone who seems more intent on manipulating the discussion rather than helping it along by reason and logic has a hidden agenda. Such behaviour should be exposed for what it is. In my opinion it is not in the spirit of the forum to manipulate discussions for one’s own emotional reasons.

Aggressive behaviour, ranting and raving, using obtuse language, sarcasm and patronising people are all ways of trying to hijack the discussion to protect a view that someone is emotionally dependent on maintaining. That is abuse. It is an abuse of the forums and disrespectful to people who come here to discuss issues for the right reasons.

I do not need to expose anyone’s deep dark secrets they are there to be seen by anyone within an ounce of insight. People often expose a lot more than simply their opinions and ideas when they post. If they do not want that exposed then they should refrain from posting.

“You and Phanto should do lunch”

It is that kind of sarcastic bitterness that I am talking about.