This is very good. H/T Hattie. As a side note, it alludes to one of my main themes: the fallacious idea that it is more healthy and “natural” (or “genuine”) for women to be irrational than for us to be logical. As we know, that idea is central in Reeducation.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
It’s weird. I don’t think Australian culture is actually so backwards as these ads appear to make USA culture out to be. We are, however, experiencing a right wing backlash, so you can never be too sure of where you stand.
One of the aspects that is not in Australian blue collar working class conceptions at all (pardon the pun) is the idea that women are inherently emotional in some way. That does seem to be quite a strong idea in the various, what do they call it, pink enclaves, the secretarial pools, and with regard to lower status admin workers (which I had the extreme displeasure of being, once. Talk about a monster in the china-shop.) But the inherent blue collar idea is that women are tough. The inherent upper crust idea is, on the other hand, that there are some things not to talk about. Do as you please.
The U.S. is very, very conservative. IRL I have been in a five way conversation for several days about which country is more retrograde on gender relations, ourselves or Peru. We cannot decide.
I think there has to come a time when people see how much these attitudes erode human relations. I think that the patriarchal perspective often — well, usually — takes the approach that women are infinitely malleable and will bend to comply with whatever social order rules the day. This uncompromising attitude, however, embitters human relationships, and erodes human promise.
That’s what the patriarchal perspective expects, and it is destructive. But I am cynical here: I think they DO see how much these attitudes erode human relations, and that enough of them LIKE it that they want, and are able keep this system in place!
Yes, you are right. But you know the old cartoon of the tree surgeon who climbs along a branch of a tree and places himself at the utmost end, in order to sever the limb?
Ultimately, what they are doing cannot be sustained.
I’m going around and around about what you are saying and can’t think my way out. All the issues of womanhood seem different now than when I was younger. I can’t decide whether this means I’m wiser or if I’m just beaten down!!!
Jennifer – but do you think it will stop before the planet approaches thermal death? It’s been going on for so LONG.
Hattie – I think it is beaten down. You are a little older than I am but not that much so I am guessing we remember a lot of the same things. My upbringing, starting in the late 50s, was a lot more conservative than my mothers’ and grandmothers’ had been … maybe moreso than that of some earlier generations too, from what I can gather … but then we got 70s feminism and I thought it was over. Then Reaganism and the religious right set in, and things crept back and back … and I, not being fully hip to what gender discrimination really was, took a long time to even learn to recognize it.
Current womanhood: yes. One is hottt, fixes problems with plastic surgery, has children and a career, and all of this is sort of a recipe and sort of a surface without interiority … or am I being too negative?
I’m fighting it PZ, with all I’ve got. I think I always have been.
People should wake up and realise that they are going to die because of global warming anyway. Then they should fight it.
Yes!
The problem in my family was that my mother was psychotic. Whatever was in the air then about women that was negative became amplified in the crazy little family atmosphere she and my selfish, indifferent father created. What saved me was some model of sanity that entered the situation when my mother went into analysis. If it were not for that, I probably would have ended up insane, too.
My mother’s mental illness was something she was blamed for, and this is still what goes on today.
“My mother’s mental illness was something she was blamed for, and this is still what goes on today.”
Yes!