{"id":30382,"date":"2015-02-24T03:00:41","date_gmt":"2015-02-24T08:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=30382"},"modified":"2021-10-03T10:25:28","modified_gmt":"2021-10-03T14:25:28","slug":"the-bitter-war-between-men-and-women","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/02\/24\/the-bitter-war-between-men-and-women\/","title":{"rendered":"The bitter war between men and women"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sarah Hoyt recently reposted<\/a> her rant (in her words) about the ongoing struggle between men and women:<\/p>\n

I know this goes completely against everything you\u2019ve ever heard and learned. History \u2014 and SF \u2014 is full of dreamers who are convinced that if women ruled the world it would all be beauty flowers and non aggression. (To these dreamers I say spend a week as a girl in an all-girl school. It will be a rude awakening.)<\/p>\n

Dreamers of the Dan Brown stripe posit a peaceful female worship, with yet more beauty and flowers and non-aggression. They ignore the fact that 99% of the goddess-worshiping religions were scary. And don\u2019t tell me that\u2019s patriarchal slander \u2014 it\u2019s not. The baby-killing of Astoreth worship has been documented extensively. (Of course, the Phoenicians were equal-opportunity baby killers.) The castrations of Cybele worship were also well documented. Now, I can hardly imagine a female divinity without imagining hormonal episodes requiring appeasement \u2014 but that\u2019s because I\u2019m a woman of a certain age, and that\u2019s fodder for another altogether different discussion. Suffice it to say that the maiden and mother usually also had a crone persona who was \u2026 er\u2026 \u201cnot a nice person.\u201d<\/p>\n

Anyway \u2014 all this to say since I joined the MOB (Mothers Of Boys) the scales about such things as the inherent equality of men and women as far as their brain structure and basic behavior have fallen from my eyes. (Well, the scales that remained. My experience in school notwithstanding, I\u2019d been TAUGHT that females were getting the short end of the stick and that\u2019s a hard thing to overcome. Learned wisdom is so much more coherent than lived wisdom, after all.)<\/p>\n

Again \u2014 indulge me \u2014 I\u2019m going to make a lot of statements I can too back up, but which would take very, very, very long to document \u2014 so it will seem like I\u2019m ranting mid air. Stay with it. If I feel up to it later, I\u2019ll post some references.<\/p>\n

Yes, women have been horribly oppressed throughout history including the rather disgusting Victorian period that most Americans seem to believe is how ALL of history went. I contend, though, that women were not oppressed by some international conspiracy of males \u2014 yes, I know what Women\u2019s Studies professors say. I would however remind you we\u2019re talking of a group of people \u2014 men \u2014 who a) have issues finding their own socks in the dresser they\u2019ve used for ten years. b) Are so good at communicating as a group that they couldn\u2019t coordinate their way out of a wet paper bag, or to quote my friend Kate, couldn\u2019t organize a bonk in a brothel. (In most large organizations the \u201csocial\/coordinating\u201d function is performed by females at various levels.) c) That women being oppressed by a patriarchy so thorough it altered history and changed all records of peaceful female religion would require a conspiracy lasting thousands of years and involving almost every male on Earth. If you believe that, I have this bridge in NY that I would like to sell you. \u2014 Women were oppressed by their own bodies.<\/p>\n

Throughout most of history women had no safe and effective means of stopping pregnancy. \u2014 please, spare me the \u201cherbal\u201d remedies. I grew up in a village that had little access to medicine. If there had been an effective means of preventing pregnancy we\u2019d have known it. TRUST me. There are abortificients, but they endanger the mother as well. However, until the pill there was no safe contraceptive. The herbal contraceptive is a plot device dreamed up by fantasy writers. Also, btw, the People\u2019s Republic of China TESTED all these methods (including swallowing live tadpoles at the full moon.) NONE of them worked. SERIOUSLY.<\/p>\n

What this meant in practical fact is that most women were pregnant from menarche to menopause, if they were lucky to live that long. I\u2019ve been pregnant. If you haven\u2019t, take it from me it\u2019s not a condition conducive to brilliant discourse or reasoned logic. On top of that, of course, women would suffer the evils of repeated child bearing with no rest. In effect this DID make women frail and not the intellectual equals of men. And it encouraged any male around to \u201coppress\u201d them. I.e., when the majority of females around you need a minder, you\u2019re going to assume ALL females need a minder. It\u2019s human nature. Note that beyond suffrage, the greatest advance in women\u2019s equality came from the pill. Not a coincidence, that.<\/p>\n

However, the people who think that women were oppressed by an international historical cabal rule the establishment. Including the educational establishment. I find it hilarious that in their minds men\/boys are so powerful that they must be kept back and are suspected of being criminals just because they have a penis. This is attributing to them god-like powers to rival what any Victorian housewife would believe.<\/p>\n

Anyway \u2014 these people have decided all efforts must be made to equal male and female performance in school. Since, in practical fact, this is impossible because males and females develop at different paces and favor different areas, they\u2019ve settled for hobbling the all-powerful males.<\/p>\n

You see this everywhere from Saturday morning cartoons to kindergarten to all the grades beyond. In cartoons these days, the girls ALWAYS rescue the boys. (They do it while keeping impeccably groomed hair, too. Impressive, that.) And in school all the girls are assumed to be right and all the boys are assumed to be wrong.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sarah Hoyt recently reposted her rant (in her words) about the ongoing struggle between men and women: I know this goes completely against everything you\u2019ve ever heard and learned. History \u2014 and SF \u2014 is full of dreamers who are convinced that if women ruled the world it would all be beauty flowers and non […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[66,7,11],"tags":[713,374,987,139,1444,43],"class_list":["post-30382","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health-science","category-history","category-religion","tag-biology","tag-children","tag-feminism","tag-psychology","tag-sarahhoyt","tag-women"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7U2","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30382","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30382"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30382\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":68777,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30382\/revisions\/68777"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}