If this most ancient and unyielding form of human inequity is of no interest to your philosophy of the destruction of all authority, then your ersatz philosophy is mere affectation, and your protests to the contrary are lies. If you find yourself confronting the word feminism with questions about how there can be a feminism if masculine and feminine are false categories, and if you are impressed with your cleverness in this regard, then I invite you to consider your own anarchy, wherein the whole object of your obsession, the State, is a metaphor and an abstraction.
I can't say much on the same level of his broadside, which I find pretty fucking challenging. If you want change, then you have to undergo change. The individual is not unanimous. We have a lot of fragments of other thoughts, a lot of expectations that have come from subtle social encouragement... In short, we are a kludge. Why should we not undergo the process we seek to impose?
And so why do we not look for imperialisms inside?
I find this process hard because I want to remain powerful. I have barked and I have pushed and I have tried to defend myself against a woman who was herself brought up to be passive-aggressive, furtive, dreamless, self-sacrificing, and subtle. I desperately want to avoid repeating the crimes I saw in my childhood. I don't want to relate to her the way her filthy, domineering, humiliating tyrant of a father did and does.
But I have to fight with her as my class superior, as my former partner, as a woman who has possession of my child. A woman with rights. A woman with power to harm me. A woman with power that she ought to have in helping to raise my boys. It is conflict and collaboration. It is complex.
I don't know how far along I am in the whole anarchy thing. I try to yield power to others. I am learning to talk to others without implying rape or ownership or threat. But it's hard to project confidence without falling to machismo. I don't think most people would call me macho, but I do think I project my personality and maybe that's reflection of class or sex or ethnic privilege. I don't know. As far as my relationship to the woman in my life, my soon to be former wife, I am trying to recognize her as a human being who I want to treat well but from whom I also want to protect myself.
Is there an anarchy and a feminism there? Perhaps. It is the best I have been able to do at present.
Cuneyt,
ReplyDeleteI admire your ability to write with raw honesty.
so do i .. of what jack says above .. admire something of your honesty ..always .. .
ReplyDeleteI relate to this too much:
ReplyDelete"I find this process hard because I want to remain powerful. I have barked and I have pushed and I have tried to defend myself against a woman who was herself brought up to be passive-aggressive, furtive, dreamless, self-sacrificing, and subtle. I desperately want to avoid repeating the crimes I saw in my childhood. I don't want to relate to her the way her filthy, domineering, humiliating tyrant of a father did and does."
My principles collide with each other all the time. A smallish woman raised in Japan to call wife, her father quite kind to men like me, but to women? Not so much. Authoritarian tendencies she acquired long ago, reapplied to our own two children. And I, a man twice her size from the country that destroyed hers and helped set its current course...what to say?
devin, .. . there is something happening in this .. walk up flat.. building ..that i live in .. right now ,that i have been talking with rob payne about .. because it has so unnerved my very feminine but oh so very brave ways ,.. it is of a man from the darker side of how behaving ..in somalia , meaning that he was an abuser in many ways where he once was , ..now he has some very odd ideas about what it means to be the caretaker of a building here, ..
ReplyDeleteof a cont. , of a query put to me by a 'arka ,.. ..your answer here ..in this comment on a post at cuneyt's anarchurious ,.. " there is something happening in this .. walk up flat.. building ..that i live in .. right now ,that i have been talking with rob payne about .. because it has so unnerved my very feminine but oh so very brave ways ,.. it is of a man from the darker side of how behaving ..in somalia , meaning that he was an abuser in many ways where he once was , ..now he has some very odd ideas about what it means to be the caretaker of a building here, .. " on whois' .. .now as well
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ReplyDeletethis was the query, from arka .. . "What we probably need around here is some lengthy thoughts from anne on what it means to be a woman in this modern world. . " .. . / not lengthy .. but more .. ,that is enough of a suggest for some ..
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