It’s been months now, I know. I have a good reason for my prolonged absence, aside from being so busy: Israblog wouldn’t let me in for some reason. I just got IE11 (for some reason only IE ever lets me log in; other browsers won’t even save my cookies), and I think it might solve this annoying little predicament.
So here’s a little something I’ve been thinking about recently:
Throughout history we can see that the usual attributes assigned to men and women have changed constantly. If today men are supposed to be stoic and women are emotional, back in Mediæval times it was the other way around; men are supposed to look far more rugged than they did back in, say, the 18th century (we’d consider the amount of make-up and the fancy clothing they used rather gay these days, although there is a reverse trend these days), &c. Even blue and pink used to be associated with girls and boys, respectively: blue was associated with the Virgin Mary, and pink was a lighter (i.e. more youthful) variant of red, the colour of blood. So when feminists talk about men being one way or another, it’s a rather moot point, as it’s actually ‘what women and men are expected to be like today’.
However, one can consistently see that whatever the norms are, women always get the short end of the stick: if men are emotional and women are not, then men are ‘sensitive’ and ‘refined’ and women are uncivilised brutes, but if it's the other way around, men are ‘stoic’ and ‘rational’and women are ‘hysterical’; if men are violent and women are not, then men are ‘strong’ and ‘brave’ and ‘heroic’ while women are ‘weak’, but if violence is bad, then men are ‘rational’ and women are ‘catty’. Noticing this pattern made me far more aware of feminists pointing out what they refer to as ‘patriarchy’, a term which can easily come across as very misandric.
However yet again, from what I’ve seen (and Meirav Michaeli, a notable Israeli feminist activist, is a pretty good example of this), feminist discourse does not deconstruct these terms but adopts it, choosing to invert the assigning of attributes, saying, ‘Men should be more peaceful like women,’ instead of, ‘We should stop assigning attributes to genders in the first place and stop violent fighting, be it masculine of feminine.’ In a sense, this construction of patriarchy perpetuates patriarchy.
Y’all have a good one.
Unum diem...
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