Many women, I think, resist feminism because it is an agony to be fully conscious of the brutal misogyny which permeates culture, society, and all personal relationships.
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Andrea Dworkin, Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics
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“Women, under separate masters, are the most divided of oppressed groups. And men prefer a willing slave to a forced slave, hence the necessity to enslave the mind. When one considers the natural attraction between the sexes, the dependence of the woman on the husband, her achievement of identity only through him ‘it would be a miracle if the object of being attractive to men had not become the polar feminine education and formation of character’. Resignation of will and meekness become part of sexual attractiveness. What is now called the nature of women is eminently an artificial thing – the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in others…no other class of dependents have had their character so entirely distorted from its natural proportions by their relations with their masters.”—Charnie Guettell, from Marxism & Feminism (1974)




3 comments
March 23, 2015 at 6:04 am
roughseasinthemed
Many women resist feminism because they must compete by the patriarchal rules.
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March 23, 2015 at 9:34 am
robert browning
The resisting feminism thought reminds me of resisting liberal or progressive views and Upton Sinclare’s ( =/-):” It’s difficult to get someone to understand when they think their livelyhood is threatened if they do understand”
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March 23, 2015 at 10:36 am
tnt666
Very interesting quote from Guettel. Though the book, claiming that the oppression of females is due to capitalism, misses the whole point that the oppression of females started with patriarchy some 5500 years ago, and uses religious morals to impose slavery onto the world, womb slavery, and labour slavery.
If we females really want to make a dent in capitalism, as denying the Holy spirit is the ultimate Christian sin, there would be no better wrench to place in the cogs of capitalism than to stop providing it with cheap labour, by boycotting reproduction for a while. It is what I have done, permanently.
All contraception, all sterilisation, all abortion, should be free and accessible in Canada, so as to empower females to make real choices, that do not derive from the obligation to raise offspring alone, stressed, and poor, after the “good man”, after “the right one” has left.
All of our society is structured around the “female as child producer for industry”, our governments encourage this, our organisations encourage this. It needs to stop. There is no “biological clock” forcing us to reproduce.
Capitalism is indeed a strong component of the oppression of females. However, communist countries did not do too well by us females.
What we need is not a left-right dichotomy, but something new.
Thank you for the good wake-up thought.
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