more notes on freedom

I read what blows the top of my head off. If it’s not going to blow the top of my head off, I don’t have time for it. I finally got my hands on Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch. Therein is the famous line that begins the chapter called “Loathing.”: Most women have no idea how much men hate them.” And it begins a frightening chapter of a frightening section. Frightening because every last word of what Greer has written is true. More frightening because, when I talk to my female friends I realize most of them have one, never heard of Frieden, Greer, or Mary Daly, let alone read them and TWO: if they began to read them, would close the book in either disgust, confusion or disbelief. This is the condition Greer is addressing by the very title of her book: that women are, in this society, lesser versions of men with pretty hair and desirable tits They are valuable because they are valuable to men. And, what is more, all to willing to accept this second class role. To me this is like a white man reading the autobiography of Malcolm X and a history of black slavery, and then telling an African American about it and one of us laughing it off. But there was a point when Blacks did laugh off such things content to take only what we could get. And what we got was nothing. We remained slaves long after 1865.

That is really the condition of many women today.

To be content for the scraps the master throws from the table for you to gobble up is a dog’s lot, and if a human does it, then she is not free.

A woman may think that it is enough to hate men, that this is the message, that MEN did this. No, a man, some man, did this long ago and there was enough hate in the doing of it: men hating women and women hating themselves, to last a life time. It is not enough to be bitter. We have to be willing. Willing to make changes.