- those who think the two movements are natural enemies.
- those who see a natural affinity between the two and found this worrying.
- (just lately) those who see a natural affinity between the two movements and see this as promising.
A bunch of college guys were playing ball hockey on the street and there were three high-school-age girls on the grass a little ways away exercising. Stretching. It was 8 degrees Celsius, which is about 45 Fahrenheit. That detail is important for all three girls were wearing leggings, tank tops and bras that the tank tops did little to hide and the bras, in turn, were clearly designed to put their breasts on display.
And the exercise they were doing was intriguing. It was a kind of stretch wherein each girl would like on her back and point her legs straight up in the air and then spread them as wide as they could. When she had done this, a second girl would kneel between her thighs and gently push on her inner things with both hands. Then they started to wrestle and playfully pull one another's tops off.
I'm sure you get the picture. You see a lot of it about.
Here is the really intriguing thing: no one wants to blame the girls. And no one saw it coming.
Really, I was around in the late 1970s and neither the feminists who were pushing one way nor the cultural conservatives pushing the other foresaw that girls would respond to greater individual freedoms by dressing and acting like, both respectively and simultaneously, whores and princesses. And no one saw that their mothers would either tolerate or openly encourage this behaviour. I certainly didn't see it. If you asked me in junior high school if such a thing were possible, I would have accused you of hallucinating.
And to some extent they still don't see it. Feminists who decry the princess movement blame Disney and it never seems to cross their minds even for a tiny moment that the girls actually want to do this. I was reading a couple of sites by conservative Catholic women lately and both treated the slutty dress and behaviour we see in college girls these days as something that was being forced on the girls against their will. They argued that what these girls need, desperately need, is someone to tell them that they don't have to do this.
What I am getting at here is a shared assumption on the part of both groups that women and girls are naturally superior in a moral way particularly as pertains to sexual behaviour. In the 1980s, in the face of irrefutable evidence to the contrary, feminists insisted that no woman would ever lie about being sexually assaulted. Today, cultural conservatives look at young women behaving in sexually unrestrained fashion and blame everyone but the women themselves for what is happening.
This last is really odd because any one who has ever been responsible for a group of teenage girls will know that left to their natural instincts most will push the limits sexually. All of the wild behaviours now deplored were already in evidence when I was in university in the 1980s. New media have made us more aware of these things and relaxed social standards have made them more common but there is nothing new about them. There is nothing here that isn't deeply embedded in human nature and always will be.
But that fantastic belief in female moral superiority simply will not wilt. Particularly in women themselves. Women I admire deeply, women whose intelligence otherwise awes me, are peculiarly blind in this area.
They all know, as they have to, that there are women who behave in exactly the ways they claim women don't behave. But these cases are always treated as exceptions. What we don't see, particularly from feminists and cultural conservatives, is any willingness to treat women as moral adults who should individually be held responsible for their behaviour. Not as long as either Disney or men or the broader culture can be blamed anyway.
No comments:
Post a Comment