“Adrienne Rich (1979) [commented that] objectivity is the name we give to male subjectivity.” Introduction, p5
“Anna Bexall (1980) [ has suggested that] males have a great emotional investment in objectivity.” Introduction, p5
“… the ways we have been ‘protected’ from obscenity, yet made the object of much of it.” from “A Thief in the House: Women and Language,” Mercilee M. Jenkins and Cheris Kramarae, p11
“For those of us who studied literature, a previously unspoken sense of exclusion from authorship, and a painfully personal distress at discoverin whores, bitches, muses, and heroines dead in childbirth where we had once hoped to discover ourselves …” from “Dancing Through the Mine-Field: some Observations on the Theory, Practice, and Politics of a Feminist Literary Criticism,” Annett Kolodny, p24
And almost 50 years later, that’s still all we see on tv, in movies, in video games.
“… what we are asking be scrutinized are othing less than shared cultural assumptions so deeply rooted and so long ingrained that, for the most part, our critical colleagues have ceased to recognize them as such.” from “Dancing Through the Mine-Field: Some Observations on the Theory, Practice, and Politics of a Feminist Literary Criticism,” Annett Kolodny, p29
What’s that thing about fish not knowing they live in water?
“It is,after all, an imposition of high order to ask the viewer to attend to Ophelia’s sufferings in a scene where, before, he’d always so comfortably kept his eye fixed firmly on Hamlet.” from “Dancing Through the Mine-Field: Some Observations on the Theory, Practice, and Politics of a Feminist Literary Criticism,” Annett Kolodny, p29
Read chris wind’s Soliloquies: the lady doth indeed protest.
“‘If Kate Chopin were really worth reading’, an Oxford-trained colleague once assured me, ‘she’d have lasted—like Shakespeare’; and he then proceeded to vote against the English Department’s crediting a Women’s Studies seminar I was offering in American women writers.” from “Dancing Through the Mine-Field: Some Observations on the Theory, Practice, and Politics of a Feminist Literary Criticism,” Annett Kolodny, p30
Clueless. Utterly clueless.
“We know from women’s autobiographies that most men kept back a portion of their wage, no matter how small, for the sake of ‘self-respect’, even though no such sum was either expected or given to women …” from “Women, Lost and Found: The Impact of Feminism on History,” Jane Lewis, p56
“[M]ale dominance is used to perpetuate male dominance …,” from “Education: The Patriarchal Paradigm and the Response to Feminism,” Dale Spender, p157
Posters, mugs, tshirts …
“Allowing females access but preserving the male ethos and definitions has been one way of ‘accommodating’ women without required modification from males” from “Education: The Patriarchal Paradigm and the Response to Feminism,” Dale Spender, p161
“[M]ost researchers do not even think it necessary to give reasons for excluding women.” from “Education: The Patriarchal Paradigm and the Response to Feminism,” Dale Spender, p163
“[M]any researchers have expressed surprise and bewilderment when they have ‘encountered’ women in their research and found the behavior of women inconsistent with or contrary to male predictions.” from “Education: The Patriarchal Paradigm and the Response to Feminism,” Dale Spender, p163
Clueless. So utterly clueless.
“A major debate has centred on whether law required moral content, but since the basic tenet of positism holds that law is the expression of the will of the soverign, that is, of those in power, the answer has been negative.” from ”Before and After: The Impact of Feminism on the Academic Discipline of Law,” Katherine O’Donovan, p177
Ah.
“Bentham, the revered founder of this school of thought, justified the allocation of power and superior legal rights to men on the pragmatic ground that they already had physical power …” from ”Before and After: The Impact of Feminism on the Academic Discipline of Law,” Katherine O’Donovan, p177
And so it should be just the opposite (since men have the advantage of physical power, give to women the superior legal rights), to balance, to compensate.
“In her analysis of the marriage contract, Lenore Weitzman has shown that the marriage contract is unlike any other. Its provisions are unwritten, its penalties are unspecified, its terms are unclear and the parties cannot either write their own terms or vary the existing terms.” from ”Before and After: The Impact of Feminism on the Academic Discipline of Law,” Katherine O’Donovan, p180
Yes indeed. I discovered this when I tried to find a copy of the marriage contract. Discovered that you can only find out the terms of the marriage contract by studying divorce law. (When you find out what’s considered a violation, you understand what’s considered a contractual obligation.)
“Turning to studies of our own species, is it an accident that scientists have been primarily interested in exploring contraceptive techniques that tamper with the female reproductive system, following the curious logic that because ‘fertility in women depends upon so many finely balanced factors … it should be easy to interfere with the process at many different stages …?’ Would it not be more sensible to conclude that it is more difficult and riskier to tamper with a woman’s reproductive system than a man’s because the eoman’s sstem is made up of ‘so many finely balanced factors?’ from “The Emperor doesn’t Wear any Clothes: The Impact of Feminism on Biology” Ruth Hubbard, p214 (the quotes are from Clive Wood, 1969)
“In it [a ‘matriarchal’ account of human reproduction by Ruth Herschberger in her 1948 Adam’s Rib], the large, competent egg plays the central role and we can feel only pity for the many millions of miniscule, fragile sperm most of which are too feeble to make it a fertilization.” from “The Emperor doesn’t Wear any Clothes: The Impact of Feminism on Biology” Ruth Hubbard, p229
“In her life time, an average woman produces about four hundred eggs, of which in present-day Western countries, she will ‘invest’ only in about 2.2. Meanwhile the average man generates several billions of sperms to secure those same 2.2 investments!” from “The Emperor doesn’t Wear any Clothes: The Impact of Feminism on Biology” Ruth Hubbard, p229
How can we explain this?
Most (if several is just 3 billion, that would be .00000007% ) of the sperms a man creates are losers.
Men are by nature wasteful.
[Other amusing possibilities?]
