just me wrote:Well, I don't know about other women, but I just adore having a strange man tell me what it means to be a woman.
No kidding. And yet he completely misses that everything he is talking about and blaming on women (and "women's lib") are historically male standards of feminine attractiveness. Look at this statement:
Once upon a time, women wanted to project an innocence.
When was this? When did women collectively want to be seen as "innocent?" Innocent of what?
"Innocence" was socially prized as an attribute of womanhood as part of the Victorian "Angel of the Hearth" mythology. And it was equated with "ignorance" and dovetailed quite nicely with the way that women and children both shared the same status as legal incompetents. Of course, such innocent womanhood was only the natural attribute of "true women:" those of the domestic middle classes and never assumed to be part of the nature of the "lower classes" who were, as the old saying went, "no better than they should be."
Or what about this?
Of course men play a role in this as well, but women should know better and they once did. Once upon a time you would hear girls talk about kind of women men date and the kind they marry. You don’t hear things like that anymore.
Women did not invent the patriarchal double standard, even if they had to live with its consequences.
From the Ernest L. Wilkinson Diaries: "ELW dreams he's spattered w/ grease. Hundreds steal his greasy pants."
