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Sometimes popular discussion of women's issues gets bogged down in daftness. I find this amusing when I'm in a good mood and annoying when I'm in an irked mood. There are dangerous patterns to daftness, though. The extreme form can be seen (neatly digested into a handy list of ten) here or another form (no list of ten) here.
I was going to write a highly polemical post today to get my Women's History Month posts off to an exciting start. I was going to talk about why it doesn't really help to get stuck into labels and theoretical structures until we understand people. I was going to talk about how we often measure bullying by the suffering of the victims, when really, it's the evil of the bullies that needs to be condemned and diminished. I was going to explain why it hurts to see women forgotten in so many ways.
I'm not going to do that. I don't want the bullies to win and I don't want labels to triumph. This is partly because of the dangerous patterns in these kinds of daftness. A neat category or a set of hates that get acted upon share a rather nasty area of overlap: they assume an 'other.' That 'other' can be walked over and, in the extreme cases I referred to above, murdered. Human lives should not be hushed as if it were easy.
This Women's History Month I want to celebrate people. Not by talking about individual women (because I've done that before) but by celebrating the stuff of women's lives in specific places and times. Cooking, silk braiding, religion, dreaming, high level politics and a whole heap of other things.
Men may well do many of these things too, but the vast bulk of our written history takes a male focus. This month all my history posts are going to assume women as the prime movers and shakers in our past, and men (sorry, all the men in my life!) are subsumed beneath it. Let me reassure you that just because you're invisible for a few weeks, doesn't mean you cease to exist. In fact, this is exactly what I was told in high school history when I asked where the women were in our textbooks, so you're in excellent company when I say that just because you're invisible, doesn't mean you cease to exist. That doesn't make it any better, of course.
'History,' therefore, means 'the history of humankind ie women.'
I'm doing this partly as an anniversary. A half century ago (or thereabouts) a bunch of humans were sending this exact message out to the Western world. It didn't stick*. That doesn't mean it wasn't worth doing.
Why is playing games with our cultural assumptions not daft when other things are? It may be. If someone wants to prove it's daft, though, they'll have to read my posts and analyse them. Otherwise, they'll have done what I did in that first paragraph, where I made wild claims and offered extreme examples without actually making a case at all.
I'm sorry I'm such a ratbag right now. But at least it should provide some entertainment. When I stop waiting for life to happen (only 2 appointments in the next 7 days! and only 2 letters still to come in the mail one of which is only 2 weeks later than it ought to be! things are improving!!!) then I suspect I shall be a much nicer person.
*Though it did make a difference. Without that message, Australia would not have a woman as GG right now, for instance.
I was going to write a highly polemical post today to get my Women's History Month posts off to an exciting start. I was going to talk about why it doesn't really help to get stuck into labels and theoretical structures until we understand people. I was going to talk about how we often measure bullying by the suffering of the victims, when really, it's the evil of the bullies that needs to be condemned and diminished. I was going to explain why it hurts to see women forgotten in so many ways.
I'm not going to do that. I don't want the bullies to win and I don't want labels to triumph. This is partly because of the dangerous patterns in these kinds of daftness. A neat category or a set of hates that get acted upon share a rather nasty area of overlap: they assume an 'other.' That 'other' can be walked over and, in the extreme cases I referred to above, murdered. Human lives should not be hushed as if it were easy.
This Women's History Month I want to celebrate people. Not by talking about individual women (because I've done that before) but by celebrating the stuff of women's lives in specific places and times. Cooking, silk braiding, religion, dreaming, high level politics and a whole heap of other things.
Men may well do many of these things too, but the vast bulk of our written history takes a male focus. This month all my history posts are going to assume women as the prime movers and shakers in our past, and men (sorry, all the men in my life!) are subsumed beneath it. Let me reassure you that just because you're invisible for a few weeks, doesn't mean you cease to exist. In fact, this is exactly what I was told in high school history when I asked where the women were in our textbooks, so you're in excellent company when I say that just because you're invisible, doesn't mean you cease to exist. That doesn't make it any better, of course.
'History,' therefore, means 'the history of humankind ie women.'
I'm doing this partly as an anniversary. A half century ago (or thereabouts) a bunch of humans were sending this exact message out to the Western world. It didn't stick*. That doesn't mean it wasn't worth doing.
Why is playing games with our cultural assumptions not daft when other things are? It may be. If someone wants to prove it's daft, though, they'll have to read my posts and analyse them. Otherwise, they'll have done what I did in that first paragraph, where I made wild claims and offered extreme examples without actually making a case at all.
I'm sorry I'm such a ratbag right now. But at least it should provide some entertainment. When I stop waiting for life to happen (only 2 appointments in the next 7 days! and only 2 letters still to come in the mail one of which is only 2 weeks later than it ought to be! things are improving!!!) then I suspect I shall be a much nicer person.
*Though it did make a difference. Without that message, Australia would not have a woman as GG right now, for instance.