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From: RA04@Lehigh.UCAR.EDU
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: RE: Feminism's ill effects on men?
Message-ID: <11109001:30:33RA04@lehigh.bitnet>
Date: 11 Oct 90 06:30:33 GMT
Sender: nadel@aerospace.aero.org
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Approved: nadel@aerospace.aero.org
Status: R


re: "oppressed" by gravity

One of the issues Doug's post brings up is the predominant view
supported by our (white, masculine-mostly, Euro-American) culture:
that there are Man and Nature, and nature exists for the benefit of
Man.  So, in some very significant senses, the fact that humans are
"subject" to "natural laws" is looked upon as a challenge and an
obstacle.  As we "advance" and "make progress" (see, hardly anyone's
asking about the destination of this movement), more and more of
nature falls under our power.  We "tame" wilderness and build nice
little ordered subdivisions; we "harness" rivers and get electricity;
etc.  If we don't harness and tame and subdue and exploit, we won't be
"top dog," won't be "first in the pecking order."  And quite a few
feminists are noticing this "oppress or be oppressed" model that
(mostly male-gender) humans have in fact imposed on everything that
isn't mostly-male-gender-human.  The implications of the model are
amazing, and they account in part for the threatened, fearful, and
almost entirely arbitrary (!) responses by some men and man-identified
women to feminists' demands for a change.  According to the "oppress or
be oppressed" model (and only that model), men will have to lose power
if women lose their oppressed status.  Thing is, that's an eighteenth-
century, closed-system approach: one way to conceptualize, not THE way.