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From: laura@l5.uucp (Laura Creighton)
Newsgroups: net.singles
Subject: Re: emotions and your so
Message-ID: <297@l5.uucp>
Date: Sun, 1-Dec-85 15:39:05 EST
Article-I.D.: l5.297
Posted: Sun Dec  1 15:39:05 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 2-Dec-85 00:12:40 EST
References: <382@ssc-vax.UUCP> <1059@lll-crg.ARpA> <556@rti-sel.UUCP>
Reply-To: laura@l5.UUCP (Laura Creighton)
Distribution: na
Organization: Nebula Consultants in San Francisco
Lines: 88

Actually, Bill, it is a lot worse than all that.  Let us consider worse-case,
totally exemplary editions of *the person you should not be caught dead
going out with*.  What do you see?  Well, for women there is this
drunken louse who comes home drunk and enraged and beat up on his wife and
his kids. (Totally logical, this wretch!)

And for men, there is the emotional blackmailer.   The stereotypical
irrational whiney bitch who  cannot be reasoned with. ``If you go out with your
friends, or don't give me what I want ...  I'll -- cry, pout, not have sex with
you tonight, bitch at you constantly, make guilty noises and talk behind
your back to my girlfriends.  Basically I will make our house an emotional
drain and beat it out of you emotionally.''

Now these stereotypes are not really sex-specific (you get men who are
emotional blackmailers and women who are husband and child beaters) but
there seems to be some sort of sex corelation.

I went to school in an all-girls high school.  It was a terrible place, and
I was thoroughly miserable, but at the time I noticed that what passed as
``girl talk'' in the place all centred around ``how to manipulate your
boyfriend into giving you what you want through emotional blackmail''. The
other side of the coin was that if your blackmail was clumsy, your boyfriend
would get angry and might hit you.  Since you were weaker (or at least your
emotional blackmail depended upon your saying that you were weaker and thus
filling your boyfriend with guilt)  you would not deal with the problem
directly.  Instead of getting angry and saying that if you hit me one more time
I'll drop you so fast you'll see smoke, or wisely giving up the blackmail
(after all, you are ``powerless'' and have to depend upon feminine wiles)
you get more and more subtle about it...until you could twist your boyfriend
around your finger and he wouldn't even notice.

I hopw other high schools were better than mine, and I hope they are better
now than they were then.

I thought that this was the most hideous example of making your grave and
then lying in it that I could think of.  At school it sickened me more
than anything else.  And I looked around at my parents friends, at people
in the neighbourhood, and my friend's parents and at the parents of people
I went to school with and found it again, and again, and again.  Men pushed
to the limit of their endurance beat up on each other and their familites.
Women convince themselves that they are always on the limit of their
endurance (after all they are feminine and weak) and then play a constant
game of emotional blackmail and manipulation.

More than anything else on earth I wanted to find out how to avoid living
like this.  My parents had a way (be so busy that you have very little
time to interact with each other) but I wanted another one.  (Interestingly
enough, my mother is the only person I have ever heard say that
communication is *bad* for a marriage; but given that most of the
communications that she and I both grew up believing were ``what was
normal'' were not-all-that-well disguised attempts to play one-up with
your mate, I think that she has a point.  She's got over a quarter
century of married life which she calls happy as well... but it wasn't
what I wanted.)

There is a way out of it.  Women have to get rid of the idea that it is
somehow attractive to be ``weak'' and realise that they are strong and be
proud of it. They are going to have to give up the feminine ideal (have
you ever noticed that the social ideal in feminine behaviour is remarkably
like the social ideal in child behaviour -- and not like the social ideal
for male or human behaviour?)  and start dealing with men as equals.  This
deos not mean going out and joing up with the feminist bandwagon.  (If you
want to do this, that's fine, but it sure isn't mandatory.)  A good many
feminists are very stuck on the idea that ``women are the victims of men
in a man's society'' but this is only a half-truth.  Women really do make
their own grave and go lie in it, and if you go join a feminist
organisation because you are looking for more reinforcement of your
cherished idea that you are a victim then you are not going to make much
progress getting rid of this idea.  And men are going to have to make
it clear to the woment that the deal with that they are unwilling to be
manipulated by cunning children.

Right now things are very confused.  There is too much reinforcement for
the idea that it is rewarding for women to live as parasites and as
emotional manipulators.  There is too much reinforcement of the idea that
if you are a man and you are being manipulted emotionally by someone
who refuses to be reasonable then the only response is to hit them.
We all need to take a hard line against the emotional manipulators and
the physical abusers we run up against. Or otherwise the stereotype of
the emotional woman (as contrasted with the emotionless man, who is
busy trying to reason with the irrational) will continue forever because
it really does reflect a grim truth about reality.


-- 
Laura Creighton		
sun!l5!laura		(that is ell-five, not fifteen)
l5!laura@lll-crg.arpa