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From: mat@mtx5a.UUCP (m.terribile)
Newsgroups: soc.singles,soc.women
Subject: Re: Re: Feminists
Message-ID: <1592@mtx5a.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 16-Oct-86 01:58:19 EDT
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Posted: Thu Oct 16 01:58:19 1986
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> . . .
> My first introduction to feminism wasn't soft-spoken or patient.  She
> was an English teacher I had in high school with whom I had a rather
> strong personality clash.  This teacher felt that her daughter would
> suffer no ill effects from being shuttled into a day-care center asap
> after birth;
>. . . .  She made students whose
> mothers were housewives feel inferior (we had to say "domestic
> engineer" in order to avoid a scathing attack on our mothers' values),
> and failed one girl who didn't happen to watch the Bobby Riggs/Billy
> Jean King tennis match.  We were forced to listen to "women's music"
> and told us that Heinlein was sexist for writing what he did in the
> '50's while Shakespeare wasn't anti-semitic for writing "comedies"
> which didn't have happy endings for the Jews.  She treated anyone who
> didn't espouse and embrace her viewpoints like mud, and her way of
> presenting feminism was enough to almost make me want to become
> Phyllis Schafly II.

> Yes, there ARE women out there who fit the stereotyped feminist model,
> just as there are cool, calm, and soft-spoken ones.  Those of us in
> the latter group need to enlighten women who have been scared off by
> the more militant model, because it's frightened women reacting to
> MILITANT (read: stereotypical) feminists who side up with Phyllis
> Schafly even though they'd probably embrace the ERA and concepts such
> as "equal work, equal pay" if they were presented in a more gentle
> fashion.

There are insensitive, loud, and hurtful people on every side of every issue.
There are people willing to use power over people to make themselves feel
good and damn the consequences: teachers who pull this crap on adolescent
students are not that many steps up from pedophiles who convince themselves
that the sex that they enjoy with toddlers is a loving act.

When feminism becomes a struggle of awareness (``we have met the enemy and
he is us'' - Kelly) and a question of basic fairness, it usually wins allies.
When it becomes a question of who's going to take power from whom, you get
about as much cooperation and real growth as you do during a bananna republic
coup -- which it is, really: one group taking by force what another holds by
foce, when the force was unjustified in the first place.

This isn't to say that confronting someone with a clash in his values and
exploiting it is necessarily either a good or a bad thing: it has been used to
both ends.  But where it has been used, via the courts and via other emotional
processes, it *can* be a means to individual and group growth.
-- 

	from Mole End			Mark Terribile
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