"I think girls should be raised in the bottom of a deep, dark sack until they are old enough to know better. Then when it came time, you could either let them out or close the sack and throw them away, whichever was the best idea."
I've been re-reading Heinlein's Farmer in the Sky... or, well, skimming the tedious Boy Scout filler to reach the couple of meatier chapters about farming in the sky. That line caught my attention because it's put into the hero's mouth purely to prop him up as a strawman to be knocked down into an appreciation of womankind later on. Heinlein did in fact use it elsewhere (damned if I can find it now) with an adult commenting on a boy that when he hits his teens he should be placed in a barrel and fed through the bung-hole, and at adulthood either the lid removed or the bung driven in. Both times Heinlein was apparently paraphrasing Mark Twain (though the original quote seems to have been muddled by history) who had been more firmly on the pro-bung lobby. But it is interesting how much softer Heinlein applied the same quote to girls (strawman opinion to be torn down) versus boys (grumpy comment, still comedic but left to stand.) A second look at the novel raises the question of why the female characters were necessary at all, being, as mentioned, a Boy Scout story in which a teenager and his father move to Ganymede to plant beets or beans or broccoli or whatever. It would've made a perfectly workable young adult Robinsonesque yarn. Why were the men not sufficient unto themselves?
On a completely unrelated topic, my eyes fell across a book title recently: Staging Masculinity. I almost walked on by without a second thought. For once I'm perfectly happy to judge a book by its cover and assume it the same social constructionist palaver we've all seen reiterated a thousand times a year, spackled over with some playwright jargon, some excuse to shit on men for an easy sale to soccer mom amateur theater groups. But the title itself reminded me how strenuously we avoid turning the same critical eye toward women's behavior.
How do women stage their femininity?
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| not sure if this is InXile's or GoG's ad copy |
I deleted some spam recently urging me to buy the "Colorado Collection" of Wasteland 3, which I won't be doing anytime soon given the game's good initial setup but poor handling of factions, companions, encounter diversity, character advancement, economy, plot, etc. and its transparent attempt to cover up these lacks with feminist pandering to distract critics. Doesn't seem they've changed their tune either, telling me to take command of a squad of:
- Desert Rangers
- lawmen
- women
Y'know... women. Law-men, and also wo-men. Class: women. Race: women. Background: women. Education: women. Qualifications: women. Prior experience: women.
Entitlement: women.
I did run across another title recently, and this one I probably will look into: Growing Up Absurd by Paul Goodman. Don't get me wrong, I'm expecting a hefty dose of primitivist hippie garbage riding the naturalistic fallacy into the ground - but juxtaposed with 1950s social repression it should still yield a few good observations. What really piqued my interest though (in a "my enemy's enemy" sort of way) was Wikipedia's insistence on including this line in the book's very introduction at the top of the page: "in later years, retrospective reviewers criticized Goodman's exclusion of women from his analysis" - and also Zimbabweans, yak herders or the line-up of the 1960 Icelandic national football team.
Heavens forfend a male speak without subsuming himself to the interests of women. Why exactly? It's not like women at the time could not publish anything from pulp detective novels to social critiques. In fact The Feminine Mystique launched around the same time and as far as I can tell out-sold Growing Up Absurd at least three-fold. How does yet nobody bat an eyelash at this hypocritical core dogma of female chauvinism: that women are more capable and superior to men in every possible way and never need a man's help, and also HOW DARE YOU slack off white-knighting for us for even a single second, you filthy pigs!
Staging Masculinity - book titles like that are themselves the staging of femininity. Nothing is more feminine than entitlement, whether to demand men's service or pass judgment on men or seek to invalidate men's right to live their own lives, or simply claim, by blanket uterine fiat, that everything must be for and about women.
And we haven't even gotten to the question of for whose benefit, for which audience is that masculinity being staged?
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