I have trouble trying to see males, per se, as more rational than I. That doesn't work for me, and I can't seem to make this contemporary paradigm make any sense.
Confirmed somewhat from my recent trip to Zimbabwe, I get a sense that the culture there still views women as representing "civilisation" and men as representing the wild man, as part of "nature". If I am right that this really is how most colonial whites see it, it also confirms that this is probably how I was brought up to see it, too.
If so, this would particularly account for my suspicion about gender roles in Western culture. After all, it would have been an effective switch, for me, to have start to see myself in terms of "nature" (at least at the subconscious level) whilst seeing males as representing the opposite symbolic pole of "civilisation" as such.
I needed to make that switch in my thinking to adapt successfully, to a very different culture, -- and I did not.
The more recent (or, in other terms, "urban") male strategy of dominance -- choosing to identify with civilisation and not with nature -- seems linked to the world moving away from frontier cultures (wherein men were supposed to guard the peripheries) towards urban cultures. In this latter case, hierarchies, represented by the metaphor of the skyscraper, seem more apt. This is a case of men on top, women on the bottom.
***
..which would explain the nature of my project: a desperate effort to try to reinscribe myself into "nature" and into the realm of emotion, to adapt -- an effort that ultimately failed, since I have now chosen non-adaptation, not fitting in, as my only realistic recourse. And why I now see a large part of the memoir as representing a project that failed.
Confirmed somewhat from my recent trip to Zimbabwe, I get a sense that the culture there still views women as representing "civilisation" and men as representing the wild man, as part of "nature". If I am right that this really is how most colonial whites see it, it also confirms that this is probably how I was brought up to see it, too.
If so, this would particularly account for my suspicion about gender roles in Western culture. After all, it would have been an effective switch, for me, to have start to see myself in terms of "nature" (at least at the subconscious level) whilst seeing males as representing the opposite symbolic pole of "civilisation" as such.
I needed to make that switch in my thinking to adapt successfully, to a very different culture, -- and I did not.
The more recent (or, in other terms, "urban") male strategy of dominance -- choosing to identify with civilisation and not with nature -- seems linked to the world moving away from frontier cultures (wherein men were supposed to guard the peripheries) towards urban cultures. In this latter case, hierarchies, represented by the metaphor of the skyscraper, seem more apt. This is a case of men on top, women on the bottom.
***
..which would explain the nature of my project: a desperate effort to try to reinscribe myself into "nature" and into the realm of emotion, to adapt -- an effort that ultimately failed, since I have now chosen non-adaptation, not fitting in, as my only realistic recourse. And why I now see a large part of the memoir as representing a project that failed.
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