Third-wave Feminism Defends the Idea of Women as a Servicing Class | Clarissa's Blog
1. A lot of women seem quite happy servicing others’ emotional needs. There seems to be a return to traditionalism, with the idea of the fancy wedding, babies, a docile existence. There is strong resistance to experimenting with qualities that are not traditionally feminine.
As for myself, I have tried these non-traditional experiments, with mixed results in the public sphere. Privately, I have gained great self-esteem by not being normal.
Much of society has not let up on giving women an emotional role to play. Generally this is a kind of projective identification, in Western Australian society. People get distressed or alienated from anything meaningful, and then they take out their anguish on what they deem to be lower class members of society — women. Many women here seem to accept that punishment as just the way things are. You’ve actually got to be pretty tough to take it — tougher than I, no doubt — or just less perceptive.
2. I’ve always been shut out from Western feminism. That’s truly weird for me, but I don’t view myself in a primarily moral way, as a gatekeeper for society’s mores. This means that contemporary feminists don’t understand what I’m getting at. I don’t need to be a moral exemplar in order to have something to say about the state of play in gender. It’s not about pointing fingers to morally condemn ‘the patriarchy”, nor is it about immersion in a martyr complex. I can have fun, and not be perfectly extraordinary in all sorts of ways, and yet still say that when men project their unwanted emotional sensations onto women, they are doing themselves and the women a grave disservice. People need to be whole. Patriarchy therefore needs to be banished.
3. I have had to take huge evasive measures to save my mind from the continuous onslaught of patriarchal projections. You know, it’s weird that Western patriarchy relies so heavily on the psychological division of men and women into halves, whereas other societies don’t necessarily require this. There are still, regrettably, different designated roles for men and women, but the heavy heavy emotional onslaught is less prevalent or does not exist at all.
Western women do get targeted in this way, to be emotional receivers of society’s ills. If you do not realize what is going on when this starts to happen, you will probably either withdraw without deep reflection, due to the astonishing irrationality of it, or you will allow your being to be penetrating in such a way that you start to take on the weird roles allotted to you. That is mental rape — and for some women, it is ongoing.
But back to your point, and that is, I suppose, that most people can’t see what is going on. They don’t seem to be able to conceptualize the notion of war that happens at an ontological level — that is, a war for one’s being. Most people entertain a fantasy that they simply emerge into reality like the flowers of the fields, exactly defined as they already are. It’s an absurd idea — to assume we are not subjected to change, sometimes by malicious forces.
1. A lot of women seem quite happy servicing others’ emotional needs. There seems to be a return to traditionalism, with the idea of the fancy wedding, babies, a docile existence. There is strong resistance to experimenting with qualities that are not traditionally feminine.
As for myself, I have tried these non-traditional experiments, with mixed results in the public sphere. Privately, I have gained great self-esteem by not being normal.
Much of society has not let up on giving women an emotional role to play. Generally this is a kind of projective identification, in Western Australian society. People get distressed or alienated from anything meaningful, and then they take out their anguish on what they deem to be lower class members of society — women. Many women here seem to accept that punishment as just the way things are. You’ve actually got to be pretty tough to take it — tougher than I, no doubt — or just less perceptive.
2. I’ve always been shut out from Western feminism. That’s truly weird for me, but I don’t view myself in a primarily moral way, as a gatekeeper for society’s mores. This means that contemporary feminists don’t understand what I’m getting at. I don’t need to be a moral exemplar in order to have something to say about the state of play in gender. It’s not about pointing fingers to morally condemn ‘the patriarchy”, nor is it about immersion in a martyr complex. I can have fun, and not be perfectly extraordinary in all sorts of ways, and yet still say that when men project their unwanted emotional sensations onto women, they are doing themselves and the women a grave disservice. People need to be whole. Patriarchy therefore needs to be banished.
3. I have had to take huge evasive measures to save my mind from the continuous onslaught of patriarchal projections. You know, it’s weird that Western patriarchy relies so heavily on the psychological division of men and women into halves, whereas other societies don’t necessarily require this. There are still, regrettably, different designated roles for men and women, but the heavy heavy emotional onslaught is less prevalent or does not exist at all.
Western women do get targeted in this way, to be emotional receivers of society’s ills. If you do not realize what is going on when this starts to happen, you will probably either withdraw without deep reflection, due to the astonishing irrationality of it, or you will allow your being to be penetrating in such a way that you start to take on the weird roles allotted to you. That is mental rape — and for some women, it is ongoing.
But back to your point, and that is, I suppose, that most people can’t see what is going on. They don’t seem to be able to conceptualize the notion of war that happens at an ontological level — that is, a war for one’s being. Most people entertain a fantasy that they simply emerge into reality like the flowers of the fields, exactly defined as they already are. It’s an absurd idea — to assume we are not subjected to change, sometimes by malicious forces.
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