The Burning Times: fascinating docu on women's power before Christianity

who Saf-me?

[feminism is a collective movement women need to understand one another
and.........and.........and...................]

well said SAF.

x-post, Saf

when I became a radical feminist which is nearly ten years ago now
Aww, bless, you young feminists!

I wish you'd stop raving about that stupid book. It was discredited in its time. It was a 'best-seller' for its freakishness. It is quite startling, I'll grant you that.

Anyway, I'm fed up with - yet again - getting involved with the interminable dialogue on "Is Dittany More Feminist Than Anybody Else (This house believes Dittany defines feminism.)" Have a nice time.

No! Nobody's working to erase misogynistic harms, not here anyway. But it damages feminism when you make everything about woman-hatred. Lots of people have posited theories about why women may have fallen foul of the witch-hunts, more so than men. You haven't. You've just gone "Woman-haters! Woman-haters!"

You might have engaged with the wider discussion, but you choose not to. You might have picked up on some of the leads thrown about specifically female-targeted scourges concurrent with the witch trials. You chose not to. You might even have engaged with the conversation about whether, and why, men might have perceived women as magical. You derided it. Your choice.

What do you want to do, have an Outrage about every rule that's hurt British women in the past? Here's a starter.
Chastity belts.
Women-only crimes with the death penalty: gossiping, scandal, nagging, adultery and considering adultery, being barren, refusing sex, souring milk.
"Homes" for women who had a child out of wedlock, or a child that might not be their husband's.
Incarceration for "mad" women who annoyed their husbands.
Sterilisation for "uneducable" women.
The status of women as livestock.
The status of women as mentally incompetent to vote.
The status of women as too menatally feeble for university.
... we could go on indefinitely.
If you add in the rules that hurt people, men and women, you'd be here forever. So why not stick to the ones that were, incontrovertibly, targeted at women?

Or, better still, look to what needs changing now and how to effect the changes.

Wrt your other dig - it's irrelevant I'm intelligent, but not academic. Working-class and all that, never got the chance to live the life of the mind.

TYR-
i vaguelly remember reading a bit about countess Bathory
wasnt she a victim of conspiricy?
something to do with the church?

Dittany (and anyone else who would care to venture an opinion) with reference to this assertion, "That whole article is about how nobody even wants the question asked. It was shown up again on this thread. A man invented thumbscrews, a man invented hanging, a man invented the iron maiden and the rack - men operated them, men ordered them to be operated. At every stage of the process was a man making a choice. That's what needs to be acknowledged and stated."

How do you categorise Countess Bathory, who is credited with the invention of a variety of grisly tortures which she visited upon young women?
Was she an anomaly or does she present a valid argument for the proposition that absolute power corrupts, leads to cruelty and is not necessarily as gender specific as you appear to maintain?

GB, Dittany did know about the witch trials. She thought it was hidden from some other people.

nostradamus was a seer.
why wasnt he murdered?
probably because hes family had turned to catholicism and he was privaledged?

Skipping again ...
dittany Wed 01-Jun-11 18:25:34

I don't want to talk in depth about torture. I want to talk about the men who did it and what they chose to do. I think they are the key.

It has been posited that they did it in order to keep a population oppressed, and to attempt absolute power over everybody. That looks likely to me.

In those days - as, today, in the places where painful means of punishment & death are still routine - torture was considered necessary to make the death penalty seem more meaningful. That tends to happen when life is unreliable and short, as death itself is insufficiently feared. As elsewhere, everywhere, at other times, the prosecuting class has attracted sadists because they love the job of torturing.

Your thesis seems to be that this maleficence was directed specifically at women. I disagree. It's true that the majority of 'witches' were women. That might be because more women practised the 'dark' arts, or it might be for other reasons. In the time before my paint dries, I can offer a few possibles:
~ Women were the holders of herbal medicine, thus threatening 'establishment' healers;
~ The punishing class comprised mainly male sadists, who particularly enjoyed torturing women for personal reasons;
~ Women were considered inherently magical;
~ Our culture considered women magical, where Iceland considered men so;
~ It was a gender-based assault.

In this particular context, I think the latter is least likely. You don't have to look very far for striking examples of definite gender-based assaults, so I don't know why you're fixated on the witch trials for this purpose.

Your personal anger over this thread seems, to me, illustrative of the following:
1] You had been unaware of the witch scourges, and thought everyone else had been similarly unaware.
2] You were, understandably, shocked.
3] Since you learned about them from a badly-argued feminist film, you took the film makers' bad arguments in good faith.
4] It turned out that other people had wider/deeper knowledge of the problem, and you felt cross that your emotions had been churned up by the film-makers' shallow knowledge.
5] So you felt obliged to defend the film's proposition.
Which is completely understandable and natural.

But it might be time to climb down half a step, and consider that the witch trials weren't specifically targeted at women, they were a more generalised form of oppression that happened to hurt more women than men ... doesn't everything? So - why would it have hurt more women? In fact, how come women get the sharp end of most (not all) oppressive moves?
Those questions are being considered on this thread, in historical and contemporary terms.

Isn't that what feminism's for?

Darn, I have to go out, but will be back ...