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

[sakura]

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#at=380 youtube]]

ANd why women are feared to the extent that they are accused of witchcraft and killed for it

Yes, that makes perfect sense.

There was a thread a few days ago where someone pointed out that attitudes towards women would be considered absolutely outrageous if the same were said to certain minority groups. I think it is what SAF is saying too - people can emotionally afford to get upset about, say, animals being hurt (and as a country we donate a huge amount to animal charities ... not saying it's wrong in the least, but we do). But if we're going to get upset about women being mistreated, we have to confront that internalized problem that we ourselves are conditioned to fight with our own psyches ... so we're resistant to getting upset in the first place.

thankyou LRD
ah i guess we are all saying the same thing then-just in diffrent ways
reg confronting the internalized problem-i feel that maybe realising that the problem is there in the first place is a start?

Sparky, you posted your stream of consciousness as I was catching up on the thread and formulating my own!
I was thinking (fragmentally):

I was born into a family that devalued women,
but also relied on us -
leading me to develop an 'othered' identity, or to put it differently,
to live in the 'grey area' described above.
So I find the 'behind enemy lines' idea easy to understand.
Because of this problematic personal legacy, I'm interested in how/why this happens -
and agree with sieglinde that it's not logical.
No benefits in 'binary' thinking, as LRD points out!

Good points made about infrequent menses: we're always being told it's not 'normal' to have a period every month.
I haven't experienced disgust at menstruation, sakura, despite having the kind of periods that unpredictably drench my surroundings with blood - sad that you have found this, but not a universal experience.
Going back to superstition, women do have power over life & death - from a superstitious pov, very mysteriously so.
Not only do we bleed, but we get pregnant and then lose the baby - after which we bleed like a dying warrior, but don't die. And we can die while giving life.
That's some scary force.

It's idiotic to discount superstition as (the strongest) defining force in our societies.
You only have to travel a couple of hours - to Romania, for example - to find a societies still dominated by magic and ritual.
Superstition was - and, largely, still is - mankind's attempt to 'control' and make safe an incomprehensible, dangerous world.

Umm, I may have to another one of these later Sorry!

Aha, SAF, you have crystallised my psyche! (Sort of.) Thanks :)

sparky - absolutely agree it's a start.

SAF - I do see what you're saying, but I'm not sure what you mean by 'the academics of it'?

I really do hate it when people say everything has already been done so we don't need to keep doing it - rubbish argument, isn't it!

I've just thought - I think it's this internalization problem that, for me, makes me so distrustful of big, binary narratives about women being powerful. I can't help feeling that I may be being fed another story that looks attractive but that might turn out (like the good woman/bad woman or virgin/whore story) to be another way of making women feel as if they're being valued when in fact they're being palmed off with a destructive pretense. Does that make sense?

I think some of you should consider the possibility that you have started from a premise that may be wholly wrong, like the presumptions arising from the film that started this thread.
The extent to which some of you will speculate to validate a sense of victimhood is quite revealing, as are some of the increasingly unhinged posts placed last night.
Lastly, the fact that you would use the term ?MRA? as an insult and an accusation is every bit as bigoted as the enemies (real and imagined) you rail against. I?m not sure I know any ?MRA?s? and hadn?t come across the term but I?m sure they think they are fighting real battles too. I wonder if they use ?WRA? as an insult when challenged.
Some of us do real things in real time to challenge discrimination and help real victims of both genders. I do; perhaps one or two others do as well.
Posting misandrist rants and intellectually vapid theories on an internet forum will be of little use or comfort to the victims, exclusively female, on whose behalf you become so indignant.

Tyr, darling, if you actually have something to correct in what we're saying, please do feel free. Until then, is it ok if we just sit around and snigger at your inability to form any argument, much less a compelling one?

I'm interested that you think we're all misandrists, though. DH would be surprised.

I've no idea what you're talking about Tyr. People will speculate and discuss these things as comfort to themselves. Most of us are women; we're not always doing it for someobody else. Ther's nothing wrong with speculation if you're aware that is what it is.

Cross-post - yes, I see SAF. I guess for me (it may just be the way my mind works), that sort of stuff is necessary too. Not as a substitute for action, but as an alternative. I don't think it's always well done, but imo it needs doing. For two reasons: firstly, because I notice, and feel depressed by, texts and analyses and 'academic' stuff that marginalizes or mocks women, and I think there's a lot of it. Secondly, because this stuff is internalized, it's not purely physical and therefore there needs to be an effort to work out exactly how and why women have been conditioned to use their own minds against themselves. We need to develop strong arguments that apply to all areas of life, so academics must be one of them.

But that's just my view, and it is a slanted one I know. I just so often find myself arguing with actual, misogynist academics that I really, really need to find and explain what is wrong with what they are saying and wrong with what they are teaching. So that's where I come from on it.

Oh ... my cross-post apology was cross-posted. Sorry.

Yes, SAF, I think that's why we clash. I think as well, it's quite easy to see academia as a misogynist institution and to feel angry and impatient with people inside that institution who seem to be making such tiny amounts of progress ... I do get that, I feel like that myself sometimes. But then I also feel furious that if I say something even vaguely feminist in certain academic circles, I will (I'm not kidding or exaggerating) be systematically punished for it, and probably, ultimately excluded from that area. And then, if I'm kicked out, I watch it becoming more sexist and see more young women getting dragged down by misogynist rhetoric and sexist justifications of why feminism is wrong.

Thanks SAF, will go see if I can order it (my librarian gets really confused ... half my books are 14th century manuscript culture and the other half are recs off these threads!)

Actually, I agree with this: Lastly, the fact that you would use the term ?MRA? as an insult and an accusation is every bit as bigoted as the enemies (real and imagined) you rail against.

And this: some of you will speculate to validate a sense of victimhood.
As Milly says, there's nothing wrong with speculation as long as you know that's what you're doing.

My initial feminist activity, in the 1970s, was prompted by a sense of 'rightness' - a kind of instinctual feminism - which, I now know, came from my internalised feeling of 'otherness'. I wasn't, at that time, aware that I was indeed a victim. I've subsequently come to understand myself much better and to understand those who harmed me. This informs my current feminism, almost as much as my long-term involvement with feminism has.

I sometimes feel irritated with younger feminists here (and they are almost all younger) just as my elders did in the 70s! But, now, I understand that most are on a personal as well as a political journey.

Hope that made at least some sense.

SAF, a lot of it just different people have different ways of expressing their ideas, to both themselves and other people. So I would find it hard to express myself in the way that you do, but I still agree with what you're saying; it is just that I have to translate what you are saying into my thought patterns.

GB, I also think part of it is because we are on an internet forum. We don't want to describe exactly how we have been victims, or our friends have been victims, in such a public space. It would be personal and distressing and then made more so by trolling.

I doubt many women posting on here need to justify to themselves that they have been victims of something, and we don't need to justify it to other people on here either.

Milly, thanks for posting that ... that is how I feel too, about translating into my thought patterns.

I think I get as angry and upset and fired up by things that happen, and yes they're in the past and in that sense could look irrelevant or like side issues ... but to me, the way my mind works, they're part of the same thing we all get upset and angry about. I'm not picking on issues from the past because I want to browse gently through some academic ponderings (I mean, sometimes I do, obviously, like to do that) - I'm picking on these issues because they're so much at the forefront of what I'm thinking about, and they seem to me so clearly mapped onto what's happening to all of us right now.

LRD, sweetie.... speculate, postulate and rant to your heart's content. Let not facts, dates, geography or any of those other troublesome intrusions hinder you. I'll content myself with laughing at the results; actually quite a good deal.
On a parting note, you mentioned a husband so you seem to have embraced the status of "livestock" yourself.
Oh dear.....

[im interested in why/how it happens]
Garlicbutter-im not sure whether im understanding youre post but.....
maybe its.....woman gets her door kicked in/windows done/beat up by her boyfriend and i comfort her and help her to clean up the mess/secure her door/get someone to fix window=she dont bother calling the police and i dont bother telling her to as we both know its a waste of time.
if her boyfriend ends up in court he will just get a slap on the wrist and it could make the situation worse for her if he goes to court.
internalized defeatism?