From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sat Jul 01 2000 - 21:43:03 MDT
At 10:34 PM 1/07/00 -0500, Bonnie wrote:
>while I adore men
>as friends and lovers, I prefer women as house-mates. For one thing, they
>don't try to own me. But the owning thing may be cultural rather than
>hard-wired.
Yeah - after the longest time, we're very belatedly starting to escape from
the almost universal cultural rule that men own women.
There's been a lot of woo-woo bullshit mythologising of the wondrous sexual
equality of `primitive' cultures such as traditional Australian aborigines.
This latter instance seems at first glance to have some plausibility,
because men and women have powerfully policed separate `sacred business',
rituals, liturgy, tasks, etc. But the evidence is that these archaic
cultures were brutally patrist anyway. Women had a tough time, unless they
knuckled under. It's not an accident that so many legends and folk tales in
so many cultures are about rape and other sexual property infringements...
Damien Broderick
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