On Strength and Sexuality

Don't worry, I won't get too explicit.

As part of studying for the GRE, I am reading the Norton Anthology of Women Writers. I know the editors, so I suppose I should have expected what I got--a fairly comprehensive set of feminist complaints about male domination. I will admit these women have a point, but I find myself wanting to disagree with them simply because I am ticked. Perhaps I would give them a more fair reading if they didn't constantly belittle my gender by insisting on our never-ending victimhood. To read a feminist history, one would suppose that all women were oppressed sows who have no more desire in life than to bare the breast and neck to our subhuman male oppressors, except for the few, lucky, educated and wealthy women who manage to break the glass crucifix and put them men-folk in their place. I personally object to this.

Anyhow, I disgress in my manifestation of dislike of feminist literary criticism. Two things really stood out to me especially in their examination of medieval literature. First, the introduction claimed that women were oppressed by the threat of childhood, a threat brought to them solely by their demanding husbands and clerics who insisted their only salvation was through childbirth. Goodness knows, I read history, kings tortured wives in the quest for a son. Priests told women it was their duty to bear children and bear sons, and yes, girls got married at 12. But then, the average time of a woman's death was 40, they had to live twice as fast as modern women. As to "threat of childbirth" disease, bad sanitation, incompatible blood types, poverty, and all manner of things killed children and mothers at great rates, aside from spontaneously discovering most of modern technology, I can't see off-hand what the men could have done to save their wives, apart, perhaps, from total celibacy, which may have had a negative effect on the population. Also, women were constantly threatened by childbirth, what about the men? The men who were constantly threatened with war, death by overwork, and disease? How about the dreadful oppression of men by the women who insisted on getting pregnant and raising children and thus forcing the men to work to even feed them?

As to the second, thing--Female sexuality. The authors both condemn the men for showing women as divine, arguing that this makes them mere objects, even if they are objects of worship. It also bashes the men of the times for portraying women as overly sexual. Using their sex in bestial, man-like, or aggressive ways--examples being Lady Macbeth and Chaucer's Wife of Bath. These women also bash men for their excessive misogyny and exercising their right to physically manhandle and abuse their women. And in this, I think the feminists have made one good point, women use sexuality as a weapon throughout time. The only difference, is now we call it femine power, free love, or otherwise using men for our pleasure. Men, as they point out, constantly face the temptation to misuse their greater strength, only now, where women are given a license to seduce, men are drugged, caged, and coached out of any ability or desire to use their strength in any way. Perhaps in the medieval age, they were merely honest enough to point out the greatest weapon of both genders and condemn the abuse of it as wrong, while modern women are not strong enough to admit they may be wrong and need to be strong enough to control their power.