"In vacant or in pensive mood..." I am: Bekah; 24; Law Student / Favorite Things: Carbs (so there!), Johnny Damon, Smiling at babies, Grilled cheese, Comfortable silence / Favorite Supreme Court Justice: Brennan / Favorite Wilson: Owen by an inch / Today's Special: Song: Elliott Smith, "Bled White"; Quote: "You know, there's like a butt-load of gangs at this school. This one gang kept wanting me to join because I'm pretty good with a bowstaff." Please love me: mmbekah@yahoo.com


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Women and Words

I've been meaning to post this incredible email for a while, and just haven't gotten the chance. My sister Hannah sent these "definitions" to me a few weeks ago in the wake of my defense of the Law and Gender course. I'm posting them with exerpts from her astute and witty email; I won't make many additional comments, because I think she pretty much says it all:

I was reading a book by Wilfred Funk, 30 Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary. Wilfred is one of the most important American etymologists EVER. Probably the most important. Okay. This book was originally written in the 40's, but was updated in 1970. Though "women's liberation" had apparently happened...the following is STILL true...

The book is addressed ONLY to young businessmen who need to develop a larger vocabulary to get ahead in CEO-land. This much is not surprising; gender neutrality was far from the norm in '70. But that's not it.

Women are, in fact mentioned three times in the book, in conjunction with word descriptions. These are the three passages in which Funk saw women as fit examples (among other examples, for each word, but none of them involving a negative portrait of any facet of masculinity). These are in order of stupefyingness rather than that in which they appeared in the book, most stupefying last:

1) Vicarious. "The lonely, friendless woman living a life of suffocating routine or hopeless boredom can sit glued, hour after hour, to the television set. She then becomes the lovely young girl to whom a virile male makes passionate love; she can experience VICARIOUSLY all the excitement, romance, thrills, exotic adventure that her real life is so empty of. She can be a spy, a murderer, a figure of international intrigue, a visitor from another planet. She has only to twist the dial and change her drab existence into an abundant, fulfilling, and electric (but VICARIOUS) reality."

2) Wanton. "Call a woman WANTON and you are saying that she indulges in every passion, that she is lewd and lascivious--in short that she believes in living it up, with no thoughts of consequences or of the morro's hangover. She never expects to be sorry in the morning, and she never is."

3) Sublimate. "A female whose unconscious desire it is to enslave men, to dominate and destroy all males, becomes the energetic and successful business executive or the president of a college with largely male faculty, and only her psychiatrist knows that she is SUBLIMATING."

Here, Bekah, we have almost EVERY female stereotype of the era, even those that contradict one another! Really fascinating to me is the fact that he acknowledges the sort of despair that women like Ann Sexton and Sylvia Plath wrote about in just about the same era as the second printing of this book, but of course chews it up and spits it out as pitiful, vicarious laziness. But what should women do instead of be lazy? Not work, I guess, since if they did that, they would obviously unconsciously WANT TO "DESTROY ALL MALES." And she might be lazy, but not too lazy to get out on the town and bang every dude within a 100 mile radius, the wanton slut!

Ok. If I go out and party, I'm a wanton, thoughtless whore. If I stay home, I am lazy, pathetic, and incapable of a meaningful existence in reality. If I go to law school, I am bitchy and overly agressive, and have an unconscious desire to destroy all males (since conceding that women could have a conscious desire to do anything would be impossible in this framework). Glad I got all of that straight. I think I'll go talk to my pyschiatrist, since he's the only one who can see through my sublimation and advise against my evil plot of male domination.

Onward to enslave males! Onward to promote a lascivious lifestyle of wanton vicariousness!

Onward to Law and Gender.

posted by Bekah at 11:33 AM :: |