Tag: Misogyny

The Crap They Made Me Read!

Celebrating Women’s History Month!

To this day I regret the experience of reading some of those books!

Fifty-odd years after the fact, I’m still bitter over some of the utter garbage they forced me to read in high school. Looking back on the torture of those “classic” books, I wonder how much misogyny, both hidden and overt, I imbibed along with those supposedly-great works, such as Guy de Maupassant’s The Necklace. (God know why, but I read a couple more of de Maupassant’s stories later on, probably only because they were included in short story compilations. The man absolutely despised women. His female protagonists were all vain and empty people, devoid of genuine feeling and lacking in character, and all were suitably punished through dreadful events by the end of each story.)
Maupassant and his misogyny aside, among the worst books I suffered through were Moby Dick, The Oxbow Incident, Lord of the Flies, and The Plague. Not to put too fine a face upon the matter, none of this was reading to be recommended for a teenage girl suffering severe clinical depression. I attribute a great deal of my senior year suicidal ideation to having been forced to read The Plague. But I found few redeeming features in any of these novels. It was not just that most of them were stultifying (which they were); they were upsetting, sometimes gross, often disgusting. Despite the fact that I could discern important themes promoted within the stories, they were still not novels I would have chosen to read, and I regret the experience to this day. I’m actually sorry that I can recall a great many passages from those books, because most of what I remember of them is disturbing.patch (4)

The one disquieting book that I recollect with some redeeming grace is Elizabeth Kata’s Be Ready With Bells and Drums (A Patch of Blue), which our 7th grade class was, quite surprisingly and after a great deal of back-and-forth between our teacher, the school principal, and our parents, given to read. Reading it was, however, still distressing; not because the subject, racism, was in any way repellant, but due to the descriptions of physical, verbal and emotional abuse suffered by the main character, Selina. Owing to my personal experience of neglect and abuse, the described situations felt agonizingly familiar. I dared not tell my teacher, my friends—certainly not the other students–that the vivid portrayal of one brouhaha in the book, the screaming quarrels and obscene insults, were all too familiar; were daily occurrences in my own home.
To the disgust of my teacher, Mr. Phillips, I could only repeat inanely that I disliked the book. Disguising my true reasons, I complained that I found the slang speech of the characters irritating. Beyond that, though, I provided only the vaguest and most unsatisfactory reasons for my aversion.
In retrospect, I realize that this one book, of all those I was forced to read, was a genuine classic; a truly important, timely story, one that initiated hard conversations about racism (an unusual and valuable discussion in a 1967 classroom). Sadly, I was just at a very bad point in my adolescence to be reading it.
Rereading the book as an adult, I still found many passages of the book distressing, but was in a better position to handle my reactions.

Still, there is one literature lesson which I remember with pleasure. During my freshman year of high school, our teacher assigned the class to write a long, comprehensive essay on a book of our own choosing, with the caveat that she must approve the book we selected. “None of those trite romances!” she commanded. I smiled. At the time, I was working my way through the entire Pearl S. Buck oeuvre, having begun with Pavilion of Women and continued with The Good Earth. I’d just finished Jane Eyre. I’d twice read Karl Bruckner’s The Day of the Bomb, the heartbreaking account of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima. I constantly borrowed from my mother’s huge collection of biographies and historical fiction novels about famous women of history: Nefertiti and Hatshepsut, Empress Josephine, Harriet Tubman, Isabella of Spain, Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Katherine Swynford, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Queen Esther, Elizabeth I, Katherine of Aragon, Empress Tzu Hsi, Anne Boleyn, Lady Julian of Norwich, Mary, Queen of Scots… Stories of real women and their formidable effect upon history that were certainly never touched upon either in my history classes or in the “masterworks” (emphasis on master) that I was forced to read.
I no longer remember which of these books my well-read adolescent self selected for my essay; I only recall that I didn’t need to reread it after having it vetted by my teacher. I just wrote my paper and earned my A.
I recall many passages from those biographies and novels, too, and the lessons that I learned from them: primarily, that women have had limited power throughout history, even when they achieved wealth and status, and also that the few female authors whose books were considered classics were still somehow of too little importance to be believed valuable for instructing the young.
I wonder sometimes how my love of reading survived the awful books that I was tortured with in high school. And I’ll never forgive my schools and teachers for the misery I endured in each page.

If this essay appealed to you, you might also enjoy “Hook, Line and Sinker”. You can locate it by scrolling to the Archives, below. It was published on June 19, 2018.

A Time for Tears

In Minimizing Is Not a Bra I remarked, “But that’s a subject for another blog post.”  Well, here it is.

A man I once worked with, a strong, proud Vietnam vet, had married an Asian woman he’d met during his tour of duty.  They’d had a long and (at least according to his side of the story) happy marriage, successfully raising well-adjusted, responsible children and living normal, middle-class American lives.

Mr. Veteran attributed the success of their marriage to the fact that his wife never made excessive emotional demands upon him.  His marriage was free, he once commented, of  “emotional instability”.  “I’ll tell you this,” he would say, chin raised high and lips thinned in a proud smirk, “In 40 years of marriage, I have never seen her cry.”

The looks he received at this remark from female coworkers were usually either disbelieving or simply aghast.  I was certainly unimpressed.  But after the third or fourth time he made this statement, a woman far more forceful than I am spoke up and said what we were all thinking.

“The operative word in your sentence is ‘seen’,” she said firmly. “Tell yourself anything you want; that woman has cried, and cried plenty—all alone.  She knows she doesn’t dare display her feelings in front of you.  She wouldn’t get any compassion or comfort.  You’d never put your arms around her and hold her while she cried.  You’d just walk away or get angry.”

Mr. Veteran scoffed, but we women nodded and agreed with our gutsy coworker.  And I don’t believe any of us ever heard him dare make that reprehensible remark again.

The memory of this incident, though, came sharply to mind recently when a male member of a group I’m involved with intentionally belittled an emotional remark I made.  I recognized his bullying and responded to it; I snapped right back at him.  But experiencing his attempted intimidation in response to the feelings I displayed, and recollecting Mr. Veteran’s remarks, made me wonder why and how it is that women are still considered by many in Western society to be excessively emotional; why, in fact, the expression of feelings, especially sadness, continues to be considered, by society in general and males in particular, to be a “bad” thing.

I recalled an article written by a man describing his viewpoint of the male reaction to women’s tears: men were, he explained, very disturbed by any evidence of sadness, any weeping, because it might keep happening. And, he expounded, men just didn’t want to feel called upon to provide comfort by even acknowledging a woman’s sadness.  They simply didn’t want to deal with it.  Men, the author claimed, preferred a stiff upper lip to distress, no matter what was happening and in spite of every provocation.

This writer’s explanation sounded shockingly similar to the 1950s marital advice provided in women’s magazines, in which a wife was encouraged to make her home an oasis of perfection and quiet, ensuring that her spouse was undisturbed by any domestic problems.  It flabbergasted me to realize that, 70-odd years after that era, a good many men are still expecting the same thing.

That led me to consider just how many books (many of them bestsellers) had been written, by men, for women, explaining to females just how they needed to treat their men to keep them happy.  At least three-quarters of the “relationship books” of the past 50 or 60 years, I realized, were written in this vein.  Why wasn’t the converse true, I wondered belatedly? Why weren’t the bestseller lists studded with books written by women, for men, advising them on how to make their female partners happy?  Why was it assumed that the success of a relationship was predicated upon a woman doing all she could to make her male partner’s life a paradise: bending to his every whim; understanding his every requirement; meeting his every need?

With sudden and startling illumination, I belatedly realized why my misogynistic coworker had always made it a point to state that his wife was Asian.  The shameful myth that Asian women are docile, subservient and submissive was part of his worldview.  Sadly, his wife, transported following a brutal war from a country in tatters to life in what was nearly another world; dependent on him; feeling it incumbent to keep her marriage intact for her own and her children’s’ survival, fell in line with his demands, even to the point of suppressing her every emotional need–not because she was Asian, but because she, like so many women of all nationalities, everywhere, had been taught to caretake the needs of men to the detriment of her own.

That this has been the way of the world for centuries is appalling.  That a marriage of such inequality could have been contracted in the 20th century is unspeakable.

But that such attitudes continue to exist is enough to make one weep.

If you’d like to read the prequel to this essay, you’ll find “Minimizing Is Not a Bra” by scrolling down to the Archives link below, and checking the post of June 9, 2021.