In recent months, I’ve found myself angry and peculiarly unsettled when it comes to my relationship with men.
I’ve been taught and have learned well to charm my way into their good graces. When I was a young woman, I flirted and made myself appealing. I believed that my ability to stay in their good graces was important to my success in life.
I looked up to men as though they were smarter, stronger and more worldly. I charmed my way into and out of uncomfortable situations. And I seldom questioned my role.
Questioning My Role, Years Later…
I wasn’t a feminist. I didn’t burn my bras or march on the front lines of the fledgling women’s movement in the 1960s though I had friends who did. I just used the skills that seemed to me to work. They had worked for my mother whose charm was incandescent and they worked for me.
But now, late in life, my veneer of charm has worn thin. I no longer to want to play up to men who take up more than their share of the space, power and airtime. I’ve become impatient and less willing to work around their out-sized egos.
I find myself struggling to make sense of the change in my attitude.
Getting Off the Patriarchal Merry-go-Round
Then recently in the Book Review section of The New York Times, I read a review by Toni Bentley that captured the complex truth I am wrestling with. She writes:
A man has always been a woman’s best excuse to avoid her destiny: that a man is her destiny is one of patriarchy’s most pernicious tenets. What a scam.
Her words captured the complicity of many women, myself included, in the “patriarchal merry-go-round.” We have tended to do men’s bidding in small ways and large. We hesitate to stand up and say “NO,” not just to inappropriate sexual advances, but to their expectations that we behave in a way that supports their patriarchal dominion.
Toni Bentley’s article ends this way:
Until women realize our pre-eminence, and act accordingly, with its inherent responsibilities, we will never get a grip on our own happiness. Might we shift our thinking, reorder our priorities and discipline our minds in our affairs with men? Can we change ourselves? If we did, the world would change too.
Amen!
Quotations drawn from Consumed, a review of Three Women by Lisa Taddeo in the Book Review section of the New York Times on August 11, 2019.
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