Pornography: Men Possessing Women, by: Andrea ... - Feminish

The solution, as Dinnerstein sees it, is child care by men as well aswomen, so that the vengeance can be more fairly doled out.But it is the male who is powerful, and even the child, early on,knows it, perceives it, acts to mitigate the danger, to protect himselffrom it. This means making an alliance with the one who has thepower, the father; and this is what all boys try to do. Tounderstand, or to know even without understanding, that survivaldemands this alliance means that the boy has passed beyond anyinfantile experience of the mother’s power over his immediate wellbeing.He has experienced her powerlessness, and it is this moremature experience of female powerlessness, of the female’s inabilityto protect the boy from the power of the adult male, that is the basisof his adult behavior.Adult men have made their seedy pact with and for male power.They have entered the kingdom and once there, they will not returnvoluntarily to the degraded world of the female. Because as menthey can define reality without reference to truth, they turn theirown experience on its ass to justify their capitulation to the powerof the father, their cowardly abandonment of the mother. Theirguilt must be very great. In all their communication, shouted andwhispered, no matter what men have done to them, they namewomen the threat, and the truth is that any loyalty to women doesthreaten a man’s place in the community of men. Anything,including memory or conscience, that pulls a man toward women ashumans, not as objects and not as monsters, does endanger him.But the danger is always from other men. And no matter how afraidhe is of those other men, he has taken a vow— one for all and all forone—and he will not tell. Women are scapegoated here too, calledpowerful by men who know only too well how powerless womenare—know it so well that they will tell any lie and commit anycrime so as not to be touched by the stigma of that powerlessness.E v e r y t h in g in l if e is part of it. Nothing is off in its own comer,isolated from the rest. While on the surface this may seem self-