On that second article, it’s interesting that they didn’t quote any women complaining about being felt up, but rather a man complaining that male soldiers were frisking “our women”.

I think women being complicit in their own oppression… there’s something going on in addition to Stockholm Syndrome perhaps? These burkha’d vigilantes seem similar in spirit (though harsher i think) to religious women’s movements in the US in the early 1900’s… like the temperance movement that led to prohibition, which I recall as being related to the whole cult of domesticity thing, which told women that they were naturally more moral than men. (That was a big switch from the rhetoric of earlier eras, which held that women were morally and mentally weaker.) Of course that makes them responsible for their husbands’ and sons’ immoral behavior, and for the raising of the children… but because it makes them responsible for something there’s this false sense of empowerment, and voila women police each other, saving the guys a lot of work.

Or maybe that is a trait of Stockholm Syndrome… the kidnapper deliberately giving their hostage some responsibility? It’s conceptually distinguishable from a mere loosening of the thumbscrews, though.

However, I’m not sure I grasp how the group of marauding women trying to make the countryside safe for a misogynist sect is at odds with the Stockholm proposition. Religion consists of enforced subservience to a male god who favors men and who can potentially subject insubordinators to eternal torment, and as such is practically a textbook example in favor of my thesis. If there were a textbook. Maybe I’d better write one.

It’s a compelling explanation, and when seen as a part of the whole pattern, probably quite true. There’s also the insidious dominance and submission cycle inherent in any heirarchical model, like society and religion, where those who consider themselves superior always delight in trampling their inferiors, if only because those beneath them, being vicitmized, act so appropriately victim-like, which enrages them to further acts of dominance. This happens when women attach themselves to models of belonging more evanescent and illusory than the fundamental reality of womanhood. Then women are likely to distract themselves with the alluring spectacle of those beneath them suffering their well-deserved debasement, even if they are also female.

Many times I see all evil as a desire to control others, and it’s something men and women both do to varying degrees, with the men, of course, being more frantic and murderous about it in any possible instance.

But, as someone who has found himself, despite all reason and intelligence, playing the victim role, I can see how easy it is to fall into this hole and never get out, since getting out requires the even deeper humiliation of admitting you were a victim in the first place.

It’s not explicitly mentioned in the wikipedia discussion of Stockholm Syndrome, though I suppose if Patti Hearst was helping with bank robberies the SLA must have trusted her with some responsibilities.

But so too, perhaps, does revolution; it seems to me that demonizing the oppressor is the first step to becoming the “new boss.”

That’s why patriarchy-blaming, though attractive and delightful, sometimes reminds me of those joke mugs from was it the nineties? that said,”Eliminate all negativity.”

And I return to the equally futile but far less depressing contemplation of which of Bert’s paws, in the “cute-ray” photo, is in fact the cutest.

A common misconception.

Any thoughts??

Well, as the Whatstheirnames say in my Rhino “Have A Nice Day” boxed set, “Do it. Do it. Do it till you’re satisfied (whatever it is).”