NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #31/NN_1992_31.iso/spool/bit/listserv/wordsl/49630

Text File | 1992-12-26 | 3.3 KB | 66 lines

Comments: Gated by [e-mail]
Path: sparky!uunet!paladin.american.edu!auvm!MHWPA.ATT.COM!KTW
Original-From: Ken Wolman <mhwpa!ktw>
X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.3 PL11]
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.words-l
Date:         Sat, 26 Dec 1992 09:45:43 EST
Sender:       English Language Discussion Group <[e-mail]>
From:         [e-mail]
Subject:      Re: Camillemania
In-Reply-To:  <no.id>; from "Judith E. Schrier" at Dec 26, 92 8:53 am
Lines: 52

> >who pushes dress racks up 7th Avenue.  Serious question, then: why
> >would a woman be a woman-hater?
>
> I think we're back at last season's question: why would a Jew be a
> Jew-hater? Why would anyone turn against his/her own identity and
> line up with the more powerful oppressors? When I state it that
> way does the question contain implications of an answer (not
> necessarily *the* answer, of course...I don't think there is
> *AN* answer...)?

<Judith, you're making me run my mouth again...:-)>

The glib question is "Why do people become traitors to their own and
their own interests?"  That may not be quite accurate.  Perhaps the
better question is What do people perceive in their own groups that
gets them to identify negatively with what they see as the weaknesses
in those groups, and to react toward what they see as the strengths in
groups allied against them?  There are far too many examples of Jews,
for example, in the extermination camps, who identified with the power
of life and death the Nazis held over them, and who "believed"
(vainly, more often than not) that aping their oppressor would somehow
buy them favors and grant them some of their oppressor's power.  Some
in fact survived, but learned the lessons too well.  A woman I knew in
graduate school was living with a man whose parents, both survivors,
punished him when he was child by beating him on the soles of his feet
with a rubber hose: one of the things that was done to them in the
camp.  How many non-Jewish French and Poles and Norwegians openly
collaborated with the Nazis because they viewed themselves as a
defeated people, and saw the Germans as the "main chance" at
maintaining their comfort and what they interpreted as their
"dignity"?

I suppose there is an answer implicit in how Judith framed the
question: people who identify with what we perceive as Power may seek
to curry it even at the expense of what we call our souls.  But that
opens other questions that I am unprepared to answer or even properly
formulate: power over life and death is not the same thing as the
power of a higher morality that teaches that physical life is not
necessarily the greatest or only good, that some things and people may
be worth dying--maybe even killing--for.

None of which addresses why women may despise other women.  From the
little I know of her, I don't think Camille Paglia is a woman-hater so
much as someone whose self-definition of what it means to be a woman
explicitly attacks women who don't fit her definition.  In much the
same way, I have met one too many self-identified Orthodox Jews who
are willing to deracinate other Jews who are not up to their standard
or definition of what it means to be Jewish.  Both Paglia or the
Orthodox seem to define The Other Guy as the sell-out, and locate
Power according to value systems I won't begin to discuss.

Ken