More recently, I read articles in newspapers about how prisoners during the Balkan crisis feared most a female Serbian torturer. (Guardian Weekly, August 16, 1992, "Laughing young woman" was cruelest torturer, by John Mullin.) Or how it was women in Africa giving the orders to Hutu men to slaughter Tutsi civilians. And all the time I'm trying to remember that women are the "good" guys - it's men who are supposed to be "bad."
I compare the styles of Winnie and Nelson Mandela. I recall the belligerence of Margaret Thatcher and the way in which many women still take her as some kind of role model. Some feminists claim that Thatcher is an aberration -- an example of a woman identifying with the worst excesses of a patriarchal society -- but as I pass the newsstands and all the various women’s magazines, I am left wondering just which "feminists" speak for what women.
Just yesterday I was talking to a guy who belonged to a peace activist group. A woman came to a meeting with a huge black eye, the result of domestic violence. Only her partner's another woman. None of this makes sense to me.
Feminists talk about the oppression of women but everyday I see men looking through garbage bins, strung out on drink, despair in the faces, resignation in their "shadows," and I know something else might be going on. I wonder why "women's issues" count so highly but no-one seems to mind the escalating suicide rates among young men.
They talk about being mothers as though this conferred upon women some kind of divine right, but I know a man who, on Mother's Day, will wait until he knows mother is away and sneak a present to the back door, then hurry away.
I know another guy, an artist who, as a teenager, decided to be an artist - much to the dismay of his parents. He described to his students how, one day, he'd been at his easel painting when his father came in and just starts hitting him.
This artist becomes quite emotional up in front of his class as he describes how the blood from his nose poured freely out onto the unfinished-painting in front of him - the red blood mixing with the bright red splashes of a parrot. It's quite amazing to hear. After the lecture, privately he tells me it was actually his mother who had hit him, but she's still alive so he doesn’t feel he can tell the truth.
This is not the kind of thing people want to hear. Many probably wouldn't read this let alone consider publishing it, because, after all it's just from a man. But I can't help wondering if this attitude, in itself, constitutes a kind of bigotry.
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