Three strikes, and you're out, Ong! Paglia hit a home run with her first book. But you whiffed with each of your books. So she has had a big impact on the American reading public, but you haven't.
Ironic as it may sound, though, we can step back from the polemics of the women's movement and make a wry observation. The various feminists involved in those spirited polemics, including both Paglia and Rosin, are thereby engaging verbally in the kind of agonistic behavior that Ong discusses in connection with men. As he sees it, agonistic behavior always involves the felt sense of adversativeness -- of being up against it, whatever "it" might be. The irony of course is that feminists usually have not praised the agonistic spirit in men.
In the 1956 Broadway musical My Fair Lady, the character Professor Henry Higgins famously sings "Why Can't a Woman Be More Like a Man?" Thanks to the renewed women's movement that emerged from the 1960s onward, American society now has educated and articulate feminists engaging in verbal polemics -- just like the verbal polemics of men that Ong studied.
Of course this was probably not what Professor Higgins had in mind. Moreover, many feminists have been singing their own song back to Professor Higgins: "Why Can't a Man Be More Like a Woman?" So is it possible that many women today, perhaps including even some feminists, are becoming more like men and that many men today are becoming more like women?
If both of these possibilities are emerging in more people today, then those people can be described as becoming more androgynous -- that is, the women involved are becoming less stereotypically feminine and the men involved are becoming less stereotypically masculine. Put differently, they are becoming more balanced.
By developing their agonistic spirit verbally, outspoken feminists are thereby cultivating the agency dimension of their psychological lives -- as David Bakan explains this term.
DAVID BAKAN'S INSIGHTS
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
