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Exposing a Feminised System
posted by D on Saturday February 15, @11:34PM
from the Misandry dept.
The Media jll1024 writes " I found this article on AskMen.com. It's a letter and a response concerning male-bashing in the media. I think it's important to note that AskMen.com may be one of the web's most visited site concerning general men's issues, and that the reality of a feminized culture is being exposed by a mainstream media source. Please write to AskMen.com and thank them and encourage them to continue writing without fear of women who fear men."

Clara Harris found guilty | Lazy husbands the norm?  >

  
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a treasure (Score:0)
by Anonymous User on Sunday February 16, @07:33AM EST (#1)
For me, askmen.com is really a treasure for every man-all of its articles and especially Love Doc's ones- without being an extremist.

Pericles
Greece
more on "a treasure" (Score:0)
by Anonymous User on Sunday February 16, @07:49AM EST (#2)
Concerning the aforementioned askmen.com's article it's worth noting that the most prominent feminist here in Greece is the wife of the American ambassador. He is considered as the most "hard" American ambassador of the last 50 years.

  Why did she marry such a strong man if he really opposes the alleged "patriarchy"?
Re:more on "a treasure" (Score:1)
by cshaw on Sunday February 16, @01:02PM EST (#3)
(User #19 Info) http://home.swbell.net/misters/index.html
American women tend to seek out and marry males whom they can dominate and exploit. Statistics show that, in the USA, currently, the most successful marriages and the most long lasting one's are ones in which the female dominates the male. The ambassador from the USA and his wife are examples of American culture with the domineering "feminist anti-male wife" and a subservient husband who, because he strongly suppports this culture norm, is attempting to "strongly" promulgate this American norm in Greece and through out the world. Rising anti-Americanism throughout the world is due, in part, in my opinion with regard to this effort of the USA to promulgate American cultural feminism throughout the world. I've traveled to Greece twice. I enjoyed my stay there tremendously especially seeing all of the historical and cultural treasurers you have there.
C.V. Compton Shaw
Re:more on "a treasure" (Score:0)
by Anonymous User on Sunday February 16, @02:23PM EST (#4)
American feminism teaches the world that brain-dead nonsense can be extrememly powerful and successful. That sort of lesson doesn't help the world. Good luck going for something better in Greece.
Re:more on "a treasure" (Score:2)
by Dan Lynch on Sunday February 16, @03:57PM EST (#6)
(User #722 Info) http://www.fathersforlife.org/fv/Dan_Lynch_on_EP.htm
"Good luck going for something better in Greece."

A friend of mine, who is greek and has spent a great deal of time in greece, told me that there is no 'single mothers' there. That they don't have a welfare system for them and the problem does not exist.

Correct me if thats wrong. But geezzzz, there's no doubt in my mind that the single mother welfare system has promoted much of the bigotry against men. I only see it as getting worse.
Re:more on "a treasure" (Score:0)
by Anonymous User on Sunday February 16, @05:18PM EST (#7)
Welfare system here is generally not good. Divorce rate is very low. But we still have a mandatory military service.

Re:more on "a treasure" (Score:1)
by dave100254 on Sunday February 16, @11:36PM EST (#8)
(User #1146 Info)
The single mother welfare system in the United States has been the juggernaut by which the backbone of this Country (Middle/Lower Income Family Units) has been decimated. Welfare, and the cottage industries that it brought about, allowed young single women a financial future with the government, on their backs. It robbed women of their dignity, turned them against men, and spurned a generation of dissafected youth that were raised expecting to be taken care of by the government. When the coffers ran dry, they suspended the Constitutional Rights of the American Male so as to create a wage slave system hiding behind the cry of save the children, when in fact the only thing they cared to save was the system that they had created. Every county of any size has a federal reserve library in which those that are curious can research the actual executive orders, and the explanation of those orders, and what the intent was. It is frightening reading for those that are interested. It is interesteing to note that while we were being told that the majority of welfare recepients were minorities, the fact was that the majority of welfare recepients were caucasion, and resided in rural America, we were deluded, and attacked from within the heartland!
Re:more on "a treasure" (Score:0)
by Anonymous User on Tuesday February 18, @12:28AM EST (#10)
This may be a bit off the subject, but not much.

Did anyone else here know that ONE of the reasons that the Taliban(SP?) have a "problem" with America is because we, as a nation, are basicaly 'P-whipped...?
They see this country as being a feminized nation, the men subserviant and submissive to the female. The kicker is that to a point the S.O.B.s are RIGHT!!
Notice also that though this is one of the reasons the Taliban hate the U.S., the media fails to list it as such.
I heared it mentioned ONCE on a news show. I don't remember whitch one, though.
It was probably 'FOX news Sunday'.
Anyway, food for thought I guess.

    Thundercloud.
EXCELLENT ARTICLE! (Score:0)
by Anonymous User on Sunday February 16, @02:52PM EST (#5)

I am in awe of the truth and the well stated perspective in it!

"The American Woman" by Eric Dingwall (Score:1)
by cshaw on Monday February 17, @11:06AM EST (#9)
(User #19 Info) http://home.swbell.net/misters/index.html
The following is a long post of excerpts from a book by Eric Dingwall entitled "The American Woman" which delineates the extent to which males in the USA have become subervient to females socially,culturally, politically, and economically.
he American Woman

                                                                                                                          by

                                                                                                        © Eric Dingwall

                                                                                                                    (excerpts)

                                                                              ... many domestic and foreign
observers have remarked that the United States seems to
have a surprising number of men who remain adolescent and
of women who play the roles both of doll and of matriarch,
and they have not always realized that this is part of the
American cultural pattern and the result of the domination
of society by women. The conflict in the American soul, is
an economic and a sexual conflict, and the American woman
is, I think, at the heart of that conflict. It is women who
set the stage and largely control the players in important
sections of American life. America is a woman's world, a
world in which, as a Chinese woman, Helena Kuo, remarked,
women have succeeded in everything except in the art of
being truly feminine. In this lies the tragedy and the danger.
It is the purpose of this book to try to see how the American
woman has attained her position and how the whole of
American culture is permeated by her
influence.
p. 14

                                                          ... Theodore Dreiser, in his Hey, Rub-a
Dub-Dub!, contributed a stinging indictment of contemporary
America ... As to the American woman, Dreiser
expressed astonishment that the ideas regarding her could
honestly be held by any rational person. But, he stated,
Americans move in a world of illusion. To them woman is
more than human and has become a goddess, a divine
creative principle to whom no vice, error or weakness can be
found. He went on to say that this fantastic delusion caused
sex activity, as it were, to become a criminal offence, since
it was through its expression that the paragon was
violated. p. 28

                                                                                    ...Woman, who, unless
carefully
brought into legal and moral subjection, was of all things most
likely to be used by that Infernal Serpent as he had already
used her in those far-off days ...
Woman was to be watched and guarded against, and the
Puritans were the ones to do it...
It is when we see the Puritan face to face with the problem
of woman that we can see a picture of strong men wrestling
with something so intangible and elusive that it seemed im-
possible ever to obtain a grip firm enough to discover just what
it was against which they were struggling. The problem had
always been the same. The Fathers of the Christian Church,
saints and holy men in all ages and of nearly all faiths, had
had the same riddle to solve and had failed utterly to solve
it. For here was something that defied analysis; so subtle, so
dangerous was it that proof of Satan's power seemed the only
dear fact that emerged from mature
consideration....
p. 34

                                                              ... Sex antagonism is no modern
notion built out of the difficulties and tensions of civilized
life. It lies at the heart of the natural process, and com-
promise only is possible. The aims of the sexes are different
and are incompatible. The ways of man are not those of
woman and the paths destined for feminine footsteps can
never be those trod by men. All attempts to suppress
manifestations of this overwhelming impulse are doomed to
failure...
p. 35

        ... Marriage to the Puritan was an alliance of two persons
joined in love and mutual companionship, help and comfort.
It was, as William Ames again so well put it, an arrangement
whereby existed a "most sociable and intimate affection be-
tween Man and Wife," and anyone who reads the family cor-
respondence in the Winthrop Papers cannot fail to be struck
by the tokens of esteem, respect and affection in the letters ..
in the Puritan family the woman was a responsible individual,
an equal partner with her husband before God, and, as the
bearer and educator of his children (and in spite of the fact
that as a female she was somewhat suspect), began to assume
importance which, as time passed, began to grow
and p. 36

change the general pattern of the family unit. This position
of influence and authority grew so rapidly that I do not sup-
pose that there are any competent historians, male or female,
who would deny the importance of so striking a factor in
moulding of the American
Republic...
p. 37

                                                                                                                  ... many of the
colonial
women were soon engaged in tasks apart altogether from those
connected with rearing a family. Except in professions such
as Medicine and the Church, their activity was but slightly
hampered, and they soon began to deal with administrative,
executive[,] and legal matters, while some actually managed
businesses ...
The most important social unit in colonial times was nat-
ally the family, and, as we have said, the woman was the
unchallenged head of the home, although her husband was
nominally the head of the
family...
p. 38

                                                                                                                            ... How
far the Vin-
dication of the Rights of Women was read in colonial America
I am not prepared to say, but it is clear that the life of Mary
Wollstonecraft was not one of which many would have ap-
proved, and that the sentiments expressed in her outspoken
book were hardly those which would have appealed to the
typical New England housewife. Yet it is here that we can,
I think, perceive the germs of those ideas which were later
to work such havoc in the lives of American
women... p. 43

                                                                                                                    ... The wife's
place
was the home, and her legal position, borrowed as it was
from European enactments, was that of inferiority, although
the conditions of life were clearly undermining the position
of the husband and the ancient patriarchal pattern. The posi-
tion of dominance that the wife maintained in the home
extended not only to the management of the children and
the household generally but to a certain amount of control
over the husband's purse. In his Letters from America, which
were translated in 1924, the writer, who seems to have been
a German officer and who has described his experiences from
1776 to 1779, declares that the stylish display affected by
the women of New England was due to the fact that they
insisted on controlling the domestic finances, and he adds that
mothers on their death-beds ordered their daughters to retain-
the mastery of the house and the control over their father's
purse-strings. It was thus, he concludes, that "petticoat rule"
was spread throughout America. Thus the growing power of
women arose from a natural process which began to operate
very early in the United States and from which the present
almost "matriarchal" pattern has
developed....
p. 48

                                      ... early American novels ...
As early as 1802 .. signs of a changing attitude
were becoming dimly perceptible. From the daring rake
bent upon carrying off the protesting damsel to his lair,
to prey upon her hidden charms, the beau was beginning
to be considered a somewhat weak and poor specimen...
                                                                                        ... But the preferences of
the ladies were clearly in another direction and the Rhett
Butlers of the 1800s were much more popular than the gentle
beau who were likened to syllabub--"all froth and show,
white, sweet and harmless." It was not, however, for the
ladies to say so, for only females of the lower grades
de- p. 50

graded themselves thus. "Ladies" had no such feelings, and
thus they were able to rise superior to the other sex, which
was clearly much lower in the animal scale. Man was begin-
ning to take the place assigned to him by the American
woman, for was it not she who was about to take the moral
leadership of the country into her own hands? Freedom for
women offered, so it seemed, boundless opportunities for
female improvement and advancement, but on the other hand
it provided opportunities for libertinism where such was de-
sired. This was the dilemma in which the feminist leaders
were always entangled. Jumping from one horn to the other,
they became enmeshed in a web between the two, and in this
web they are still
struggling...
p. 51

                                                                                                                        ... The
gradually in-
creasing importance of the mother and the supposed inno-
cence of the female child had a profound influence on social
custom and behaviour, since to the power exercised by mater-
nal authority was added the myth that women were super-
ior morally to the other sex, and that it was only through
an inexplicable arrangement of Nature that they had to sub-
mit to what was, after all, something of a degradation. Thus,
as we shall see later, women were being divided into two
sections, the pure and the impure, and since the children of
both sexes were under the influence of the mother, both boys
and girls were early trained to conduct themselves in ways
which were not only unnatural, but which led directly towards
the formation of those neuroses which are so noticeable a
feature of the American scene
today....
p. 59

                      ... the problem of woman and the problem of love
are two of the most serious questions that the people of the
United States have to face. It is true, of course, that there
other highly important problems, such as the economic
problem, the problem of the Whites in their relation to the
Negroes, and the problems of the relations of the United States
with the outside world. Unlikely as it may sound, however, all
these questions are linked up with the fundamental disharmony
between the sexes, a disharmony distinct from, but still con-
nected with, the sex antagonism in other
countries.... p. 63

                                                        ... It was the nineteenth century which
saw the gradual emergence of the new American woman
from the early days to the days of organized feminist agitation
and subsequent power. Her dissatisfaction with her lot can be
seen gradually increasing as the dichotomy of the sexes
became wider and more pronounced. But through the whole
of her numerous activities and troubles a single thread runs
from which branch out numerous fibres in all directions. That
thread is her love-life, and it is because her love-life is hope-
lessly awry that the American woman is as she is. She is too
often a woman without love, for love in America is not
what it is in the rest of the world. Woman is the centre of the
moral chaos, the immaturity, the strange fetishes and the
even stranger practices which are to be observed everywhere
in the United States. Yet it is largely through her that the
system which has put her in her present position is per-
petuated....
p. 64

                                          ... It must be remembered that, as Nathaniel
P. Willis said, a lady in American society could do no wrong,
for the women of the United States were superior to the men,
physically, intellectually and
morally...
p. 72

                                                                                ... The American husband, as
Mrs. Houstoun wrote in 1850, was "merely the medium
through which dollars find their way into the milliners' shop
in exchange for caps and bonnets."
...
p. 73

        In 1869 Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
were still discussing the evils of tight dresses in their The
American Woman's Home, and they joined in the increasing
condemnation of everything masculine, and above all in the
attempt to show the superiority of woman over the mere male.
For example, they declared that it was the brother who was
to do the hardest and most disagreeable work. It was for him
to face the storms and perform the most laborious drudgeries.
As to the family circle, it was for him to give his mother and
sisters precedence in all the conveniences and comforts
of p. 75

home life. 15

15 Writing in 1910, an American lady, Katherine G. Busbey, de-
clared that the American boy was subject to the tyranny of his sisters,
and that "an observing Englishman" saw in this fact the beginning
of the so-called slavery of the American man to the American woman
(see Home Life in America, p.
29).
p. 76

                                                                                        ... Margaret Fuller herself,
who
published sections of her Woman in the Nineteenth Century
in the Dial, showed the same tendency to attribute sexual
irregularities to man alone, and declared that many women
looked upon men as wild beasts, although such a supposition
was surely terrifying if they were all alike. Frail was man, in-
deed, she concluded; but how frail! and how impure!
... p. 77

      ... it was in the nineteenth century that we can see the
beginnings of the theory of male inferiority and female
dominance, not only in the home, but in society in general,
which, as Dickson Wecter points out in The Saga of Amer-
ican Society, women finally dominated completely and occu-
pied a position which the American man has usually accepted
without question. ...
          ... A. d'Almbert, in his Flanerie Parisienne aux Etats-
Unis, said that the women in the United States realized their
power to such an extent that they abused it like tyrants who
are aware that there is no limit to their despotism. On the
other hand, the men showed a boundless patience and a
deference to the women that could scarcely be imagined.
American husbands, he stated, knew that they were inferior
to their wives, and as they secretly confessed it, their attitude
was explained. The least sign of any gratitude on the part
a woman towards a man was considered superfluous, a
feature which Francis Lieber had noticed twenty years
before.
        Similarly Alfred Bunn in his book Old England and New
England declared that if there was one feature more striking
another in the American character, it was the boundless
attention that American men paid to women. She is supreme,
and they are the mere creatures of her will, an opinion voiced
twenty years before, when William Faux in Memorable Days
in America declared that south of the Delaware woman was
"a little divinity, to whom all must bend, give place, and pay
idle homage." Bunn noticed the rudeness of women when
travelling, and observed one case in which a woman turned
a man off his seat and then used both halves of the settee
for herself and her baggage. It was women of this kind to
whom Anthony Trollope doubtless referred when he spoke
of persons who were more odious to him than any other
human beings he had met elsewhere. Although generally
speaking he found American women charming, he noted
that p. 84

they had "no perception of that return which chivalry de-
mands of them," illustrating his thesis by an account of what
he himself observed in street cars A similar point of view
was expressed by Count de Soissons, who was interested to
confirm what William Dean Howells had written about the
American women when he had said that it was useless to
quarrel with their decisions because there was no appeal from
them. Soissons mentioned that in America everything was
for the woman. Love played a very small part in her life, for
her husband, whom she dominated, was merely a machine
for making
money....
p. 85

... a point of view [was] even more forcibly expressed in
the p. 96

Philadelphia Public Ledger and Daily Transcript for July
20, 1848, when it said that one pretty girl was equal to ten
thousand men and a mother was, next to God, all
powerful... p. 97

                                                        ... Mrs. Farnham proceeded to com-
pare the two sexes, to the great disadvantage of the male.
Woman's brain was finer, she wrote, as were all her other
tissues: it was, moreover, more complex, as was her general
build. Through this fineness arose her higher character, her
mom delicate grasp, the more penetrative reach of her
faculties, her swifter power to seize relations, her more re-
ceptive states, which were open to illumination and inspira-
tion, and the more fluent inner life which she enjoyed. As to
her body, the same proofs were there...
... Men, she went on, revel in bestial sensuality and they
dare to speak of "fallen women." "I accept man's language,"
Eliza exclaimed; "it is a fall for my sex when it descends to
meet his at the level of sense," for women abhor sensuality
in their own sex, women, who have been shown to possess
the most perfect, "complex, varied, refined, beautiful and
exquisitely endowed organization, comprising, with its cor-
responding faculties, the most susceptible, sensitive yet en-
during constitution; and also the purest, most
aspiring, p. 100

progressive, loving, spiritual nature of any being that inhabits
our earth."
          Such was woman according to Eliza Farnham...
                                                                                        ... what she had said was
not
the reasoned argument of a mature thinker, but the wild and
incoherent ravings of a frustrated, jealous and neurotic
woman, of an American woman of the middle nineteenth
century. She voiced the opinions of many others who ...
felt themselves cheated and trapped, and thus the fight for
quality in the United States was a fight in which sex an-
tagonism played a prominent part. In this connexion Emily
Faithfull quotes an amusing skit on the kind of address de-
livered by an American feminist. "Miss President, feller-
wimmin and male trash generally," the speaker began, "I
believe sexes were created perfectly equal, with the woman a
little more equal than the man ... The only decent thing
about him was a rib, and that went to make something
better."...
p. 101

        When considering the effect of the motion-picture and the
radio on women in the United States we shall see how the
producers have constantly to bear in mind the tastes and
desires of their feminine and juvenile audiences. For not only
in recreation but also in retail buying the women of twen-
tieth-century America played a highly important part. Sep-
arate as the sexes were in the nineteenth century, the gulf
which divided them was wider still in the twentieth. Women
were still dominant in the social sphere and in the home
where children are concerned. Teachers were still largely
feminine and unmarried, and men still retained a firm but
probably weakening hold on business and politics. It was an
age when the American Woman was coming into her own at
last. She could do all that men could do--almost. It was the
age when the American Man was beginning to wonder what
it was that had hit him. He saw woman in the ascendancy,
and had no idea what was to be done. It was an age when
a Methodist divine (Bishop C. Denny) had to comfort his
male followers by telling them that, come what might, women
at least could not yet "grow a mustache." It was the age
when, as an American woman once told me, the American
Man was simply a doormat-and liked it!
... p.
124

            ... Instead of calm confidence many a woman exhibited
merely restless frustration: many mothers were more often
than not maternal tyrants: and younger girls became
stereotyped dolls basing their appearance, manners[,] and dress
upon the film stars ... ... hard reality was cast
aside in favour of sensuous phantasy. The American family
itself seemed to be breaking
up...
p. 125

                ... the American Woman was becoming more and
more of a problem not only to herself but also to others...
              ... The more observant foreigners were amazed at
what they found and the way in which so many American
men allowed themselves to be dominated and "pushed around"
by their female relations and
friends...
p. 126

  .. I am inclined to regard the enormous importance of
the sissy concept in American life as due to that feminine
dominance which is everywhere apparent ...
It seems to me likely that the idea stems from an only partly
conscious terror on the part of men that maternal domination
may so influence the son that he may lack at least some of
the masculine characteristics that woman still permits the
American male to exercise...
        At the same time, the American mother, while paying lip
service to current beliefs, is not at all anxious to see her sons
exhibit too many of the male characteristics, which may
remind her of her own deficiencies and thus tend to deflate
her assertive personality...
... H. Elfin, in his acute discussion of the aggressive and
erotic tendencies in army life, published in 1946, goes so far
as to say that the profanity and obscenity of the American
soldier is the symbolic rejection of the shackles of that
matriarchy in which he was forced to spend his early years.
He goes on to say that a large proportion of American
men p. 130

have never properly developed beyond the early stages of
emotional experience, and that the anxiety and strong reac-
tions they exhibit when required to live by standards expected
of mature adults are proof of the kind of upbringing to which
they have been subjected...
                                                                                                                ... The fact is
that, as
Graham Hutton so well puts it, American men, on account
of their upbringing, retain "an unparalleled devotion" to their
mothers ("Moms"). Their lack of maturity is reflected in
what they are called. They are called "boys," often think of
themselves as such, behave as such and indeed often continue
to be called by this word all their
lives...
p. 131

... With the rise of the motion-picture the desires and wishes
of the American girl began to change. Her vitality and desire
for happiness began to be centred upon the kind of life
portrayed on the screen. Happiness was to be obtained by
being beautiful, rich and well known. To be content meant
having a body which men would look at twice, a long sleek
car, and one or more long-drawn-out and passionate love
affairs. As might have been expected, these phantasies made
the girls neither happier nor more contented. The main effect
was to standardize their behaviour as it standardized the cut
of their hair and the style of their dress. It did not, however,
make them more feminine. The American girl, remarked
Maurice Dekobra in 1931, is a beautiful little tigress (although
without claws) who feeds on orchids (without perfume),
gramophone records (without needles)[,] and nocturnal tele-
phone calls (without passion). Another French observer,
Christiane Fournier, was even more scathing. Writing a year
after Dekobra, she declared that American girls knew nothing
whatever about real love. All they wanted were husbands who
would both earn a million dollars and also wash the dishes.
What was wrong, she insisted, was that in the United States
the women had the men completely under their
thumbs... p. 132

... We have already mentioned some of the effects which may
be thought to follow the education of boys by unmarried
women, although perhaps it is an exaggeration to say, with
John Erskine, that the schools have the best intentions but
that what they are actually doing is making girls out of
boys.29
        However, it must, I think, be admitted that one effect is
that boys learn to obey women...
In one of her critical and well-informed columns in the Wash-
ington Post, Mary Haworth declared that she thought that
the manners and customs of American men were woman-
tailored to a far greater extent than in any other modern
society. American men have, she stated, been taught, with
a few exceptions, by mothers and nurses in their cradle era,
and by women school-teachers in the nursery school, kinder-
garten and grade-school phase of education. It has thus been
possible for the American woman to fashion her ideal man...

29 J. Erskine, Influence of Women and Its Cure, p. 70, Cf. C. F.
Ulrich's review, "Off with their Heads" (Sat. Rev. of Lit., Feb. 15,
1936, vol. xiii, p.
13).
p. 138

... In the preceding pages it has often been said that the
social p. 141

dichotomy between the sexes (concerning which more will be
said later) led to an absorption of men in business, thereby
permitting women to dominate the social scene...
                                                                                                                      ... Miss Dix
always
managed to show what Maurice Dekobra called her imper-
turbable good sense. She pointed out how in the United
States no amount of education or sophistication or knowledge
of what happens to other people prevented women from
believing in fairy-tales. They expected to be perpetual brides,
trailing their clouds of glory for over forty years, and when
this did not happen they could not take it without
"squawk- p. 142

ing to heaven" that marriage was a failure. Men, she said,
take marriage as it is, while women yearn for it as it isn't.
Or again, a few weeks later she replied to a girl of nineteen
who said she was very miserable because her husband did
not come up to her idea of the dream husband and the
romantic lover whom she thought he would be. Miss Dix
said that if she had waited to marry until she were grown-up
she would have realized that nobody got a fairy prince for
a husband, and it would be far better for her to realise that
she was dreaming of some impossible creation built out of
her
imagination...
p. 143

                                                                                                            ... boys were
often
in as great a fix as the girls. "What line of conduct do the
girls like?" asked one. Did they "crave a little mauling"? He
went on to tell Miss Dix that when he tried a little petting
the girl refused, but if he did not persist, then she would
not date him again, because he was slow. Similarly, if he
actively insisted, he lost the date, because then he was too
"fast." To these conundrums Miss Dix had a ready answer.
She told him that the mystery of how a woman's mind works
made the riddle offered by the Sphinx look like a puzzle
which any moron could solve without
effort...
p. 147

                                                                                                                                  ... In
the United
States, where the growth of the idea of sex equality has been
one of the most important features of the changing social
scene, it could be expected that courtship would reflect this
tendency to a marked degree... The American girl, fed as
she is week in and week out by the phantasies of Hollywood,
still dreams of the Prince Charming who will take her away
to realms of happiness where life will be one long honey-
moon. Since real life is utterly different from that portrayed
in the magazine or on the screen, disillusionment sets in: the
young wife becomes discontented and miserable, and divorce
follows... ... The main obstacle
to
female success and adjustment in courtship is psychological.
Since, in the United States, woman has gained what she be-
lieves is almost complete equality with man, the usual female
role in courtship has to be modified in response to these
claims. In other societies man is usually (though not always)
the one who woos: woman is pursued and won: she is not the
pursuer. This pattern of being pursued and being able to
yield to a man equally desired is a source of the keenest
enjoyment to a woman, since, when finally overcome, she
is p. 153

able to enjoy the exquisite passivity which is her role. More-
over, man is at a disadvantage when pursued, and he is apt
to take fright and run away...
He does not altogether care for the signs of the times as
suggested by the titles of such books as Get your Man and
Hold Him, Hold your Man!, How to Snare a Male, or Win
your Man and Keep Him and How to Attract Men and
Money."' Neither did he much relish the picture painted by
Disney's Bambi, where the three bold young females soon
had the fawn, the rabbit[,] and the skunk all "titterpated." But
the fact remained that this was a prevailing tendency, and
men had to make the best of it, and run away when the
chase became unbearable.55 Moreover, if he read the mag-
azine
C.V. Compton Shaw
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