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a plug for Polly
Apr. 6th, 2007 11:37 amI was recommending _Women and Desire: Beyond Wanting to be Wanted_ by Polly Young-Eisendrath (which iyindo recommended to me earlier this year and I LOVE), and I found an excerpt of it online:
http://www.ofj.org/newsletter/2000/03-pye.html
It still just speaks so vividly to me and I had to share some of my favorite bits:
"Human desire has two contrasting faces. The meaner face of desire appears in craving, impulsiveness, addiction, and power mongering. The kinder face shows through self-determination and self-responsibility. We women have learned to hide the meaner face, even from ourselves. Because we often ignore or deny our meaner desires, we are also unfamiliar with how to direct our lives through taking responsibility for our own needs and motives."
"Wanting to be wanted is about finding our power in an image rather than in our own actions. We try to appear attractive, nice, good, valid, legitimate, or worthy to someone else, instead of discovering what we actually feel and want for ourselves. In this kind of conscious or unconscious arrangement, other people are expected to provide our own feelings of power, worth, or vitality, at the expense of our authentic development. We then feel resentful, frustrated, and out of control because we have sacrificed our real needs and desires to the arrangements we have made with others. We find ourselves always wanting to be seen in a positive light: the peffect mother, the ideal friend, the seductive lover, the slender or athletic body, the kind neighbor, the competent boss. In place of knowing the truth of who we are and what we want from our lives, we become trapped in images."
"Stories about the evil power of the hag were one way that earlier societies demeaned and demonized female power. Portraying female power as devitalizing, overwhelming, poisonous -- especially for unsuspecting men and children -- encouraged a belief in a negative emotional spell that could be cast exclusively by a demanding woman.
Today when women want to be wanted they unintentionally reinforce the misogynist belief that a demanding woman is to be dreaded and subdued. When we act as though our desires are too powerful and can overtake another's free will or good sense, we reinvent the negative psychology of the hag-bitch. We are at risk of identifying ourselves and our desires with an alien, almost superhuman emotional power. When Anne, for example, prefaces her own needs or wants with phrases such as "Do you mind if I . . ." or "It would be so nice if you. . . ," she implies that she wants something especially burdensome or difficult that cannot be stated directly. When we cloak our desires in niceties and seductions, we protect ourselves from being known directly and imply that others must always be nice to us. This kind of eggshell quality of female desire suggests "that our needs must be hidden, that they are dangerous.
http://www.ofj.org/newsletter/2000/03-pye.html
It still just speaks so vividly to me and I had to share some of my favorite bits:
"Human desire has two contrasting faces. The meaner face of desire appears in craving, impulsiveness, addiction, and power mongering. The kinder face shows through self-determination and self-responsibility. We women have learned to hide the meaner face, even from ourselves. Because we often ignore or deny our meaner desires, we are also unfamiliar with how to direct our lives through taking responsibility for our own needs and motives."
"Wanting to be wanted is about finding our power in an image rather than in our own actions. We try to appear attractive, nice, good, valid, legitimate, or worthy to someone else, instead of discovering what we actually feel and want for ourselves. In this kind of conscious or unconscious arrangement, other people are expected to provide our own feelings of power, worth, or vitality, at the expense of our authentic development. We then feel resentful, frustrated, and out of control because we have sacrificed our real needs and desires to the arrangements we have made with others. We find ourselves always wanting to be seen in a positive light: the peffect mother, the ideal friend, the seductive lover, the slender or athletic body, the kind neighbor, the competent boss. In place of knowing the truth of who we are and what we want from our lives, we become trapped in images."
"Stories about the evil power of the hag were one way that earlier societies demeaned and demonized female power. Portraying female power as devitalizing, overwhelming, poisonous -- especially for unsuspecting men and children -- encouraged a belief in a negative emotional spell that could be cast exclusively by a demanding woman.
Today when women want to be wanted they unintentionally reinforce the misogynist belief that a demanding woman is to be dreaded and subdued. When we act as though our desires are too powerful and can overtake another's free will or good sense, we reinvent the negative psychology of the hag-bitch. We are at risk of identifying ourselves and our desires with an alien, almost superhuman emotional power. When Anne, for example, prefaces her own needs or wants with phrases such as "Do you mind if I . . ." or "It would be so nice if you. . . ," she implies that she wants something especially burdensome or difficult that cannot be stated directly. When we cloak our desires in niceties and seductions, we protect ourselves from being known directly and imply that others must always be nice to us. This kind of eggshell quality of female desire suggests "that our needs must be hidden, that they are dangerous.
