Thursday 4 September 2008

Posts that upset people

I wrote a post yesterday (day before?) about the friend of Mr ONIS. Mr ONIS then read the post and perceived it to be one big moan about the young lady (hereafter referred to as TYL).

Alright, yes I probably was moaning, but why not? Though very nice and not unpleasant (to me), TYL essentially treated a brand shiny new friendship as an old and secure one. That's okay, I can work with that, it just caught me out.

All the same, Mr ONIS read it as being excessively negative and so I deleted it.

He also raised the question of a point to the post and to the blog. I have told him this and I will repeat it. The point is mine, and mine alone. It's barely even about being read, it's just about writing: anything. I'd like to write and the only way to improve is to do it. I have a stock of pieces saved in Word which I have written, but where's the fun in that. Writing in this blog is little more than journal keeping, nothing profound, though occasionally a little more ambitious.

I can accept that my brain is less switched on now than as a student and that often I want to say something but can't quite make it hang together and that I start following routes without knowing where they'll lead.

When I wrote about TYL, I had intended to write something along the lines of a 'why aren't you a feminist?' piece. I wanted to write about conversations I have had with women aged between 25 and 85 in which they have all revealed classic examples of points on which feminism is fought. They include rape, exploitation, abortion, the effect of motherhood on career, education and the simple desire to carve something better out for themselves. Yet, when asked, they don't describe themselves as feminists.

Why could this be?

There are obvious answers which are useful clichés, like: feminism not being sexy; feminists not being sexy; feminists having no sense of humour and equality having been achieved.

I'm not really interested in these arguments, although I think all but the last are valid. There's something deeper going on whereby women who have had a genuinely bum deal come to think of that as just deserts. There's something of the Uncle (Auntie) Tom to the mode of thought, of buying in to the system which has dealt them the bum deal.

That's what I'm grasping at, and missing. I just had to have a bit of a moan first, about not knowing what to expect from TYL and then getting something I didn't expect, even though I didn't know what to expect...

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