[b]Susan Faludi
When the enemy has no face, society will invent one.[/b]
At least one.
The “feminine” woman is forever static and childlike. She is like the ballerina in an old-fashioned music box, her unchanging features tiny and girlish, her voice tinkly, her body stuck on a pin, rotating in a spiral that will never grow.
And then one day she’s a Playboy Bunny.
Are you still as angry as you used to be? Julia, the World War II resistance fighter, asked Lillian Hellman in the biographical movie Julia. I like your anger….Don’t you let anyone talk you out of it.
Of course no one ever did.
The camera only documented what had been there all along, a marriage whose foundations, constructed from the cheap materials of convention and fear, had been buckling for years.
Of course they didn’t have Youtube back then.
All of women’s aspirations – whether for education, work or any form of self-determination – ultimately rest on their ability to decide whether and when to bear children.
That’s the biological part, isn’t it?
Here was a Jewish man-turned-woman making fun of Jewish men for not being manly enough.
Now that’s ironic.