OatmealTrash

Baby mirai sketch page bc we were robbed of kurenai’s besties helping raise the group baby

Men speak humorously, or so they say, of "the war between the sexes" - a transparent and guileful attempt to mislead us into thinking that there is a natural enmity between women and men, and that the "sides" are evenly matched. Nothing could be further from the truth on both counts. The "war between the sexes" is man made, and it is not between anybody. It is against women. We know that to be born female in patriarchy is to be born behind enemy lines.

But because everything associated with women is degraded by that association, something subversive happens to the glorious male vision of war when we insist on calling women's lives with men on this earth "war." War, to the patriarchal mind, is heroic, grand, full of magnificent courage and color, camaraderie, idealism, moral and physical strength - the whole shot through with religious fervor: God is always on our side because we are right and good and noble. The Old Testament is all the proof one needs that war in patriarchy is the holiest of holies.

Then feminists come along and sully that splendid word. What could be less noble and heroic and grand and magnificent than the furtive ugly sneaking weak and cowardly acts of rape and battering and incest and pornography-inspired sadism, and sexual harassment and pauperizing and sterilizing and obligatory motherhood - to name just a few of the less heroic aspects of this most invisible and vicious and widespread and prolonged and prototypical of all wars in human history. No wonder people become alarmed, even outraged, when the holy word "war" is used for the disgustingly two-bit work of bullying and brutalizing women into submission. Even to use the words "war" and "women" in the same sentence makes a mockery of all they reverence.

Yet, the screams of women, their moaning, the crying of the women of the world, past and present, echo through the chambers of the unconscious in every human being alive. On some level, each of us knows what is going on, but it is as if we have signed a pact not to let on that we know, have sworn to keep it secret. What else can account for the public aghast when one minute fragment of the hidden hoard of evidence escapes into public awareness?"