Sherry Chandler

2 Comments

• 1. Tommy replies at 24th January 2008, 9:25 am :

  From what little I read of Susan Faludi’s “The Terror Dream” before I had to put it down because it raised my blood pressure, this attitude does not seem to have gone anywhere.

  Many men in the “new world” after the WTC crash felt the need to protect women and children so strongly that they would verbally lambaste any woman who did not seem to need protection.

  There was a strong drive to force women out of fire departments, for example, after the many years they’d been fighting to get in. All of the stories of the heroic resistance on the aircraft focused solely on the men, to the exclusion of the women on board. One flight attendant was brewing up a pot of boiling water with the intention of throwing it on the hijackers, but she’s almost never mentioned.

  The idea that protecting women & children excuses most anything a man cares to do is still with us, from paying too much for life insurance to packing heat in case the terrorists decide to make an example of your family.

  How do we rein that in so we do not ever get another Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib? That, I think, is a large question in this “new era.”

  Love,

  T

• 2. sherry replies at 24th January 2008, 2:21 pm :

  Tommy, your comment made me think of a post I read the other day at Echidne on the subject of learned helplessness. She said, in part:

  The picture I imagine of [Caitlin] Flanagan’s teenage girls is as tragic victims. Like all those fairy-tale heroes locked up in towers or lying pseudo-dead in glass coffins, waiting for the prince to come and rescue them. That way of thinking is a vicious, mean, horrible cycle which is just intended to make teenage girls into real victims: shuttered inside their houses with perhaps painted-over windows as in the Taliban Afghanistan.

  For we really cannot be both free and totally safe. Ultimately a woman is only quite safe when she is dead. Does that thought make you happy?

  Flanagan and others of the same ilk offer women the panacea of protection: protection by fathers and mothers and protection by husbands. What is the price of that protection? And how do the women protect themselves when the protector turns into a predator? No answers to these questions, because the point of these stories is to spread the myth of female victimhood, to paralyze women by fear into agreeing to be protected and governed by others.

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