It's been five years and some months since my ex left me. For at least a couple of years after the fact, I felt like I didn't want another relationship. I miss a lot about that relationship (like how good it was for my confidence), even though it was flawed and I wasn't exactly a good boyfriend. It was new territory for me and I was doing my best, if somewhat badly. I can be a slow learner at times, so I expect a few fuck-ups (including being quite self-absorbed) along the way. Now, I'm trying to learn how to be a better person so I can give it another go.
I write this as someone flawed, who realised that my past relationships were subject to my own faults and I need to improve upon them. Avoidance of relationships isn't going to get me anywhere, but I don't want to rush into a new one until I've learnt from past experiences. I don't feel that I'm there yet, hence my endeavouring to learn to be a (better) Feminist from reading Feminist literature. Maybe I'm misguided, but I feel I've got to do something that makes me a better potential partner than I was. Of course, I'll likely still fuck up on occasion, which is to be expected.
To that end, I've started not just amassing, but actually reading, Feminist literature (starting with first wave Feminism, in its eighteenth century language). The book I'm currently reading on weekends (when not working on my current project for my cousin's husband) is Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Women, from back in the day (circa 1792) when women were denied a lot of the rights and station that they have in modern "progressive" Western countries. There are a number of paragraphs that stand out to me, but quoting them all here would make this post quite a lot longer than it already is. However, the following quote seems to me to give the gestalt of Wollstonecraft's writing on the topic (if you can get past the formal way it is written):
"Novels, music, poetry and gallantry, all tend to make women the creatures of sensation, and their character is thus formed during the time they are acquiring accomplishments, the only improvement they are excited, by their station in society, to acquire. This overstretched sensibility naturally relaxes the other powers of the mind, and prevents intellect from attaining that sovereignty which it ought to attain, to render a rational creature useful to others, and content with its own station; for the exercise of the understanding, as life advances, is the only method pointed out by nature to calm the passions.
"Satiety has a very different effect, and I have often been forcibly struck by an emphatical description of damnation, when the spirit is represented as continually hovering with abortive eagerness round the defiled body, unable to enjoy any thing without the organs of sense. Yet, to their senses, are women made slaves, because it is by their sensibility that they obtain present power.
"And will moralists pretend to assert, that this is the condition in which one half of the human race should be encouraged to remain with listless inactivity and stupid acquiescence? Kind instructors! what were we created for? To remain, it may be said, innocent; they mean in a state of childhood. We might as well never have been born, unless it were necessary that we should be created to enable man to acquire the noble privilege of reason, the power of discerning good from evil, whilst we lie down in the dust from whence we were taken, never to rise again.
"It would be an endless task to trace the variety of meannesses, cares, and sorrows, into which women are plunged by the prevailing opinion, that they were created rather to feel than reason, and that all the power they obtain, must be obtained by their charms and weakness;
"Fine by defect, and amiably weak!"
"And, made by this amiable weakness entirely dependent, excepting what they gain by illicit sway, on man, not only for protection, but advice, is it surprising that, neglecting the duties that reason alone points out, and shrinking from trials calculated to strengthen their minds, they only exert themselves to give their defects a graceful covering, which may serve to heighten their charms in the eye of the voluptuary, though it sink them below the scale of moral excellence?
"Fragile in every sense of the word, they are obliged to look up to man for every comfort. In the most trifling dangers they cling to their support, with parasitical tenacity, piteously demanding succour; and their natural protector extends his arm, or lifts up his voice, to guard the lovely trembler — from what? Perhaps the frown of an old cow, or the jump of a mouse; a rat, would be a serious danger. In the name of reason, and even common sense, what can save such beings from contempt; even though they be soft and fair?
"These fears, when not affected, may be very pretty; but they shew a degree of imbecility, that degrades a rational creature in a way women are not aware of — for love and esteem are very distinct things.
"I am fully persuaded, that we should hear of none of these infantine airs, if girls were allowed to take sufficient exercise and not confined in close rooms till their muscles are relaxed and their powers of digestion destroyed. To carry the remark still further, if fear in girls, instead of being cherished, perhaps, created, were treated in the same manner as cowardice in boys, we should quickly see women with more dignified aspects. It is true, they could not then with equal propriety be termed the sweet flowers that smile in the walk of man; but they would be more respectable members of society, and discharge the important duties of life by the light of their own reason. "Educate women like men," says Rousseau, "and the more they resemble our sex, the less power will they have over us." This is the very point I aim at. I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves."
