last tryst with Julie B

[fflo]

That's it; I'm done with her. In a moment I'll dispatch her back to the LoC, now that I'm sated, spent of desire & wash-my-hands finished, in a way she'd probably appreciate---though not as much, I suspect, as if I'd gotten to her. "This woman is an egocentric bitch," wrote a vandal among the volume's previous readers, having restrained herself from pulling out her ballpoint all the way until page 148 (of 197), and apparently not having noticed that Julie had proudly claimed that very identity more than once in earlier passages. What had prompted the need for retort? The suggestion that it's not getting married that's the trick for women, but getting AWAY.

The librarians are feeding us s'mores. They're leftover from a kids' thing. I was hungry, too. A/C Refuge closes in half an hour, and then I'll see about getting some right proper supper.

And now, Julie B, I ditch you, not a helluva lot better able to sympathize with your modus op. But I did take some pleasure in your company, while I felt like it.

Comments

Re: my original response to you here got et by browser crash...

[fflo.livejournal.com]

The household copy of Backlash, I'm pretty sure, went with my dear H-bomb, who'd brought it with her into the relationship. ("Back when she was a feminist," I seem compelled to add, pettily.) I don't think I'd managed to read it through during its tenure under a roof with me---so I don't know. But it wouldn't surprise me if Faludi didn't get into those issues. (I'd like to have a crack at the volume again sometime, if that counts as a recommendation. I certainly have the feeling it's an "important" book in feminist history.) (Or should that be "in herstory"? ... ha)

I was recently reading a NY Times piece Big Fat Blog linked to that talks of stereotypical depictions in advertising of "large African-American women who are kind of sassy and feisty and humorously angry" ---it mentions the idea of such stereotypes written/perpetrated/furthered by black vs. non-black writers. And that had me thinking about those movies (and I presume novels) about the hapless black women looking for a good black man. Some of which strikes me as bogus, who-gives-a-shit het whining soap opera gender difference enforcement (and even bemoaning the disruption to traditional dominant culture gender roles within that subculture---which is a slightly confusing issue for me, who roots for the disruption of traditional gender roles). At the same time it's certainly true that a way-disproportionate number of adult black men are in jail or, well, dead, and, really, I have some sympathy for the complaint of black men going for white women. Yeah, I know; it's ironic. *shrug, perhaps with slight blushing* I don't believe anyone should be constrained from having an "inter-racial" relationship any more than I think once-lesbians should be constrained from sleeping with men, but I understand the subcultural distress, the sense of betrayal.

Some of what we see in media about that business is certainly intra-cultural reference to the social/hetero complications of those facts/numbers for straight black women---and a reflection of that theme. That it has a big element of bamboozley scare tactics being used on black women seems unlikely to me, though, as it's my hunch the dominant culture doesn't care so much, or at least think it cares so much, about what black women do. So if Faludi was mainly addressing dominant culture backlash against feminism, maybe that's not in there so much. But there surely was a nugget of wisdom in your experience of that story in the context of that dinner table conversation--- the nugget of the truth of what's in the mass media often being not only removed from the perspective of so many real people but mainly aimed at influencing, in its more & less bogus declarations, the worlds of those who "count."