OK, just one more quote from Gissing’s The Odd Women and I promise to stop bugging you with this:
Women had individual characters; that discovery, though not a very profound one, impressed him with the force of something arrived at by independent observation. Monica often puzzled him gravely; he could not find the key to her satisfactions and discontents. To regard her simply as a human being was beyond the reach of his intelligence.
Isn’t this brilliant? I know quite a few men and women who believe the patriarchal myth of the profound differences between the sexes and who drive themselves to distraction trying to figure out what these mysterious creatures want. The idea that men and women are all simply different individuals is completely alien to them. They ruin their lives, live in misery, go from one unhappy relationship to another, obsessed with the hope of finding some guiding principle, some great law that governs the behavior of all men or all women.
Clarissa's Blog 
One of the worst aspects of this way of thinking is when certain males hold that we can’t really want what we say we do, because that wouldn’t fit the theory regarding all women and what they want. It’s assumed that if we want something other than this designated thing, which the male may not bother to articulate for us, we must be being very tricky and deceptive. Indeed, perhaps we imagine ourselves to be something other than that which we necessarily are. We might be pink unicorns or something.
I’ve found with very patriarchal men, the more direct you are with them, the less they are inclined to believe you. They experience strange convulsions in the process of distorting everything, in an attempt to reduce complexity to their simple prototype of “woman”.
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Again, these are experiences that I’ve had often, as well. At some point, you just give up trying to communicate what it is that you want. People just stare at you and try to convince you of the opposite because that is what their preconceived notion tells them to expect.
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Funny enough, I know a few men and women who believe in the myth of the patriarchy, go figure. 😉
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It’s not like, because Clarissa and I don’t fit the model, we can eliminate the expectations that we fit it. That would be like divorced people saying that marriage was a myth that nobody could believe in. There would still be people getting married and staying married, even if I was to get a divorce. My ability to divorce doesn’t make marriage “a myth”. It remains what it is — a social institution.
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Or you can have like you do today in the west, the majority of the people opting out of marriage. It may still exist but not as a social construct that the majority will buy into. You can kick and scream that they should or have to get married but most will just look at you and say, “nope, I dont want to”.
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Certainly! I have opted out of patriarchy. I won’t conform to any of its mores. I’m not meek or submissive or still. I follow my own agenda and do whatever I want to do. I live according to my own rules. If someone or something doesn’t appeal to me, I don’t bother trying to engage with them.
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Great! So much for the patriarchy having any control over you. It seems it no longer is quite as oppressive as some may think. 😉
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“It seems it no longer is quite as oppressive”
– Do you have any more trivialities to share with us today? Even 3-year-olds know that the patriarchy is no longer as strong as it was in Gissing’s time.
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Yes! Patriarchy no longer has so much control over me. It is no longer quite so oppressive as theoreticians concerned with how oppressive patriarchy is over me this year may think.
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Your posts have inspired me to go and get a copy of this book! I wish I’d put it on my Classics Club list rather than The Nether World now….
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I’m very glad to hear this!
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