Feminist Men

There is a male character in Claudia Piñeiro’s The Time of the Flies. He is Javier, the husband of the school psychologist who enjoys transing children. We see him doing the dishes, feeding the baby, changing the baby, comforting the baby, cleaning. He’s always sweet, smiling, always completely supportive in a quiet, self-effacing manner.

Does this remind you of anything?

Yes, Javier is the “angel in the house”, a subservient, patriarchal woman.

For all of Piñeiro’s dedication to destroying the gender binary, she ends up recreating it. Her women are men and her men are women. They aren’t interesting, nuanced personalities but collections of the hoariest gender stereotypes.

So what was the point of all this if the result is the re-creation of the same gender binary but with the biological sexes switched?

In the novel, everybody envies Javier’s wife for snagging such an excellent husband but in reality this type of man isn’t deeply popular.

2 thoughts on “Feminist Men

  1. Told my daughter at an early age, Men controlled by their dicks. For a spell I thought my warning compared to telling her about the coming of her first period. She thought she would bleed from her fingers or something! Ooops. Napoleon when he wrote Orders for his Generals he would first have an utter fool read his commands! When the fool understood the Orders, only then would Napoleon send those orders to his Generals.

    My daughter now 25 and she’s dating for marriage a MAN and not a WOMAN!!! Whooooooooooooooooooooooooooop for a spell there she explored her “personality” by dating women. I responded to this abomination by myself courting her girl friends at the risk of breaking up the family relationship. But in the end, my daughter so enraged by my love talking letter rhetoric to her “girl friend” shattered that relationship. And stopped her from going down the Dike path.

    A 5 year gap separates my daughter as an Aunt to Karen’s oldest daughters’ first born daughter. About a year ago on their birthdays, born days apart from one another, bought a motorized RV motorhome for both of them. This gives both girls the freedom to live anywhere in Tel Aviv rent free! This Aunt/Niece close relationship protects my daughter from the temptations of lesbianism. The parents of their oldest daughter, my daughters’ niece, instilled far stronger Judaism traditional observances than I did with my daughter.

    Children can be molded like play-do. But adults require subtle mussar which causes them to reach the desired parents objective conclusions, from within their own hearts without harping ‘straight’ propaganda into their ears. The wisdom of mussar seeks to plant, much like a seed into the ground, an idea that sprouts from within their own hearts and exist as their own original idea!!!!

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