![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Chesterton quote
May. 28th, 2010 10:25 amJust to show that the offensive stereotype I mentioned a few posts ago is nothing new, and not without its measure of truth.
Chesterton had his blind spots, and one of them was votes for women. In his book "What's Wrong With The World" he advances many arguments in support of his position, which if I were not so convinced he was wrong I might find quite persuasive. Among them, though, this:
"Some impatient trader, some superficial missionary, walks across an island and sees the squaw digging in the fields while the man is playing a flute; and immediately says that the man is a mere lord of creation and the woman a mere serf. He does not remember that he might see the same thing in half the back gardens in Brixton, merely because women are at once more conscientious and more impatient, while men are at once more quiescent and more greedy for pleasure. It may often be in Hawaii simply as it is in Hoxton. That is, the woman does not work because the man tells her to and she obeys. On the contrary, the woman works because she has told the man to work, and he hasn't obeyed."
Deny it any man who dares. :)
What I object to in the WKD adverts is not the simple portrayal of the lazy man making his aged mother wash the car, or the lazy man pretending to be sick. As in the quote above, it's the implied approval that infuriates me. Laziness is not a good, and it's not our right as men, or even our privilege. It makes us ridiculous and contemptible, and demolishes any claim to lordship of creation we might advance before we could even form it.
And now I need to stop goofing off on this computer and get back to work.
Chesterton had his blind spots, and one of them was votes for women. In his book "What's Wrong With The World" he advances many arguments in support of his position, which if I were not so convinced he was wrong I might find quite persuasive. Among them, though, this:
"Some impatient trader, some superficial missionary, walks across an island and sees the squaw digging in the fields while the man is playing a flute; and immediately says that the man is a mere lord of creation and the woman a mere serf. He does not remember that he might see the same thing in half the back gardens in Brixton, merely because women are at once more conscientious and more impatient, while men are at once more quiescent and more greedy for pleasure. It may often be in Hawaii simply as it is in Hoxton. That is, the woman does not work because the man tells her to and she obeys. On the contrary, the woman works because she has told the man to work, and he hasn't obeyed."
Deny it any man who dares. :)
What I object to in the WKD adverts is not the simple portrayal of the lazy man making his aged mother wash the car, or the lazy man pretending to be sick. As in the quote above, it's the implied approval that infuriates me. Laziness is not a good, and it's not our right as men, or even our privilege. It makes us ridiculous and contemptible, and demolishes any claim to lordship of creation we might advance before we could even form it.
And now I need to stop goofing off on this computer and get back to work.