(Cross posted from Gloria Brame's.)
Jessica Valenti at feministing:
Remember that book, The Surrendered Wife, that came out a while ago and got all sorts of press because it basically told women that the key to happiness in marriage was to shut-the-fuck-up?
Well it seems that some folks are taking it wa-ay seriously. This Australian version of 60 minutes covers women "who really do love, honour and obey. Especially obey." Yeah. Watch the video--it is fucking disturbing.
The short version: Women in "surrendered" marriages are just SO much happier because they don't have pesky things like opinions. Much better that only one person in a marriage have decision-making abilities.
The video features women who essentially have husbands that run their lives: one husband picks out his wife's outfits and hairstyles, another insists that she shave his face and put his toothpaste on his toothbrush, there is even one woman who is blindfolded when she and her husband drive so she's not tempted to offer help with directions.
Poor men. No, I really mean it. Poor men. A load of us can't get through life without needing a book like this to try to make our spouses submit to us, because those men can't take control in the way that they want to. It's a perfect example of what I call crotch-level politics: Rightwing, culturally conservative, religious Republican politics is entirely the result of sexual confusion and frustration. The men for whom The Surrendered Wife was written for, and their wives who will buy it to try to please them, are pitiful people. These men can't find it within themselves to treat their partners or themselves with compassion, humanity, or understanding. They can't accept themselves for who they are sexually, so they replace that acceptance with hierarchy and a rigid, gender-based paradigm of domination and submission. By doing so, they diminish themselves and their partners, and cut off or dull their experience of life as something to be enjoyed. Poor men.
It also sounds like it's an awful lot of work. The guys are essentially simulating being the parents of children with extreme mental retardation -- except that they're not letting a partner help share the burden of running someone else's life 24/7.
Just think how much these guys could get done in their own lives if they weren't so obsessed with micromanaging someone else's. Or are they doing this precisely because they feel so helpless and powerless in every other part of their lives? (As the shrink said, when we don't feel we have the "power to" create, we seek out "power over" as a substitute.)
Posted by: Phoenix Woman | June 25, 2007 at 02:23 PM