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vixen, temptress, slut: the art of telling old + new stories about women
http://tribalwriter.com/2011/10/15/women-culture-storytelling/
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"The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves inform our history, our social norms, our beliefs, our interactions with each other. They establish a framework for our culture that we tend to accept as unquestioned truth. But a culture is not about what is objectively true; it’s about what a group of people have agreed to believe in order to get along and share a reality.
We could (for example) tell a different story about sex, one that emphasizes the fact of mad mutual attraction, of the chemicals the brain releases during and after in order to promote human bonding. Instead of saying that friendship must precede sex (which is, admittedly, never a bad idea), we could add that sometimes it comes after sex; sex itself is the glue that keeps people interested in each other long enough to actually learn about each other, perhaps even venture into the deep ragged edge of true emotional intimacy (not for the faint-hearted). But in order to tell that story, we’d have to tell a deeper, underlying story that values women not for their hymen but for brain and heart and soul, action and accomplishment — none of which changes whether she sleeps with you on the first date, the thirty-fifth date, or never.
But we tell a story about the battle of the sexes: those who conquer and those who are conquered, girls who are pure and girls who are not, girls to sleep with after you marry and girls to sleep with before you marry someone else. Boys will be boys, after all (innocent until proven guilty), and so the girl must dress and act in a way that protects both him and her from his own desires (that he’s somehow not fully responsible for in the first place)."
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Oct/25/2011, 12:21 am
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Re: vixen, temptress, slut: the art of telling old + new stories about women
Excellent thoughts. More excellent connections made. Following comments also worth the read.
What comes to mind is the psychoanalytic theory of transactional analysis. The terms of which point to how we see ourselves, sometimes poorly, and how we relate to each other, sometimes in a sick fashion. Blaming a girl for being raped strikes me as such a sick transaction.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transactional_analysis
Tere
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Oct/29/2011, 11:50 am
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Re: vixen, temptress, slut: the art of telling old + new stories about women
Remembered a poem posted on the board that touches on what they writer is goinbg after.
http://bdelectablemnts.runboard.com/t1059
Tere
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Oct/29/2011, 11:58 am
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