There's no more important physical fact about a person than his or her sex. The attempts to get around this lead to misery. So, perhaps, have many attempts to account for it; one can go wrong in either direction. I still think, though, that the Western Medieval construction of chivalric love marks the high point of relations between the sexes. There was a time -- albeit only in a small place, and only probably among the social elite -- when male strength was willfully in the service of female beauty, female beauty honored and treasured male strength, and love was coupled with mutual respect.
And in all times and places, the question "What are your other realistic choices?" has considerable weight.
ReplyDeletePrison reform should be a top priority of all sides in our culture. Sadly, the constituents for the issue find themselves with no political clout whatever.
ReplyDeletePrison violence, of which rape is a prominent example, means our society pretty much out-sources torture. Instead of flogging an offender and setting him loose; instead of forcing an offender to work at an unpleasant task, allowing him to 'pay his debt to society; instead of identifying the incorrigible and executing them; we allow race-based gangs to fight and rape and kill one another in our tax-funded cages. It's worse than cock-fighting... at least the cultures that set animals to tear each other to pieces derive some entertainment value from the violence. We hide the mayhem, and pretend it doesn't exist.
Those who survive and emerge from our prisons are worse than before.
So this has been nagging at me:
ReplyDeletewhen male strength was willfully in the service of female beauty, female beauty honored and treasured male strength, and love was coupled with mutual respect.
It's the "female beauty" part. Is this literally beautiful women or is this something more metaphorical?
I don't know that I'd say it was a metaphor exactly, but neither is it simply that the women happened to be naturally beautiful. Rather, it was that there was a society that treasured the elegance and beauty that women could and did create, without the men becoming in any way softened -- indeed, they remained hard as iron. Knights fought in their tournaments clad in steel, dared and often suffered terrible wounds, and they did it with a lady's dainty silken scarf tied around their helmet.
ReplyDeleteIn the old poem Enid & Geraint, there's a warning that this can lead to a realm of delights so entrancing that it blinds you to the need to continue to do the hard work that makes such a beautiful society possible:
"The beasts he battled
With horn and lance;
Stood farms where fens lay.
When bandits returned
To old beast-holds
Geraint gave them the same.
"And then long peace,
Purchased by the manful blade.
Light delights filled it,
Tournaments softened, tempered
By ladies; in peace lingers
the dream of safety.
"They dreamed together. Darkness
Gathered on the old wood,
Wild things troubled the edges,
Then crept closer."
But that was a poem written about 9/11, really, not about the Middle Ages. Having defied the Nazis and then the Soviets, we had come out of the Cold War to declare a long peace -- perhaps an eternal one, perpetual as Kant had dreamed of -- and set about dismantling the swords and letting the armor rust.
In Malory, there's a sense that a really beautiful society with all manner of elegance and loveliness endured, and the tournaments kept away the wars by keeping the knights fit for battle and by demonstrating their prowess to all potential foes. The ladies are always there, and in fact are often the central focus of the story -- Guinevere, Vivien, Morgana, the Elaines, Perceval's sister at times during the Grail Quest -- and at other times they are described as present at the feasting and tournaments without being the central focus. It was an attainment not of a balance between manly strength and the beauty that women can bring, but rather an extreme of each that managed to coexist and flourish together.
At least it's that way in the stories. There are a lot of these stories, though: far more than most people imagine. The Prose Lancelot in the French, just by itself, runs to over a million words. Poems, sagas, epics, French, English, German and all their variations and near relative tongues: however imperfectly it was realized, it was a vision shared for centuries across a number of cultures in the West.
Thanks, Grim, for the explanation. I am reminded of Pressfield's book "Gates of Fire" and his depiction of the Spartan warriors and the Spartan women. Not a perfect likeness but similar I believe.
ReplyDeleteTo return for a moment to the original piece you linked, I found it excellent. Her use of the word "matricide" is spot on although I think her understanding of what happened in that regard and how it continues to happen 50 years later is incomplete. Still it gets to a fundamental problem with current feminism: making vast swaths of women "problematic" . I also think her discussion in general informs the explosion in the number of adolescent girls who identify as transgender. In both regards, the strictures placed on girls and women by the current version of feminism rival those placed on girls and women pre-Second Wave Feminism.
Yes, she has a lot to say that is worthwhile; I probably wrongly focused on the minor disagreements instead of the broad areas of agreement.
ReplyDeleteI am reminded that the Arthurian tradition had room for women who dressed in armor and fought as knights -- that comes up occasionally, amid a range of stories that focus on how hard it is to identify someone who is dressed in armor if they don't wear their correct heraldry on their shield. (It has been noted by scholars that the women in the stories are much, much better at identifying a disguised knight -- 'That's Lancelot!' -- than their fellow male knights.) The exceptional case could be accepted, just as Eleanor of Aquitaine could wear armor and go on Crusade.
Yet it was accepted as exceptional: and thus women in general were excused from having their worth tied up with the ability to compete physically against males. Now we have biologically male swimmers breaking all female records and dominating the competition, and the women (who are in fact exceptional as female swimmers, but not if they have to compete against men) are pushed aside and written out.
I think she gets a lot right.
(It has been noted by scholars that the women in the stories are much, much better at identifying a disguised knight -- 'That's Lancelot!' -- than their fellow male knights.)
ReplyDeleteWomen's intuition? Or perhaps a livelier interest in male physiology. :+)
"It's the "female beauty" part. Is this literally beautiful women or is this something more metaphorical?"
ReplyDeleteI've known a few women who were not glamour models but exuded beauty, and a few who were physically gorgeous who were anything but beautiful. I suspect the chivalrists (is that a word?) would have seen it similarly.