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#dorothy dinnerstein
jazbaaati · 4 years
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“Any reader who has pushed in a practical way against the legal or economic or other institutional barriers blocking change in some specific part of our overall male-female situation—even quite modest, limited change—knows how sturdy these concrete societal barriers are, and how fiercely defended. But what must be recognized is that these external problems are insoluble unless we grapple at the same time with internal problems, of feeling and understanding, that are at least equally formidable.”
Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur.
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jacobwren · 5 years
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Dinnerstein offered a subtle, revealing account of the deals men and women have traditionally struck with each other, including what was for me the first intelligible, usable explanation for women’s shamed acquiescence in male power, and our ambivalence about our own uses of force. She saw the female monopoly of infant care as decisive in all the gender asymmetry of social life that follows. It is a woman who introduces us to the world before we can recognize her as a limited, mortal being like ourselves. Struggling out from under the control of this first alluring, seemingly all-powerful person is the biggest fight we ever fight. Exhausted, we fling ourselves out of the sea full of mermaids onto the dry land of minotaurs who roar and strut but who nonetheless seem much more tamable and rational in contrast to the mother still stalking in an infantile layer of our personality. Dinnerstein argues that male power in the public sphere feels right, even when terrible; at least male tyranny stands on the firm ground of adult mastery and will; at least it seems solid in its denial of absurdity, limitation, and death. For the most part, public projects are carried on without the constant modifying influence of doubts. One boldly builds the bomb: one doesn’t let anxiety about how to stow radioactive garbage slow one down. Worrying about the waste products of human efforts is somebody else’s job, and that irritating, nagging somebody is a woman. Men agree to build the world while women agree both to support them in this struggle and to give vent, like harmless jesters, to the knowledge both sexes have that “there is something trivial and empty, ugly and sad, in what he does.” A proverb records this bargain: Men must work and women must weep. In spite of feminism’s extraordinary energy and collective will, which did indeed change so much, hatred and fear of women is entrenched, pervasive within us as well as without. The Mermaid and the Minotaur didn’t rescue me from this fact, or from my vulnerability to policing by men, but Dinnersteinian knowledge shifted the burden, making my common womanish feelings of self-doubt, foolishness, inconsequence into a shared – perhaps an alterable – condition. Such a public airing of women’s often unconscious, usually private griefs went a long way toward explaining where the powerful rage of feminism comes from in our time. The ancient symbiosis between men and women, with its traditional divisions of labor, was never fully consensual, never reliable. In modernity, the old arrangements show increasing strain. Women notice and suffer from this crisis more. They are now supposed to do both men’s and women’s traditional work, an emotional and physical overload neither honored nor supported by the culture. Because they are the ones who were dependent on that symbiosis to recognize themselves as valuable and whole, they feel bitter when men retreat from the traditional responsibilities of the old bargain. But finally, however much they depend on it, women lost more under the old regime, sacrificing sexual impulse and worldly freedom. From that dear old familiar system’s decay they have the least to lose.
Ann Snitow, The Feminism of Uncertainty
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In her acclaimed 2016 debut, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear … and Why, feminist author and cultural critic Sady Doyle dissected the ubiquitous American pastime of simultaneously idolizing and vilifying female celebrity. Her new book, Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power, also looks at how the morass of misogyny poisons everything — including our psyches, our popular culture and our everyday lives. But this book focuses more intently on … horror.
Not the horror genre — though plenty of those examples are included — but about the horror of living as a woman in a violent patriarchal society that fears you, despises you; even wants you dead. Pulling from a broad range of cultural references, from Freud to Aristotle to the second-wave feminist theories of Dorothy Dinnerstein to obscure slasher films like The Mutilator, Doyle examines the myriad ways that the world is monstrous to women — and how the world has made monsters of us. “Women have always been monsters, too, in the minds of great men; in philosophy, medicine, and psychology, the inherest freakishness of women has always been a baseline assumption,” Doyle writes in the introduction. “A monster does not merely inspire anger, or disgust. A monster, by definition, inspires fear.”
The fantastically smart book that follows is broken into sections covering the monstrousness associated with the entire socially-prescribed female life cycle, from the spark of adolescence; to marriage and motherhood (with their attendant domestic indignities); to the solitude of old age.
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septemberquotes · 2 years
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“There’s a wonderful feminist book by Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur. It discusses how the exclusive role that women have in early childraising distorts child development. When the woman is married to an immature man, she is also a mother to her husband, so she hasn’t got the openness and the energy for her kids. So your real rival for your mother’s affection wasn’t your sister, it was your dad.”
Excerpt From When the Body Says No Gabor Mate, M.D.
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Has anyone read The Mermaid and the Minotaur by Dorothy Dinnerstein?
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openlyandfreely · 5 years
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These efforts and experiences draw on a long historical tradition. Since the early days of the psychoanalytic movement, therapists and theorists have worked to uncover and disclose compromises and repressions that are concealed or disguised through fear, distraction, complacency, custom, or compliance. Wilhelm Reich wrote a study called The Mass Psychology of Fascism in 1933. Frankfurt School leaders like Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse developed critical theories melding psychoanalysis with Marxism to analyze new forms of social control that Marx had not foreseen. In the 1960s and 1970s, Frantz Fanon and R. D. Laing (both formally trained psychoanalysts) unmasked the hidden cruelties of race, colonialism, psychiatric diagnosis, and family life. Psychoanalytic feminists like Juliet Mitchell, Nancy Chodorow, Jessica Benjamin, and Dorothy Dinnerstein contributed core ideas to the Second Wave.
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handandbanner · 6 years
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recovering from my lies & men lying while imagining truth-telling spaces
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Artist: Carrie Mae Weems 
I know we all lie and I know I lie.  I'm trying to practice truth-telling.  Truth-telling is a practice and it is not a supported practice.  We are taught to lie from the time we are young children as a required skill of living and thriving in white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchy.  So there has to be a way for us as folks tied into systems of deception, as lairs to critique and dismantle systems of deceptions that require deception as part of our dehumanizing participation and survival.  It's like we all participate in degrading the environment, but we still need to be environmental activists demanding better from those in power and system creating positions while also trying to adopt better personal practices.  
A way that we are taught to lie and we teach children to lie is to insist that the things they see are not really there, to convince them that their experiences are not real and if they are to name the world as they experience it, then something is wrong with them.  
One of the areas that I have been able to develop a practice of truth telling is in the topic of race and white supremacy. I have tried my hardest to root my work life and practice in spaces where I could tell truth about how I was experiencing my social reality, and that meant being around other Black people and people of shared values and working in the grassroots.  But whenever I have had to engage the system my truth-telling practices with regards to race and racism are challenged and constrained.  Having to work a system job as a frontline social worker, I have already experienced constraints to who I can be and the pressure to be the person I was trained to be under systems of domination rather the person I truly am in order to stay employed.  So it would take time again to cultivate spaces for truth-telling with regards to race and racism, I have achieved this with some co-workers and have had honest discussions, I have not achieved it with management and I am very aware of the limits to what truth would be acceptable.  It is not something I have had to really confront because my role does not require me to be in significant interaction with management.  I have felt a bit of respite being in a space with a non-leadership role.  But if my journey involves staying in mainstream social work, I know the truth-teller with regards to race and ethnicity will emerge, and I know the trauma that happens to Black women leaders in social work who practice truth-telling with regards to race and ethnicity, I have read the studies and I have witnessed it. 
It has also been interesting to observe how aware I am of the practice space I have created in the grassroots, because this past year working with other co-practitioners, I found myself advising folks to be cautious in how they express their truth, in practice spaces that I perceive to be hostile in awareness of how we could be collectively impacted.  I have had to deconstruct and wrestle with that since and it has just emphasized for me the reality of truth-telling as more than a personal practice but also as collective structure building, creating spaces where truth is possible. So while I really value what I have been able to cultivate as a practice of telling truth to others and to power especially as it relates to social justice, I also continue to navigate how my truth-telling practice is going to face opposition, be it in the space of anti-racist food justice within the context of a racist, capitalist institution, or in the space of social work or in trying to practice decolonized faith, because I am dealing constantly with systems that uphold deception. 
I have less experience of developing a practice of truth-telling and truth-telling space in areas other than racial justice.  And recently I have been thinking about Patriarchy because I am recovering from both long term, chronic and acute patriarchal and misogynistic harm.  I have had to realize that I don’t know how to tell the truth about patriarchy just like I didn’t know how to tell the truth about racism some years ago but had to stumble and erupt into it, pushed by the trauma and my disposition towards wanting to tell the truth and wanting to be free.  So I believe I am going to be entering a season of truth-telling about patriarchy.  
Something that I can already say, is that while we are all complicit in lying, men lie aggressively and constantly. I am not talking about some men or the abusive men in my life, I am talking about every man I have ever known.  In the same way that white people have a particular relationship with lying, men are deeply dependent on deception.  And I have just been coming to the realization that I have been witnessing men lie all my life, including men that I respect as leaders.  I have been witnessing men become particularly angry at the truth and be unable to handle the truth.  All of the position of power and privilege that men hold in patriarchal society is rooted in lying.  Men lie about the fact that they don’t depend on  women’s labour  and suffering to sustain themselves at the cost of women’s health. Some acknowledge it verbally and even identify as allies is women’s liberation from patriarchy but continue to lie in action as they live out their lives.  Men lie about what they take from women, the act of lying is an act of taking something by force. Men are become terrified and lash out violently when called out about lying, they lash out through abandonment or aggression.  There is a power in lying that men are not ready to let go of, they have learned that it is their right to live a dual reality.  All my life I have seen men scared. I know what it looks like when a man becomes scared and confused by my truth-telling.  Men tend to be intrigued by my truth-telling because there is power in truth-telling and they are drawn to power like insects to a street light.  But I am constantly being invited into an unspoken agreement that the truth-telling will not be turned on them. As a survivor of childhood and adult gendered harm, I have learned to play the game. I have also learned to lie alongside men.  I treat men like dangerous animals that cannot be told the truth, the same way you would handle a moody toddler who needs to be guided from point A to point B without being exposed to the reality of the world as it is.  The difference being that men all my life have had far more power than a moody toddler, power to harm and to abandon.  To withhold friendship, love, resources or to punish mentally, physically, psychologically, emotionally or spiritually.  
I have searched through my shelf in search for All About Love because I remembered that our brilliant, incandescent bell Hooks has a chapter on the subject where she says;  
“The men I have loved have always lied to avoid confrontation or take responsibility for inappropriate behavior. In Dorothy Dinnerstein’s groundbreaking book The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise, she shares the insight that when a  little boy learns that his powerful mother, who controls his life, really has no power within a patriarchy, it confuses him and causes rage.  Lying becomes one of the strategic ways he can “act out” and render his mother powerless.  Lying enables him to manipulate the mother even as he exposes her lack of power.  This makes him feel more powerful.  Males learn to lie as a way of obtaining power and females not only do the same but they also lie to pretend powerlessness. In her work Harriet Lerner talks about the way in which patriarchy upholds deception, encouraging women to present a false self to en and vice versa. In Dory Hollander’s 101 Lies men Tell Women, she confirms that while both women and men lie, her data and the findings of other researchers indicate that “men tend to lie more and with more devastating consequences.” For many young males the earliest experience of power over others comes from the thrill of lying to more powerful adults and getting away with it.  Lots of men shared with me that it was difficult for them to tell the truth if they saw that it would hurt a loved one.  Significantly, the lying many boys learn to do to avoid hurting Mom or whomever becomes so habitual that it becomes hard for them to distinguish a lie from the truth.  This behavior carries over to adulthood.  
Often, men who would never think of lying in the workplace lie constantly in intimate relationships.  This seems to be especially the case for heterosexual men who see women as gullible.  Many men confess that they lie because they can get away with it, their lies are forgiven.  To understand why male lying is more accepted in our lives we have to understand the way in which power and privilege afforded men simply because they are males within a patriarchal culture” 
lt is interesting to me that I read this almost a couple of years ago with very little self reflection.  So I need to pay attention to the ways that even as I continue to grow truth-telling practices in race relationships, that I have yet to interrogate how lying is a part of my ways of navigating life in my gendered relationships.  It already comes to mind that I seldom with men or patriarchal relationships with women, present myself in the fullness of my intellectual power and ability for fear of punishment.  Beyond all that good reflection work that I know needs to happen for me as it relates to interpersonal relationships, some questions I feel like we all need to ponder are: 
- What does it mean to create truth telling anti-patriarchy community, spaces and institutions? What does it mean to have a space where truth-telling is cultivated and supported in diverse relationships?  I will continue to stumble and erupt as I come to terms with all the ways my own life is impacted by lying and lies and also as I recover from patriarchal harm and violence.  I look forward to learning from others further along in the journey.  
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mermaids-and-anchors · 10 years
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Symbolism
According to Dorothy Dinnerstein’s book The Mermaid and the Minotaur, human-animal hybrids such as mermaids and minotaurs convey the emergent understanding of the ancients that human beings were both one with and different from animals:
[Human] nature is internally inconsistent, that our continuities with, and our differences from, the earth's other animals are mysterious and profound; and in these continuities, and these differences, lie both a sense of strangeness on earth and the possible key to a way of feeling at home here."
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jazbaaati · 4 years
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“We must also grasp the importance of the fact that conscious human concern extends peculiarly far into the past and the future, an extension that is made possible (as Solomon Asch points out in his Social Psychology) not only by our species’ special neural capacities for memory and foresight, but also by its special abilities to pool knowledge and to build social structures based on the interpenetration of subjectivities. It is these cognitive abilities that make possible our singular feelings of vulnerability and loneliness, our singular awareness of mortality, and the singular emotional techniques that we have worked out to make these feelings and this awareness bearable”
Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur.
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jacobwren · 5 years
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In an anecdote she loved, a young man decides to kill himself, jumps off a high bridge, changes his mind in the air, straightens his body out into a dive and survives.
Ann Snitow, The Feminism of Uncertainty
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sexandthesuburbs · 2 years
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Reading an interesting new book, The Mermaid and the Minotaur by Dorothy Dinnerstein.
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spandexmino · 12 years
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coital satiety: to be fucked as the baby would like to be fed: on demand and at the rate one chooses and for as long as one wants
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jacobwren · 5 years
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The women retold tales Dorthy had loved about the triumph of eros over thanatos, like the one about a woman who falls off an ocean liner and, some hours later, when they discover she’s gone and turn back, they find her because she’s still swimming.
Ann Snitow, The Feminism of Uncertainty
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