If in a different time, a young woman had to avoid giving public evidence of sexual desire by living with someone out of wedlock, today she must avoid giving evidence of romantic desire.
#currentlyreading #psychology #body #sociology #womensstudies #culture
Maybe it's not so terrible, after all, to have someone feel he has a stake in your upbringing. A young woman is lucky, I think, if she has a "paternalistic" father -- it can only make her more self-confident. To me the truly abusive fathers are the neglectful ones who seem to feel no emotional stake in how their daughters live their lives.
What is really so terrible about "belonging" to someone who loves you? This radical notion that girls shouldn't be too attached to their fathers, because that's the source of all evil, is ironically very similar to Freud's view that girls don't develop an advanced superego because they remain too long in the Oedipus situation. Yet it is typically the girl without a strong relationship with her father...
As anyone who has ever had an ideology knows, you do not ask; you just look for confirmation for a set of beliefs. That's what it means to have an ideology.
#currentlyreading
so-soI read this when I was 13 and growing up in a religious conservative family. I remember enough to know I would disagree with plenty of it now, but perhaps not all of it. For example, she was the first author I read who interviewed young Muslim women who wore hijab, and she defended it as their choice, years before I would ever read a Jezebel article. Unlike many idiotic right wing polemics these days this is at least worth a read.
A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue | 
