Women's Liberation and the Parable of the Shattered Statue

WOMEN'S LIBERATION AND THE PARABLE OF THE SHATTERED STATUE
Wednesday Oct. 26th, 2022

In the year leading up to my seventy-first birthday, I have a different angle on women's liberation from other people, and also from what I used to feel.  It will take me a couple of paragraphs to explain.  Here we go.

1. The Parable of the Shattered Statue

We say that in earlier generations, men put women on a pedestal.  That means men talked about women in an idealized way, as if half of the human race was a statue on a pedestal.  Now, we are not supposed to talk about women in an idealized way.  One part of this means that we are supposed to talk about women one by one.  Also, if we make two pieces of art with one woman in each piece of art, the two depictions are supposed to be depictions of different women.  One piece of art ought to show one woman, and the other piece of art ought to show a different woman.

In other words, we don't have a statue of woman, or in the plural two statues of woman.  Instead, we have a statue of a woman, and in the plural, two statues of women. 

Taking the metaphor of the pedestal for granted, we can say that the statue of the woman on the pedestal has been shattered.

Now what?

In this parable I am writing, there are several things we can do, and those things are also things which people actually are doing.  Here are three.

a) We can explain why we needed to shatter the statue.
b) We can haul off the pieces of the statue, so that no one will trip over the broken pieces of stone, and they won't block the way.
c) We can deplore the shattering of the statue, and explain why it should not have been shattered.

As I said, all of those things are being done.  We can make a chart, with (a), (b), and (c) down the side, and two columns labeled "Liberals Believe" and "Conservatives Believe," and we can fill in the boxes with either "a worthwhile activity" or "not a worthwhile activity."  The chart comes out looking like this:

	Liberals Believe It Is	Conservatives Believe It Is
a) We can explain why we needed to shatter the statue.	a worthwhile activity.	not a worthwhile activity.
b) We can haul off the pieces of the statue, so that no one will trip over the broken pieces of stone, and they won't block the way.	a worthwhile activity.	a worthwhile activity.
c) We can deplore the shattering of the statue, and explain why it should not have been shattered.	not a worthwhile activity.	a worthwhile activity.

If we follow the metaphor of the shattered statue, the only thing liberals and conservatives agree about is that we need to move out of the way any and all shattered pieces of stone that are blocking people's path.

2. My Fourth Possibility

I believe there is a fourth activity we need to be doing, which no one else that I know believes we need to be doing.

We need to describe what the pieces of the shattered statue look like, lying on the ground.

That is the intellectual equivalent of taking a photograph of the shattered statue.

How can one describe what the shattered statue looks like, lying on the ground?

3. A Description

Here is my description of what the shattered statue looks like lying on the ground.

-- Men used to believe that in a boy's life, his mother would cook for him, and when he grows up, his wife cooks for him.

-- Now we believe that, early in the day, a person needs to purchase a meal cooked by a random person of either sex; and later in the day, a person needs to purchase a second meal cooked by another random person of either sex; and still later in the day, a person needs to purchase a third meal cooked by another random person.

The concept of "cook for" has been largely replaced by the concept of "buy a meal."

That is definitely not all there is to women's liberation, but it is definitely a very important part of women's liberation.

We don't mean to say that nobody cooks for her husband and nobody cooks for his wife nowadays.  But we do mean to say that the women who cook three meals a day for their husbands are a lot less numerous than they used to be; and the men who cook three meals a day for their wives used to be practically zero, and they are still not very numerous.

4. An Aside on a Fairy Tale

I will repeat the "Men used to believe" sentence and comment on it.

Men used to believe that in a boy's life, his mother would cook for him, and when he grows up, his wife cooks for him.

I think this explains a sentence in the story of Rumplestiltskin, which most people attach no meaning to nowadays.  Rumplestiltskin says to himself "Today I bake, tomorrow brew -- what a clever thing I do!"

As I said, I think most people nowadays assume that Rumplestiltskin is singing a meaningless song.  But when the story was first written down, I think that sentence meant "Rumplestiltskin had neither a mother nor a wife to cook for him.  This dude was a total goofball!"

Now when we read the story of Rumplestiltskin, we see nothing wrong with the fact that he is unmarried and he cooks for himself.

5. A More Important Commentary

Now I will talk about what I wrote in part three, when I attempted to describe what the shattered statue looks like.

You can say what I wrote is a parody of women's liberation; you can say that it is making fun of women's liberation.  You can say that it is a reductio ad absurdum (a reduction of somebody else's argument to an absurd conclusion).

But I say I could have written it for parody or for mocking women's liberation, but I actually wrote it as an attempt to describe what the shattered statue looks like lying on the ground.

6. A Final Comment for Divergent Thinkers

I am a divergent thinker.

The Old Testament says "My thoughts are not your thoughts, says the LORD."

That Bible verse says two things to me.  Number one -- God is a divergent thinker.  Number two -- if you are a divergent thinker like me, and you are leaving a conversation or a party where you feel like nobody understood what you said, it is okay for you to say to yourself, "My thoughts were not their thoughts."

Frank Newton