Quote:
|
Originally Posted by pax
...<snip> The kind of fingernails that meant she did not, could not, wear clothing that required her to manipulate buttons. Looooooong fingernails. As you might imagine, competent (or simply safe) firearms manipulation was a severe and difficult challenge for her. Even getting her finger into and then back out of the trigger guard required her full attention and several moments of careful work. Feminine attractiveness to her meant that she was too helpless even to button a blouse ... or to safely use a firearm.
I've lost track of the number of women who've appeared in class wearing inappropriate, useless footwear. <snip> Another manifestation of the same thing: useful, practical footwear is "ugly" and unfeminine. Only decorative but non-functional shoes are cute!
|
The point about fingernails and shoes is an important one. But -- I would never say they're "non-functional."
They do have a function, which is to render women helpless. A woman with those long fingernails is severely handicapped in what she can do with her hands; a woman who wears those shoes can't run, can't maneuver, and if she wears them regularly, she'll literally be crippled by the time she's 40 or 50. (I remember, as a teenager, looking at my mother's twisted feet, and realizing that I never wanted mine to look like that. And the shoes my mother wore weren't that extreme by today's standards.)
A "feminine" woman is a helpless woman. She needs a man to light her cigarette, open the door for her, hold her arm when she walks down the street, change the lightbulb... and, of course, she needs a man to protect her from other men.
When you add in the amount of time and money a "feminine" woman has to spend maintaining the fingernails and a complicated hairsyle, buying makeup and putting it on, buying half a dozen different "outfits" every year where a man can get by with a couple of suits, it's no wonder women are "handicapped" in their economic lives, as well. But that's another subject -- or perhaps not, given that a woman's disposable income will have an immediate effect on her ability to afford a gun or two and pay for the kind of training she needs to use it -- or other weapons -- effectively.
None of this is random. This is a culture which is deeply ambivalent about the idea that women have a right to control their own lives, even their own bodies. And control of the body is very much what's at issue here: at a very basic level, we're talking about deciding who has permission to touch us, how, and when. (Many men, even fairly well-intentioned ones, simply don't get that it isn't OK to put a hand on a woman they've just met. Laying a hand on the arm of a stranger is a gesture of power and dominance, not one of "friendliness.")
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Gaxicus
I guess where this ties into firearms is that from firearm selection to training methods, let women be men and men be men.
|
Great Freudian slip there, Gaxicus.
