By
Anton Dolinsky (Henderson, NV)
This review is from: The Second Sex (Paperback)
I, a young white man, read Second Sex last week. It somehow made the position of woman as the Other imaginable by me. Reading it, I imagined what it would be like for me to live in a society that had been dominated by women for more than three thousand years, a society where almost all the most renowned people, heroes, and religious icons were women. A society where the United States of America had had nothing but women presidents and every state was predominantly represented by women, though males account for half the population. Where the predominant forms of music for the last fifty years have all treated men as an interesting and occasionally useful, but often annoying or even maddening objects, and us men run around in skimpy calvin klein-style underwear on MTV while hip-hop women constantly call us "dogs" in their raps and the classic rock section of the local used music store overflows with female lyrics that question what is more important in life, men, cars, or booze? and blame us men for breaking their poor girl hearts and for being warlocks, (...), or idiots (while the woman rock stars collect millions of dollars and boy groupies run around ready to have sex with any security guard to get a shot to have sex with the famous women).
A society where families are dominated by mothers and their husbands live in fear of having their allowance terminated, and have to do menial chores around the house to try to feel, or at least look, useful. Where a boy child realizes before he is 10 that he is a failure and, at best, a second-rate human being (if not an object)(...) A society that is obsessed by the symbol of the womb--in which musical instruments, spaceships, means of transportation, weapons, religious ornaments, political regalia, and thousands of other things are designed to resemble the shape of a womb. A society in which men are scared, brutally scared, of walking around alone at night because almost any woman can physically overpower them and rape them. In which the most famous and influential philosophers of all time, the ones that get taught in university classes and whose books are actually bought and read and that influence the intelligensia, are all women, mostly women who loathe and/or misunderstand men and write things such as "What is the cure for all of a man's problems? Impregnating a woman" but despite such stupidities are adored by females.