So it does. But I would have thought that goes without saying, amongst us. It is a sad fact that men have had most of the power most of the time, over the time we have record of, at least. It is almost as sad a fact -- don't you think? -- that they've often felt the need, imposed by the hierarchical structure that supports them, to claim power for the sake of claiming it, whether justified or no. (Reflecting, you might say, the anxiety of the top dog. It's a dumb system.)
cheers, Joanna
>>At 03:02 18-05-01, you wrote:
>>
>>>Maybe we should distinguish between the Socrates Plato constructed for his
>>>arguments and the one of flesh and blood. Socrates died for his rhetoric,
>>>and the evidence suggests (to me, anyway) that he was a great fan of
>>>Aspasia's - in fact he names his two great mentors as Aspasia and Diotima -
>>>both women. Just possibly, our view of gender relations in 5th century
>>>Athens is coloured by the particular sources we have available to us, and,
>>>whilst the law was exceptionally patriarchal at the time, practice was not
>>>quite so universally so, if for no other reason that the outside world
>>>differed on a lot of these points.
>>>
>>>Cheers,
>>>Rob.
>>
>>Not to speak of the fact that it would be foolish to take as gospel all
>>men's assertions of women's inferior status and influence since it is
>>often politic, and at the very least self-aggrandising, to claim to have
>>power -- as long as there's no likelihood of the claim being publicly
>>disputed -- even (perhaps especially) in areas where one has less power
>>than one'd like to have.
>>
>>cheers
>>Joanna S.
>
>The very fact that we often have to comb through men's writings about
>women but not vice versa says a lot about gendered differences in social power.
>
>Yoshie
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