See? “Evil feminism” that proselytizes
Apr. 26th, 2018 08:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via https://ift.tt/2FiYsK8
When I was six or seven I found some books on my parents’ bookshelves about understanding your children, and I was fascinated. The books talked about emotions and internal states and desires that children had, and what actions those produced, and it was the first place I’d been exposed to the idea that people had inner lives which you could understand and then interact with them more usefully. They gave me an emotional vocabulary. They helped me make sense of my own head. I read them over and over.
There was an anecdote in one of the books which I still remember vividly. It was about a mother who was cleaning out a chest freezer which had become full of massive sheets of ice. She handed a sheet of ice to each of her kids. “Hers is bigger,” objected the son, and so the mother gave him another one, and “how come he gets two?” demanded the daughter, and so the mother tossed one at her, and after a little whole both kids were standing in waist-high piles of ice they did not want, dancing back and forth because their legs were freezing, screaming and screaming for more because it was intolerable that the other pile be bigger.
They don’t actually want ice, said the book. They want to know that they matter, and the only kind of mattering they are confident of is mattering more than the other person.
When I was six or seven I found some books on my parents’ bookshelves about understanding your children, and I was fascinated. The books talked about emotions and internal states and desires that children had, and what actions those produced, and it was the first place I’d been exposed to the idea that people had inner lives which you could understand and then interact with them more usefully. They gave me an emotional vocabulary. They helped me make sense of my own head. I read them over and over.
There was an anecdote in one of the books which I still remember vividly. It was about a mother who was cleaning out a chest freezer which had become full of massive sheets of ice. She handed a sheet of ice to each of her kids. “Hers is bigger,” objected the son, and so the mother gave him another one, and “how come he gets two?” demanded the daughter, and so the mother tossed one at her, and after a little whole both kids were standing in waist-high piles of ice they did not want, dancing back and forth because their legs were freezing, screaming and screaming for more because it was intolerable that the other pile be bigger.
They don’t actually want ice, said the book. They want to know that they matter, and the only kind of mattering they are confident of is mattering more than the other person.
