Carrington Curphy’s Reviews > Reproductive Wrongs: A Short History of Bad Ideas About Women > Status Update

Really great final paragraph:
“We need to take account of information warfare in its most sophisticated, most insidious, most powerful form ever. We need to know what people are actually made to believe about the female body, and what those beliefs can incite them to do.”

“Long after Queen Victoria's holiday family tableaux fell into obscurity, Dickensian imagery and sentiments ruled. There should be many children around the evening fireplace and the holiday table. A little girl's tender gaze will melt any amount of adult woe, so it does not really matter that she is growing up in dire or squalid conditions”

“The large family is the happy ending toward which most of [Dicken’s] plots aim. The only conceivable refuge for his young, virtuous, good-looking protagonists, if they can get through all their bizarre obstacles, is a cozy, full home, the great harbinger of which is a servile, tender, sentimental girl, naive and malleable and strictly home-oriented even though she might have been exposed to many hard knocks.“

“It had been demonstrated, after all, that sadistic thugs masquerading as religious and moral leaders and an absurdist excuse for a legal system could make a busy show of prosecuting women's imaginary crimes and ignore men's actual, habitual, heinous ones: of violence, of corruption, of foreign rampages and local oppression.”

“Witch-hunting inquisitors seem to have been the first people to address themselves fearlessly to the problem, and in their solutions, they landed somewhere between the punishment fetishist and the incel who murders women he can't have.“

Also this author alludes to The Handmaid’s Tale often

“Silent, marginal women, particularly the poor and single mothers, proved vulnerable to witch-hunting, but it was well-placed housewives who seem to have primarily attracted attention in the era of more intense witch-hunting. In overwhelming numbers, the documented victims are married or widows-that is, not servile
or outcast women but women presiding over their own homes.”

Almost annoying that Augustine took his guilt and sadness over his actions and propelled the Dark Age beliefs of purity culture, sin of lust, and sexual relationships purely for procreation— I mean what fun is it to be a “seed bed” for children! No family no love just pure seclusion! Another meaning to the dark of the Dark Ages I suppose

“Whatever women do, they can't do it in the right way, measuring up to the miraculous widow who wishes neither to marry nor to remain single, and who somehow manages to keep up her costly charitable giving and services without any assured income, and thus no morally ruinous financial independence.”

I think the self-contradiction and double standards become so apparent in this discussion