I was one of the people who privately posted to anne--just today, in fact--expressing some of my problems, not particularly with brian, but with the way that this conversation has been going. 1) I've seen a great deal of male guilt expressed on the list. In some cases it's defensiveness. In other cases, it's male-bashing carried out by males. In either case, my opinion is that guilt, whatever personal need one has for it, is not productive or useful. On the other hand, accepting responsibility (in the place of feeling guilt) is productive and useful. Lots of batterers feel guilty. Who cares? The point is to change behavior--in this case, to get men to stop battering. While the main part of that particular change will be societal, the part that is individual will, I think, best be accomplished through responsibility rather than guilt. (Guilt is also a very annoying, though not always invalid, emotion. I feel sorry for those who feel guilt, whether they deserve my sympathy or not--another unhealthy dynamic.) 2) To repeat a thrown-off remark in point 1, the male-bashing on this list has been very limited and, I think, exclusively from men. If women don't feel the need to male-bash, maybe men should follow their example. 3) Anger is a valid emotion. 4) Just a little philosophy of my own. It took new left feminism to come to the conclusion that the personal was political and vice versa. Society held instead that the personal and the poltical were separate and unrelated. Clearly, feminism was much closer to reality on this. But can we say that *everything* personal is political and that *everything* political is personal? Is a new formulation of this old (all the way back to 1970 or so) principle needed? Or is it more useful in its (perhaps inaccurate) usual form? After all, the idea which it oppposes-- that the personal and the political are separate--is still the dominant world view, even if it is a less dominant view than it once was. Perhaps guilt and responsibility are two names we give to the same phenomenon. When we react in one way, we get guilt. In another way, responsibility. And perhaps guilt is personal, responsibility is political, and the relationship between the two is complex. 5) What I'd like to see more of on the list is accounts of people's practices. What do you do in the community and how does eco-feminism inform you as you do it? How do the theories you hold stand up to use? How have you changed your ideas as they've collided with your problems? What have you become more certain of? What don't you have a clue about any more? And why? This has turned awfully long, but I don't *think* I've wandered too far afield. (In fact, I'd much rather be wandering far afield. Maybe I'll trip up to Newton County this weekend and try to pick a pawpaw or two.) John A
