8 lines
3 KiB
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8 lines
3 KiB
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<h1>Preface to Part II</h1>
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<p>Because our freedom depends on it, deprogramming ourselves from patriarchy's brainwashing is the single most crucial task before us. It is also the most difficult. To do it, we who have been a domesticated species for thousands of years must recover our wild minds, our thoroughly skeptical and irreverent facilities. We must ask ourselves at least a dozen times a day such questions as: Who said so? Who benefits from my thinking this? How does this thought or feeling keep me patriarchy's chattel? How has this idea kept the Women's Movement securely in men's hands?</p>
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<p>Asking myself that last question, for instance, enabled me some time ago to understand how the media determines the direction of our Movement. All day long the trumpets of patriarchy blare in our ears from every direction that the Women's Movement is about "ish-oos" - "women's ishoos." (You have to squinch your mouth into a tiny "o" to say "ishoos.") Although every so often women get the feeling that the Women's Movement is about something distinctly other than this, something immense and beautiful, the media's constant delineation of it as "ishoos" soon sets them straight again: what women <i>really</i> want is equal pay and child care.</p>
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<p>In this way patriarchy - particularly its media - has defined our Movement for us from the beginning. In this way we have been persuaded to pay attention to the things that would make least change in the status quo, concentrate our energies on areas that could not be seriously restructured until more basic shifts in values were made. Equal pay for equal work, for example, is a true impossibility in an exchange system; child care can never be restructured satisfactorily for mothers in patriarchy. Our focus on the red herring of "ishoos" has caused us to see ourselves small and blurry in a small and blurry Movement, like a bad snapshot taken from a distance.</p>
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<p>For years I have known that everything that men have told us is true is in fact false, if not in an obvious then in a devious, sneaky way, like "ishoos." Nevertheless, recognizing any of the hundreds of implanted and false assumptions underlying everything I think and do every day has been the hardest labor of my life.</p>
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<p>In Part II, I offer some of the insights I have gathered as I have tried to question every aspect of my heretofore automatic belief system. It is irrelevant to me whether they are "right" or "wrong." What <i>is</i> important is that they give me another perspective, they broaden the possibilities, they encourage wildness and creativity in me. These - the untamed, inspired mind and will-are what I value. The <i>habit</i> of not accepting anything out of an unexamined faith in someone else's world view - this is what I cherish.</p>
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<p>As each of us tells the others the foolishness we have ferreted out of our own minds, we encourage this habit in our species. This Part is intended as a contribution to women's quick recovery of the habit of wild, inventive thought and action.</p>
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