notes and quotes from Victoria Smith’s Hags

“… equivalent numbers of middle-aged men are not getting themselves treated in order to look less angry, aggressive, or miserable.”  p49

“When female bodies deviate from the paths set by male ones, this is till treated as a design flaw …  We need different ways of organizing education, work, and relationships to accommodate specifically female needs.  Workplace accommodations are ‘special treatment’; the front-loading of education and career progression into the life stage during which one might also get pregnant cannot be questioned.” p76

Right.  And isn’t justice supposed to compensate for bad luck?  Both male and female choose to reproduce, but it’s just the female’s bad luck that the thing grows in her body, not his.

“Women are penalized towards the end of life for having been progressively exploited at earlier life stages.” p97  (re wages)

“… during the 2020 lockdowns women’s home work involved far more interruptions for domestic and care work, ‘irrespective of [the couples’] pre-lockdown relative pay’ …” p98

“You know what men could do that would ‘dispel the myth of a binary existence’?  Do the laundry.  Wash the dishes.  Do the cooking …  Do some of their family’s emotional labour … Now THAT would be revolutionary.” Gia Milinovich  p104

“… men are progressively stealing time and money from women”  p106

“People find it particularly shocking when a woman refuses to be kind: there’s something unnatural, offensive about a female mouth declaring that the limits of her care are here and she will not be giving any more.”  Sarah Ditum p116

“For younger women, the belief that you are destined for greatness … relies on the conviction that older women were never really worth it, and that you will never be them.” p133

“women who began their adult life assuming their sex didn’t matter can be shocked to find that, actually, it matters a great deal.” p141

And men who made a similar assumption remain clueless, have yet to be shocked.  (Tell them to read What Happened to Tom.  And about those two people, one male and one female, who accidentally switched email accounts and found response to them, their work, waaaaay different …)

“Imagine we lived in a time in which there was no Pornhub, no OnlyFans, no revenge porn, no mega brothels, no normalization of prostitution as a way for female students to fund university courses.  No choking and hitting as ‘standard’ sex, no ‘rough sex’ defences, no child sex dolls on Amazon, no exponential rise in sexual assaults in schools. …” p159

I don’t have to imagine it.  I lived then.  I was a girl, a teenager, a young adult then.  A popular book was The Joy of Sex.  The Hite Report.  Masters and Johnson.

And I’m appalled at the present.  HOW THE FUCK DID WE GET HERE — TO ALL THAT?

“there is no male equivalent of the scold’s bridle, no history of women using ‘nagging’ as an excuse for slaughtering their husbands, no stories of great civilizations in which women forbade men from speaking at political assemblies.”  p209

re being at the YWCA … p227

“That in Salem widows were allowed to own property outright may have been the reason that the witch hunt there was especially intense.”  Barstow  p261

Interesting.

“Until 2018, the murders of women over the age of fifty-nine were not included in the Crime Survey for England and Wales.” p276

WHAT?

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