今天早上在豆瓣上看到这条广播。即使我可以理解作者的出发点，但依然有一些表达方式令我难以接受：无论是 gender essentialism（女性天生如何，男性天生如何），或是将社会压迫归结于生理（对母亲、女性的压迫是社会的，而不是「先天的物化诅咒」），又或是自由地解读特定的生理现象，得出过于宽泛的结论……

反对 gender essentialism 意味着: 消除性别与特质间的必然联系（女性是天生的 caregiver, 男性天生更具有侵略性）。同时，消除另一些特质的禁忌（女性或母亲的暴力禁忌，男性的 affection & tenderness 禁忌）。

如果说文学史中（二十世纪以前？）有关女性 self-determination 的作品并不多，那么女性拥有力量、暴力或 puissance 的作品则更罕见。我似乎只能想到美狄亚：因对伊阿宋的爱杀死了自己的弟弟及国王珀利阿斯；又因伊阿宋的恨杀死了与他所生的两个儿子。想到 Heinrich von Kleist 的戏剧 Penthesilea，与荷马史诗中相反，这次是她杀死了 Achilles.（还有 L’amica geniale 中的 Lila 只不过我刚开始读）然而，美狄亚是女巫和怪物；Penthesilea 是亚马逊女王。相比之下，更常见到 Tess, Dorothea 或 Isabelle Archer 这样的形象：她们极令人钦慕，但同时会感到在所处环境的压抑下，她们实际展现的力量仅是其全部潜能的一小部分。

与此同时我们也可以问：在哪些作品中，我们可以看见男性间的 affection & tenderness? 或者，男性角色对与其不在 romantic 关系中的女性角色给予（可以与女性间相互支持相比的）关心？我并不能想到多少。

男性间的 affection 似乎之后在暴力之后才被容许，才成为可能。「不打不相识」。只有通过暴力与伤害才可以意识到对方与自己的脆弱。荷马史诗中，似乎只有在杀死对手后才可以表达尊敬，只有在战友死后才可以将他抱入怀中哭泣。所谓的「男性气概」以及 heterosexual 禁止其他场景中的温柔。似乎表达温柔便有成为 gay 的「危险」。（为了逃避它甚至需要转变性别：虽然比较脱线，但想到了这一季的「異世界美少女受肉おじさんと」）此外，男性间的 solidarity 与 support 通常需要一个共同的外在敌人：工人在工会里对抗资本家，战士在军队中与敌国作战…

Come in thy lowest form of love, and I will kneel and kiss thee; but at thy highest, come as mere supernal power; and though thou launchest navies of full-freighted worlds, there’s that in here that still remains indifferent.
Chapter 119, Moby Dick

（而这里的 highest & lowest 之间是否存在一种奇异的矛盾…）

即是在 romantic 关系中，男性角色也常常体现出一种残酷：Hamlet 对 Ophelia. 与此相对，我想没有什么比 Middlemarch 第81章更好地体现了 sisterhood: emotional communication at its deepest and intensest:

Dorothea, completely swayed by the feeling that she was uttering, forgot everything but that she was speaking from out the heart of her own trial to Rosamond’s. The emotion had wrought itself more and more into her utterance, till the tones might have gone to one’s very marrow, like a low cry from some suffering creature in the darkness. And she had unconsciously laid her hand again on the little hand that she had pressed before.

Rosamond, taken hold of by an emotion stronger than her own—hurried along in a new movement which gave all things some new, awful, undefined aspect—could find no words, but involuntarily she put her lips to Dorothea’s forehead which was very near her, and then for a minute the two women clasped each other as if they had been in a shipwreck.

所以，这一切又指向什么？我想，没有什么特质是 exclusive 或被禁止的：女性与男性都可以尝试拥有新的 puissance, 探讨之前没有被考虑过的可能性。而正是 feminism 使这些成为可能。因此，对男性来说问题并不是「支持」feminism 与否。这就像坐在扶手椅上说「我支持环境保护」却同时觉得全球变暖或环境恶化与自己毫无关系一样（当然，还有那些说着「我支持女权，但是&@#¥%%&！」的智慧男性）。这关系到一种实践：重新理解自身、理解世界也必然意味着改变自己的生活。

之前读在 Adrienne Rich: Of Woman Born 中读到一些片段非常喜欢，作为结尾

…as long as women and women only are the nurturers of children, our sons will grow up looking only to women for compassion, resenting strength in women as “control,” clinging to women when we try to move into a new mode of relationship. As long as society itself is patriarchal—which means antimaternal—there can never be enough mothering for sons who have to grow up under the rule of the Fathers, in a public “male” world separate from the private “female” world of the affections.

以及，「我希望我的儿子们能有女人的勇气」:

If I could have one wish for my own sons, it is that they should have the courage of women. I mean by this something very concrete and precise: the courage I have seen in women who, in their private and public lives, both in the interior world of their dreaming, thinking, and creating, and the outer world of patriarchy, are taking greater and greater risks, both psychic and physical, in the evolution of a new vision. Sometimes this involves tiny acts of immense courage; sometimes public acts which can cost a woman her job or her life; often it involves moments, or long periods, of thinking the unthinkable, being labeled, or feeling, crazy; always a loss of traditional securities. Every woman who takes her life into her own hands does so knowing that she must expect enormous pain, inflicted both from within and without. I would like my sons not to shrink from this kind of pain, not to settle for the old male defenses, including that of a fatalistic self-hatred. And I would wish them to do this not for me, or for other women, but for themselves, and for the sake of life on the planet Earth.