Powerful Goddess Portraits

I probably do need to learn to behave.

But I don’t like it.

Elizabeth Wurtzel

That we might learn a thing or two from men on Father’s Day, an excerpt from Elizabeth Wurtzel’s The Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women:

I have no quarrel with The Rules or the advice it gives–it actually seems pretty sound to me–but if we had really come a long way, baby, if men’s perceptions of women had transformed fundamentally and intensely so that we are accepted as full-fledged sexual creatures and romantic operatives who were free to chase or be chased, and if this expanded dimension of women’s sexual personae were not frightening or overwhelming to them, then we would not need The Rules.

So of course the bitch persona appeals to us. It is the illusion of liberation, of libertine abandon. What if you want to be large in a world that would have you be small, diminished? You don’t want to diet, you don’t want to say no, thank you, and pretend somehow that what is there is enough when always, always, you want more. That has been your defining characteristic: You have appetites, and only if you are truly shameless will you even begin to be sated because nothing is ever really enough. Not because you are greedy or insatiable but because you can’t help it, you can’t go along with the fiction that the world would have you believe and adhere to: that you ought to settle and be careful and accept the crumbs that are supposed to pass for a life, this minimized self you are supposed to put up with.

This is about what has become the almost monstrous notion of female desire. this is not about making demands of other people or wearing down those who have their own screams for MORE! to address.  You’d be amazed at how often we are reluctant to indulge ourselves by our own means. It is amazing that the smallness of the space we’ve been told to squeeze into has meant that we don’t even know how to ask or what to want.

How nice it must be to just decide I will not be nice, I am never sorry, I have no regrets: what is before me belongs to me. For men, this attitude is second nature, it’s as much in their atmosphere as snow is in an Eskimo’s. They don’t even know how much they assume.

A very Happy Father’s Day to our favorite heroes!  Click on “Leave a Comment” (above left) to share what you love about men.

xoxox

© Sharon Birke

201 697 1947

Sharon@PowerfulGoddess.com

www.PowerfulGoddess.com

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