I remember mom's stories about my grandfather. I remember how they independently meshed with those from my aunts and uncles.
You'd've loved him, I'm sure. You see, he was a big believer in "home correction." You probably know what that was. Very old fashioned guy.
You see, he basically believed that women were put on Earth for the sole convenience of the menfolk, same as you. And when they didn't behave--when they spoke out of turn, or failed to do what they were told, or did but didn't do it fast enough or satisfactorily enough, or...y'know, just because he was in a bad mood right then because of his usual post-weekend hangover and felt like hurting something...he'd use grandma as his human punching bag.
And she took it. Because divorce was considered so hideously shameful that she honestly felt it was better to be an almost literal slave to a complete bastard than it was to try to be alone. Her church was, to a great extent, responsible for that, too. Not that it was different anywhere else around here, really. In their neighborhood, it was practically the weekend sport--get off from the mill, pick up a few cases of cheap beer, spend the weekend blitzed and use the lil' wifey as a speed bag, go back in Monday hungover and sick. Lather, rinse, repeat. If the cops got called, they'd laugh it off, and why not? They we're just as bad, mostly. Good, all American red-blooded he-men. You'd have liked them, too.
Well, maybe not the drunken part. But yeah.
I remember all the stories of when he'd come in from a long shift at work to wake her up with the accusation that she was dropping her dress for anything with a pulse as soon as he left, and it would turn into a night-long beating, interspersed with crying fits as he'd apologize before blaming her for his tantrum before flying off into a rage afain. How he'd turn his anger on anyone who tried to intervene--that's how one of my uncles was driven from the house at the age of 15. He essentially told his daughters the same thing, that all women grew up to be whores for anything with a dick unless you rode them constantly. He told my youngest aunt that he knew in his heart that she wasn't his daughter and he damned sure didn't love her. He told my oldest aunt that if she pursued her dream of being a law enforcement officer, he'd make sure that no one would find her body, and that if anyone did, they'd never identify the body as human, much less female. He told all of them that if he so much as imagined they had been with a black man, he'd personally find them wherever they were, kill them, along with any offspring of such a union and make sure the blame fell on their lover. No that that would have been difficult--not in this place at THAT time.
Talk about spoiling the wimmenfolks, eh? I guess, to someone like you, it might be. As long as they kept their heads down, their mouths shut, and made sure dinner was hot and waiting on him when he got home, he dudn't slap them around TOO much. Usually. Unless he had a bad day, of course.
The only thing I DO remember seeing, personally, was the Christmas '79 incident. I was five, it was Christmas Eve and my father had just been discharged from the Army, and we were gathered at my grandfather's house. My grandfather told my grandmother to chop the onions for a potato salad finer, grandma told him she knew how to chop onions and he could do it if he wanted them finer. A lifetime of abuse can make anyone a little cavalier. Sometimes he blew it off.
Not that time. He tried to cave in her skull with a piece of firewood. I remember my mother standing over her unconscious, bleeding body with a long kitchen knife, trying to climb over my uncle and my father so she could get to old granddad and turn him into ground chum, while two more were trying to hold HIM and get his knife out of his hands. He was actually egging mom on. He told her he could kill two just as easily as one. I was crying. All of my cousins were. Christmas Eve, 1979. I'd love to see THAT as a Norman Rockwell painting.
Grandma refused to press charges--her pastor met with her, to counsel her, you see. After that, a combination of emphysema and heart problems made him more tractable. Also, bedridden. She was still terrified of him. Hell, she feared and hated him even after his death.
40 plus years of Hell on Earth.
We were told all about it. We saw it with our own eyes. For all that we've turned into a horrifically dysfunctional bunch that can barely stand one another's company and have virtually nothing else in common, we've managed to avoid being like them, the people you'd idolize.
This is the world you feel such nostalgia for. These are the people you hold up and demand we emulate. We don't want to be like them, not because we're hateful, contrary people who hate anything pure, innocent and good, but because we've actually seen what the world you want for us is really like, and we know that as horrifyingly flawed as it is, the current modern world is a better place. The past wasn't better, more pure, more innocent--it was uglier and more brutal, but no one actually TALKED about it.
They grew up that way because their PARENTS grew up that way. And so forth and so on. All we're trying to do is break the Goddamn fucking pattern and replace it with something less miserable.
Your world is dead, and may it never come again. We don't ever want to live in it again, because we REMEMBER it.
That's what "feminism" is. It comes from basic pattern recognition.
