This probably wouldn't be interesting if you weren't from the area and weren't familiar with any of the people or locations mentioned, but I am and, therefore, I did think it was interesting. A fun walk through history.
Also, it's very possible that the first outdoor movie theater in the US was in Columbus, Indiana.
I was not impressed with this book. The organization is lacking, consequently it was hard to follow. I was also disappointed in that it spoke about Nordic, Greek and Roman gods more than the Germanic tribes of central Europe, which was the whole point of me reading the book. I know information on them is sparse, but I thought that's why the book was so small. There are many parallels between gods of these 4 regions, but when names were listed, I wasn't even sure who to attribute the names to. Back to the drawing board for this info I guess.
This book was so unnecessarily long! I can't honestly recommend this book to anyone except an individual bent on writing a book in the style of this age. However, that being said, there were a few amusing gems that seem to still apply today.
"Few men who feel the pressure of small needs are so nobly resolute not to dress up their inevitably self-interested desires in a pretext of better motives. In these matters, he was conscious that his life would bear the closest scrutiny, and perhaps the consciousness encouraged a little defiance towards the critical strictness of persons whose celestial intimacies seemed not to improve their domestic manners, and whose lofty aims were not needed to account for their actions."
"He's a cursed, white-blooded pedantic cock's comb!"
"Society never made the preposterous demand that a man should think as much about his own qualifications for making a charming girl happy as he thinks of hers for making himself happy. As if a man could not only chose his wife, but his wife's husband."
"He had also taken too much in the shape of muddy political talk. A stimulant dangerously disturbing to his farming conservatism, which consisted in holding that whatever is, is bad, and any change is likely to be worse."
This is such a short talk, yet there's SO much in it! Every single sentence is a nugget of power. Every person on the planet should read this!
- In a literal way, men ruled the world. This made sense thousand years ago. Because human beings lived then in a world in which physical strength was the most important attribute for survival, the physically stronger person was more likely to lead. And men, in general, are physically stronger. (There are, of course, many exceptions.) Today we live in a vastly different world. The person more qualified to lead is not the physically stronger person, it is the more intelligent, the more knowledgeable, the more creative, more innovative. And there are no hormones for those attributes. A man is as likely as a woman to be intelligent, innovative, creative. We have evolved, but our ideas of gender have not evolved very much.
- Gender, as it functions today, is a grave injustice. I am angry. We should all be angry.
- We teach females that in relationships compromise is what a woman is more likely to do. We raise girls to see each other as competitors, not for jobs or accomplishment (which in my opinion can be a good thing) but for the attention of men. We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are.
- The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be, rather than recognizing how we are. Imagine how much happier we would be, how much freer to be our true individual selves if we didn't have the weight of gender expectations.
- Boys and girls are undeniably different biologically. But socialization exaggerates the differences, and then starts a self-fulfilling process. Take cooking, for example. Today, in general, women are more likely to do housework than men, cooking and cleaning. But why is that? Is it because women are born with a cooking gene? Or because over years, they have been socialized to see cooking as their role. I was going to say that perhaps women are born with the cooking gene, until I remembered that the majority of famous cooks in the world, that are given the fancy title of Chef, are men.
- When it comes to appearance, we start off with men as the standard, as the norm. Many of us think that the less feminine a woman appears, the more likely she is to be taken seriously. A man going to a business meeting doesn't wonder about being taken seriously based on what he is wearing, but a woman does. I wish I had not worn that ugly suit that day. Had I had the confidence then that I have now to be myself, my students would have benefited even more from my teaching because I would have been more comfortable and more fully myself. I have chosen to no longer be apologetic for my femineity and I want to be respected in all my femaleness because I deserve to be.
- I often wear clothes that men don't like or don't "understand". I wear them because I like them and because I feel good in them. The male gaze as a shaper of my life's choices is largely incidental.
- Feminism is, of course, part of human rights in general, but to chose to use the vague expression "human rights" is to deny the specific and particular problem of gender. It would be a way of pretending is was not women who have for centuries been excluded. It would be a way of denying that the problem targets women. That the problem was not about being human, but specifically being a female human. For centuries, the worlds divided people into two groups and then excluded and oppressed one group. it is only fair that the solution to the problem acknowledge that. Some men feel threatened by the idea of feminism. This comes, I think, from the insecurity triggered by how boys are brought up, how their sense of self-worth is diminished if they are not naturally in charge as men.
- Culture does not make people. People make culture. If it is true that the full humanity of women is not our culture, then we can, and must, make it our culture.
