Wednesday, September 2, 2015

Queens County Revisited: The 1970's (38)

At first I would sometimes try to challenge Barry's 1950's Playboy magazine, male chauvinist, sexist, traditional and old-fashioned way of treating, viewing, evaluating and relating to women mainly as mindless sex objects, and not as intellectually equal human beings. But by the 1970's most of the women I had been closest to whose consciousness had been raised by the radical feminist consciousness-raising groups, the New Left Movement groups of the late 1960's or the early 1970's underground press were living in the youth ghettos of university towns in the Midwest, the Bay Area and Boston-Cambridge--and not in the New York City area.

And once Barry concluded that my male feminist consciousness and support for the women's liberation movement did not appear to enable me to bring home to the Jamaica basement apartment, that we shared, more women than did his anti-"women's lib" and male chauvinist way of relating to women did, his mind became pretty much closed to rejecting his 1950's Playboy philosophy, on the basis of any assertions or arguments that I might provide. Or to put it another way: Barry seemed to conclude that if there weren't more women in my "bull pen" than there were "chicks" in his "bull pen," there was no percentage in him becoming a male feminist or women's liberation movement supporter in the 1970's.

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