2013 05 Styled Shoot Tale of Two Brides

Now that men are being cast as a frontier market to be opened up by self-hatred, images have begun to tell heterosexual men the same half-truths about what women want and how they see that they have traditionally told heterosexual women about men; if they buy it and become trapped themselves, that will be no victory for women. No one will win. But it is also in men’s interest to undo the myth because the survival of the planet depends on it.

 

The earth can no longer afford a consumer ideology based on the insatiable wastefulness of sexual and material discontent. We need to begin to get lasting satisfaction out of the things we consume. We conceived of the planet as female, an all-giving Mother Nature, just as we conceived of the female body, infinitely alterable by and for man; we serve both ourselves and our hopes for the planet by insisting on a new female reality on which to base a new metaphor for the earth: the female body with its own organic integrity that must be respected. The environmental crisis demands a new way of thinking that is communitarian, collective and not adversarial, and we need it fast.

 

We can pray and hope that male institutions evolve this sophisticated, unfamiliar way of thinking within a few short years; or we can turn to the female tradition, which has perfected it over five millennia, and adapt it to the public sphere. Since the beauty myth blots out the female tradition, we keep a crucial option for the planet open when we resist it.

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