Free The Judas Rose by Suzette Haden Elgin Page A

care; certainly no such individual has taken even the elementary step of viewing the historical collections of commercial advertisements presented in all American media of the period. The most cursory viewing ofthese collections demonstrates that although lip service to ‘feminist’ views was paid by what might be referred to as the intellectual media, no such distortion existed elsewhere. Academics, themselves all too frequently effeminate, may indeed have been unaware of the work of the early feminologists; but those with true power—for example, those who controlled the advertising industry, the giant corporations, the health care industry, the national defense, and the major churches—were clearly quite free of such ignorance.
    â€œAny scholar who reads the records of history from about 1940 to 1990 with care finds an abundance of examples stating both the inferiority of the female and the custodial obligations of the male. This is true even when the curious social customs of the time necessitate various mechanisms for disguising those principles, as opposed to stating them openly. To insist that the twentieth-century preoccupation with high technology and its military applications delayed Haskyl and Netherland’s work is more than just a vicious lie. It is a blatant exhibition of ignorance which must no longer be tolerated within our field. It ignores the unobtrusive but superbly effective statesmanship of Ronald Reagan and George Bush; it ignores the equally restrained—and equally effective—statesmanship of Pope John Paul the Second; it ignores all the thousands of wise and capable men who steadfastly kept our nation on course through a period of temporary turmoil that would have meant the collapse of Western society had they been less faithful to their principles.
    â€œThere is not sufficient space to name all those men here. Some, like Chodoff, or the great Dobson, need no mention. But the manner in which our stubborn colleagues persist in denying them the honor to which they are entitled shames us all.
    â€œI ask them just one question in closing: how do they explain the fact that Haskyl and Netherland were able to obtain funding for their research into women’s cognitive and emotional competence during this period, as well as an immediate forum for the publication of their results? I challenge them to explain!”
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  (from “A Call for an End to Radical Feminology,” editorial by Broos W. Clawn, Ph.D. , Annals of Patriarchy 37:4, Spring 2207)
    There was no way that Jo-Bethany could keep from hearing her brother-in-law’s voice, however much she might have wanted to . . . human beings, by some curious oversight of the Creator, were not equipped with earlids as they are with eyelids and haveno way to shut out the sounds coming at them. But she didn’t have to look at him, as long as she made some noncommittal noise every once in a while to indicate that she was still there, and so she looked out the window at the yard outside while he talked.
    She had been with her sister and her fiancé when they went to order the yard, as chaperone. And she had done what she could to talk them out of it. She had done her best to make a case for something more pleasant to look at, something with grass and a few evergreens and perhaps a white picket fence or a nice low redwood or cedar one. But it hadn’t been any use. Ham Klander was absolutely determined to have what she was looking at now. A formal courtyard all the way round the house, laid in burgundy slate, and a wrought-iron fence topped with vicious spikes. Formal granite urns with topiary roses in them, and a formal granite pool with a formal granite boy standing in it holding a formal granite ram’s horn from which a stream of water was allowed to fall, formally, into the pool. And that was all. Not a blade of grass, not a daisy, not a tree. . . . Jo-Bethany