I saw this set of hand towels in Fred Meyer's today and it caught my eye. The most likely reason is probably because four years of going to school for sociology has seeped into my brain and I can no longer blissfully look at the world as harmonious. :) Another reason is because I have been struggling with being a Quaker woman in a patriarchal world. I do not know how to fit the two ideologies together sometimes and often the resulting emotion is anger, bordering on man-hating. While I am desperately fighting the man hating because I know too many wonderful men in my life I do not always know what to do with the anger. I hear stories from my female friends about ways they have been treated or ways in which men have used power over them and I get so frustrated. Expressing this frustration is complicated as well. The men in my life whom I love and trust do not always understand, either what I am talking about or how to not take the anger personally. Finding the right woman is hard also. I find someone as angry and confused as me and instead of working through it, it festers inside of me. Also, as I listen to stories I realize that I have my own stories of ways in which being a woman has led to a less than advantageous outcome. So, seeing these towels in the store today, at first I rolled my eyes and laughed, then I stopped and found myself asking, "how dare they?" It's simply a set of towels but when you think about it what are they saying ans what kind of message are they portraying? Maybe the towels really are just a silly thing but I don't think the struggle is.
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