Susan Faludi Quotes
Divorced men are more likely to meet their car payments than their child support obligations.
Faludi, Susan. Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women. Crown, 1991.
A fatwa is a religious legal ruling.
Citizen of U. S. & Israel
Even though a strong feminist, note the Victorian concept of sex—namely that it is the man who does the seduction and the woman who is the passive victim. Also that the act of sex has somehow damaged a woman so that she needs “maintenance”. Modern feminists and non feminists, and our laws and culture, no longer look at sex as damage to a woman so the seduction, regardless of whether the male or the female is the seducer, is not a problem that needs compensation. It is only if children result, that there is male responsibility—not for the seduction but for taking his share of the responsibility for creating another human being that needs support. Also, most modern cultures do not see all sex as a seduction of one party be another—sex can be and often is the joint decision of consenting adults. In some cases females seduce males.
This was an amazingly controversial quotation. At first glance it seemed like a typical position that a very conservative, anti-government politicization might take—the government should not interfere with a parents bringing up their children. However, there was a more ominous part of the quotations. While everyone in America would certainly agree with Paul that the Government does not “own” the children, there are few who would agree with the point that follows—that the Parents “own” the child. Paul reveals the normally hidden aspect of his politics—that he is highly influenced by the extreme, Biblical Literalist Fundamentalist Christians and Jews. In the Old Testament, the Father really did OWN the child. The latter was his chattel. A father had the legal and duty-bound power of life and death over his children. Most American Christians and Jews have long since abandoned the literal biblical notion of children being owned by a father and today see a child as a person who can sometimes need the protection of the state just like any other citizen. And there are occasions where the child must be PROTECTED from the parents who may be acting within their fundamentalist notions of Biblical rights and duties, but not with their civil rights and duties. Ownership, of a child is not one of the modern civil rights of parents.
Susan Charlotte Faludi is an American feminist, journalist, and author. She won a Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism in 1991, for a report on the leveraged buyout of Safeway Stores, Inc., a report that the Pulitzer Prize committee commended for depicting the "human costs of high finance". She was also awarded the Kirkus Prize in 2016 for In the Darkroom, which was also a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in biography.
