Essay Abominable: Gender Role and Women

Words: 1343
Pages: 6

Christine Anderson
Dr. Brown
English 1102
24 March 2013
Abominable
Carol Emshwiller didn’t start her writing until she was thirty, a mother, and married. Emshwiller, “was just learning the lessons of feminism on the front lines of domestic lines” (539). In Carol Emshwiller’s short story during the 1980’s “Abominable”, Emshwiller shows how men, in their sexual confusion, ethnic inexperience, and self-disasters, are not capable of understanding women and their needs, anger, and bitterness. The unnamed and self-styled man in the story shows his stereotypical, phallocentric attitudes to understand women becomes more humorous, rather than angry. From transforming the battle of sexes into the man’s search for an misleading species akin to
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They try the trap again, except this time they put the bananas in a straight line. This time the women have refused the bananas, because what the men offer them is never quite right (543). The men have come to conclusion that they will never satisfy the women in the mountains to come out and meet them. The men start telling stories around the campfire realistically, because they don’t know if the women are listing or not of how big the women really are (544). This shows that the men don’t know if the women are bigger than them, and could actually eat them whole, or they are small and are scared of how much bigger the men are than them. The men states that “ 72% of them perceive themselves as inferior, 65% perceive themselves to be in a fragile mental balance, only 33 1/3% are without deep feelings of humiliation simply for being what they are” (Emshwiller 544). That woman play a major role in society today including, cleaning up, playing the dominant role, and making the money for the family. It is shown that women have survived this long without men in their life, which they don’t have to always rely on men to get through everyday life. The men have realized that women have adapted to their own way of living and that they don’t have to come out to find nobody to rely on to live, especially the way men portray them out to be. This draws up the theme that women are just as