6 Comments
User's avatar
Gordon Strause's avatar

I still don't really get this "my beloved would have to be above me and not my equal.”

Or, I should say, I get that this may be what Marilyn needs to feel for her to be sexually attracted to someone, but I dont think it's universal in the way that she seems to think it is.

Expand full comment
Kabir Altaf's avatar

I find most of this interview very weird so I'm not going to get into it.

But on the point about Kate's last speech in "Shrew": one very typical interpretation is that she is saying it sarcastically. That she has figured out how to play Petruchio for her own purposes.

Expand full comment
Andrew Tripp's avatar

Really enjoy what Marilyn has to say. Always read her submissions at Quillette. She brings a very common-sensical perspective to an area of the academy sorely lacking in that department in my view.

A well done interview as well.

Expand full comment
James Borden's avatar

I think this relates to the last post but submission to religion means that you are more than your victimization and your victimization does not define you. But if you are part of a religious counterculture you will be very aware of being victimized when you enter politics. Evangelicals in the United States have acted from being aware that the general culture is "anti-Christian" for decades and even evangelicalism may be a political identity now.

Expand full comment
James Borden's avatar

I started writing a comment about the gender politics but I am not even going to try.

Expand full comment
James Borden's avatar

Actually I am going to try. I exempt myself from so much of this discourse because the fundamental assumptions are so goyish. The Jewish concept which is very old is that a wife is an "ezer k'negdo" (from Genesis 2:20) which means that if he is right she is a helper to him and if he is wrong she is opposite him. My gloss is that an ezer k'negdo is someone you trust to tell you that you are full of shit. There is a lovely Peretz story which I forgot the title of where the rabbi tells the husband that in the next world his wife will serve him and the husband says, "I don't want that. In the next world I want us to be sitting together in this big chair just as we are now." I suspect I and Marilyn Simon are not that far apart in practicality but she has adopted some Christian rhetoric about submission of wives to husbands.

Expand full comment