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The gradual extinction of softness

hippocampusmagazine.com

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Re: The gradual extinction of softness

#111

Post by lelanthran »

bsanr wrote: post #56
netcan wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a first person recollection of a nine year old girl's experience surviving two revolutionary civil wars and a genocide. Not incidentally, the sentiments you express were the precise sentiments weaponised to fuel and justify this bloodbath. Stopping at paragraph one to " yeah but she's a bouge.... " is a mark of zealotry. As to "sightedness," which I take as meaning obligatory mentions of class issues, imperia…

[flagged]

> My contention is that this is a problem, given what we know about the history of Capitalism and Western imperialist arrogance and its direct and deleterious effects on many (most) of the 3rd world countries these principles touched during the 19th and 20th centuries, and the ways in which those effects (predictably) hardened the hearts and ways of dissenters. Even in, as an adult, remarking on one's experience as a nine-year-old girl suffering at the hands of anti-Capitalist regimes.

This argument doesn't make any sense: "$FOO is bad because the anti-$FOO people are violent madmen"

You can't always shift blame away from the violent madmen.

Re: The gradual extinction of softness

#112

Post by [deleted] »

fxtentacle wrote: post #86
emodendroket wrote: post #62

> I’ve often wondered why, in a poor country where women work as hard as men to feed their children, feminine softness is so highly prized. As for me, I no longer consider it a valuable attribute. Isn't this its own answer? It's prized precisely because it is unattainable for most.

That explanation doesn't work for me. Women in Germany at my age never had a shortage of anything. Yet most of them present themselves as strong and fiercely competitive. It's rare to see a German woman embrace her softer side or act playfully in public.

[deleted]

Re: The gradual extinction of softness

#113

Post by [deleted] »

friedman23 wrote: post #39
bsanr wrote: post #18

It's frustrating to me that my potential enjoyment of this piece, lauded as it is by several of the comments that are already here, was poisoned by the introduction. I imagine that >I ran to visit my friend Yet, who lived in the village behind my parents’ house in Battambang, Cambodia. will come off as innocuous to many, but my immediate impression was, "Wait... like a plantation?". I'm not intimately familiar with C…

Your comment is amazing. You read that article written by someone that narrowly escaped genocide and your mind immediately goes to what is essentially communist propaganda. You don't express anger once at the people involved in orchestrating the killing, you don't assign any blame to the actual ideology that was used to justify mass slaughter. Instead you just spout a programmed response. That definitely scares the s…

[deleted]

Re: The gradual extinction of softness

#114

Post by kharak »

theodric wrote: post #88

Too long, didn't finish. I need a summarizer. ADHD sucks.

I don't have ADHD, but can't deal with writings like this. The flaw is mine, I'm losing out, I'm sure of it.

Others here write about the beauty of the article. All I read are convoluted, never ending paragraphs that don't tell me anything.

I stoppend reading carefully after 1 minute, started jumping ahead to see if this is leading somewhere. Finally, hopped to the comments here in hope they'd tell me the gist of what the core message of the article is about.

It's funny, I like reading fiction, well written sentences with grand narratives and all of that. But not in an article.

Re: The gradual extinction of softness

#116

Post by wnkrshm »

nickff wrote: post #105
wnkrshm wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC from [0] US politicians long regarded the horror stories out of Cambodia as exaggerated tales at best, enemy propaganda at worst, since the Cambodian regime was opposed to the newly formed Vietnamese government. They couldn't politically support the cause of their former enemy, so Cambodians suffered for longer, until Vietnam got bold enough to invade and liberate them (Edit: I don't know whether the aim was to…

Again according to Wikipedia, the Khmer Rouge were initially supported by the North Vietnamese and Chinese, only turning against the former later on. The USA appears to have opposed the Khmer Rouge until they were largely a spent force. Given the articles on the subject, and my understanding of the political situation at the time, I find it hard to believe that the USA abetted any Khmer Rouge activity. https://en.m.w…

The article you cited ends with the victory of the Khmer Rouge in 1975. It deals with the events before the Khmer Rouge rule of terror, which lasted until 1979.

In terms of support, it seems you can even quote Kissinger on it:

"You should tell the Cambodians that we will be friends with them. They are murderous thugs but we won't let that stand in our way."

"The Thais and the Chinese did not want a Vietnamese-dominated Indochina. We didn't want the Vietnamese to dominate. I don't believe we did anything for Pol Pot. But I suspect we closed our eyes when some others did something for Pol Pot." (Edit, others meaning China in the context) [0]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_United_States_s...

Re: The gradual extinction of softness

#117

Post by gumby »

fxtentacle wrote: post #86
emodendroket wrote: post #62

> I’ve often wondered why, in a poor country where women work as hard as men to feed their children, feminine softness is so highly prized. As for me, I no longer consider it a valuable attribute. Isn't this its own answer? It's prized precisely because it is unattainable for most.

That explanation doesn't work for me. Women in Germany at my age never had a shortage of anything. Yet most of them present themselves as strong and fiercely competitive. It's rare to see a German woman embrace her softer side or act playfully in public.

> It's rare to see a German woman embrace her softer side or act playfully in public.

I don’t know what your age is but this is far from my experience.

In a professional context, no more or less playful / joking than men (this varies a lot by context, of course). But outside work, yes, in public, sure.

Re: The gradual extinction of softness

#118

Post by somtoxhi »

emodendroket wrote: post #62

> I’ve often wondered why, in a poor country where women work as hard as men to feed their children, feminine softness is so highly prized. As for me, I no longer consider it a valuable attribute. Isn't this its own answer? It's prized precisely because it is unattainable for most.

> Isn't this its own answer? It's prized precisely because it is unattainable for most.

No, the question is why value softness so highly when you cannot survive without "hardness", when as a soft woman, you cannot even feed your children. Softness will lead to death.

Re: The gradual extinction of softness

#119

Post by bilbo0s »

the_gipsy wrote: post #103
fxtentacle wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That explanation doesn't work for me. Women in Germany at my age never had a shortage of anything. Yet most of them present themselves as strong and fiercely competitive. It's rare to see a German woman embrace her softer side or act playfully in public.

The context is quite different. In a “shortage” context, women must survive both against poverty and a patriarchal society, at the same time. In Germany they are free of both.

Not sure this holds up. I'm extremely familiar with subsaharan Africa. Whether a tribe is patriarchal, egalitarian, or matriarchal in nature, you tend to observe the females "embracing softness".

I don't have an answer as to why that is, but the "scarcity" theory is consistent with my observations. The "social organization" theory is not. That's not to say that "scarcity" theory is correct, only that it isn't contradicted by observation in the same way that "social organization" theory is.

Re: The gradual extinction of softness

#120

Post by dm319 »

My mother fled Cambodia and then Vietnam. She has said very little about that period, vague stories about escaping through the forest and people dying. Her family (the lucky ones) have been distributed far across the globe, the other half disappeared.

Reading this was gripping. I understand my mother better. Maybe in some ways the author being 9 allowed her to talk freely about the time that is too traumatic for someone of my mother's generation.

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