by Helen Forsey

The poster publicizing David Suzuki’s television series A Planet for the Taking stated: “We have long thought of ourselves as masters of the natural world, but now that drive to dominate and control is having dangerous consequences. Can we change the way we see our relationship with the other life forms on earth?”

“Right on”, most of us would say. But wait a minute. Does that description really apply so broadly, even in our modern Western societies? Don’t most women find it hard to imagine ourselves as “masters” of anything?

I am not quibbling over the choice of words. The “drive to dominate and control” has typically been seen as a mark of manhood, and the threat it poses is far from new. For women, children, and other living things, it has always been dangerous.

The view of the universe described in the poster is certainly the one that predominates in our culture, but it is a view of reality as men tend to experience it. If we accept it as gender-neutral we are making a grave mistake.

Historians tell us that mechanistic science, which gave rise to modern industrial society, was very much a masculine enterprise right from the start, filled with explicit images of the all-powerful male mind conquering a female Nature. Women pacifists, suffragists and abolitionists have long pointed out the linkages between war, male dominance, and other oppressions. Today, ecofeminists extend FULL ESSAY AT Natural Life Magazine

Posted by stan in Analysis