Mean Girls Pickin’ On Kunstler Again
Sharon October 14th, 2010
I haven’t read _The Witch of Hebron_ yet, but Carolyn Baker’s review suggests to me that Jim Kunstler is still on his “post-collapse women will properly return to their natural strengths - sex, sandwich making and occasional weird Hive Queening” kick.
As some of you may remember, I had a somewhat jaundiced view of the first book that I expressed after Jim Kunstler published an essay in The Oil Drum saying that women who criticized his book just didn’t get how collapse was going to end all social gains for women.
What’s interesting is that the actual collapse we’re actually seeing has worked the opposite way. Overwhelmingly, the greatest losses so far have been born by men, not women. Almost 70% of all job losses have been to men. More and more men have been cast back into the domestic sphere, without a narrative that allows them to exist there and also maintain their sense of contribution to the community.
I’m interested to read _Witch of Hebron_, and see if this is just another case of life and art going far astray from one another, or whether Kunstler’s fantasy of a middle aged male dominated world is in fact a narrative that provides an essential counter-fantasy to the extant reality.
Sharon