IVing IV, a touching touch

[alice wellintown]

> much as I agree on some of this stuff, feminism-wise, I don't agree that
> there is anything "up there in the [male chauvinist] treehouse" worth
> of a woman aspiring to or
> emulating or being pissed to be left out of...

Just 25-30% $  is all; not to mention, as I noted, the petty
perquisites and envy of those a rung below on the corporate ladder.
Consider Bigfoot's envy or the keeping up with the yacht club Jones
that the text keeps foregrounding.  Penny is a member of that singular
set of women who have managed to penetrate the first layer of
patriarch but have bumped their heads on the glass ceiling. Men ain't
exactly her friends, but she needs to use their power (a private Dick
might work) to penetrate their world.

>
> that's not acceptance of the status quo, just flat disbelief in the importance
> or goodness, even for insiders, of lopsided (poorly engineered.
> dysfunctional) power structures...
> an attitude which I think Pynchon encourages...frickin' pyramid
> schemes every one 'a' them, if ya think about it...

Yeah, of course, daisy chains, screwing the screwed, petty perks and
the like, but that reasoning, sound as it may be, is often cold
comfort and less spending money to a female earning 75% of what a male
earns to do the same job. And, I'm guessing she doesn't get invited to
boys night out when all the dealings go down. When Larry enters
Penny's work place he gets a small idea what it is like for Penny;
he's in a world where women have power and their use of it or abuse of
it may come down to sex or gender. Penny uses this Dic, and his Dick,
even sells it or trades it to other men. Not something Larry can get
over. He's not a surfing saint. But it's not a matter of revenge.
There is more than one war going on. Of course the big war, the
theatre war of buying and selling, has the same impact it does in
Beaver and Jessica and so on in GR, but Vietnam and the Feminist
battle against phallic hegemony is also a raging. Penny may not have
all the rockets and helicopters, but she knows how to win a battle or
two.

>
> 's also why I go along with millions - and see signs that Pynchon does
> too - that
> supporting an organized state where the formerly oppressed will take
> the positions of
> oppressor is really not worth the struggle...
>
> I think that is what the Events of 1968 were about - disdaining
> that form of revolution where you think you will stop when your group
> is on top...
> but things just keep turning, Trotsky mows down the anarchists at Kronstad,
> America land of the free has the fugitive slave act, Mao tse Tung gave
> thousands of women
> venereal disease, Napoleon follows the French Revolution by making
> himself emperor
>
> is like one of those mini-golf holes where you try to hit the ball
> into a recessed area
> atop a knoll, but the momentum always carries it up and over, back
> down again...Idiot's Delight
> they called it...
>
>
> --
> - "The doctor said give him jug band music; it seems to make him feel
> just fine!"
>