...the millions the court finally gave her from her late husband's estate? I could not possibly care less. I am not a lawyer. I have no credentials as a feminist. I am not among those who assume feminism has won all its battles or even identified all its battlegrounds, but I think I can still ask questions.
Its hard to generalize about what shapes behaviour beyond saying that it is part nature and part nurture. The academics lately have been pushing the line to include more nature as we discover more about how genes affect the mechanisms I will loosely refer to as "mind". But until and unless the unlikely day comes that somehow I am persuaded that genes alone produce all the characteristics of a person's behavior, I just have to wonder:
Though men and women who let their attraction for companions of sexual interest run unleashed on skin-deep criteria deserve to be used in return,
Did Vickie Lynn Hogan deserve to become Anna Nicole Smith?
I don't presume that she is dumb, smart or a boob-wagging gold digger but I do consider her an embarrassment and not nearly as lucky as some would assert. Would she have made more respectable choices if she had them? When, REALLY, does one have choices about who, and what kind of person, they will become?
Nurture generally means the people who attend your life and resouces they provide, particularly instruction or discipline or example. At some point, each of us becomes one of those people and we cannot get off the hook for attending our own life. Regardless of whether we complicate the picture by noting that that point arrives at a time which is itself produced by our innate personal timetable of maturation and by circumstances that, rather than supporting us, thrust responsibility on young shoulders...the point does come and it is childhood's end. Few reach that point having escaped any molding or forming by expectations.
NOTE: my dictionary defined feminism this way: "Belief in the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes." To which my response is "Belief"? Are there no absolutes about equality? No simple facts? As to equalities being simply due and right entitlements, that is axiomatic to me. In the realm of belief, I would put the notion that when women set the terms and get at least a truce in the last and most subtle of their battles, then men should study the game plan to see how they
can liberate themselves.
There are differences in nature I do agree.
But in law and custom, differences beg bias or belie claimed equalities.
They don't sit well with me.
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