How we cite our quotes: (Part.Section.Paragraph)
Quote #7
The game is a dominance game called I Must Impress This Woman. Failure makes the active player play harder. Wear a hunched back or a withered arm; you will then experience the invisibility of the passive player. I'm never impressed—no woman ever is—it's just a cue that you like me and I'm supposed to like that. If you really like me, maybe I can get you to stop. Stop; I want to talk to you! Stop; I want to see you! Stop; I'm dying and disappearing! (5.9.13)
Throughout The Female Man, Joanna/the omniscient narrator satirizes a number of "dominance games" that men in her world are taught to play. Although she knows that women are supposed to find male dominance attractive, this passage suggests that this kind of behavior is just as damaging and deadly as outward displays of violence.
Quote #8
Men succeed. Women get married.
Men fail. Women get married.
Men enter monasteries. Women get married.
Men start wars. Women get married.
Men stop them. Women get married.
Dull, dull. (see below) (6.8.1-6)
On Joanna's Earth, it's the men who start and stop wars, but in Jael's world, the women do too. Does the novel suggest that war is a valid expression of female power?
Quote #9
I'm a sick woman, a madwoman, a ball-breaker, a man-eater; I don't consume men gracefully with my fire-like red hair or my poisoned kiss; I crack their joints with these filthy ghoul's claws and standing on one foot like a de-clawed cat, rake at your feeble efforts to save yourselves with my taloned hinder feet: my matted hair, my filthy skin, my big fat plaques of green bloody teeth. (7.1.8)
Joanna sounds a lot like Jael here. Why is it that, in Joanna's world, women who have power (or want it) seem monstrous? Is Jael an effective parody of these stereotypes?