Once, I was in the company of people from Halychyna [an area in western Ukraine that includes several oblasts]. There were four women in the group: a university teacher, an art expert, an author of many art albums about Lviv and an editor. There were men there, too: a composer, an author and translator, two journalists, a social activist and a church activist. In other words, they were the blossoms of the nation, its elite, its intellectual backbone and its spiritual lights. Several of them are members of the current elite.
We talked and improvised at a festive table. The conversation about weighty matters was pleasant. We raised our glasses and eventually got to the third toast, traditionally drunk to women. We raised the glasses and drunk them very solemnly.
Right after that, one of the men joked: “What are men without women? They’re like a cat without a tin can tied to their tails.” The joker then commented on the beauty of this phrase. And everyone laughed.
The men’s laughs were sincere. The women also laughed. But I felt really embarrassed. The joke may be appreciated if it had not reflected the hard realities behind the attitudes of the men of Halychyna (and possibly of all Ukraine) towards women.
None of the high-minded intellectuals in this gathering would have gotten to their heights if they had not had good women behind them. None would have been who they are without the intellectual, spiritual, organizational, psychological and moral partnership with women.
Without women (or the can), a composer and author would create nothing, civil activists would starve to death and Halychyna’s political and state activists would be treated with suspicion by the traditional society. Curiously, all men know it. I suspect that, even from time to time at home, they recognize their women as partners – at least some of them do. But it never happens in public. Because, in the public eye, there is a fashion in Halychyna’s intellectual society to define women as a tin can tied to a cat’s tail. And the only way the male conformists react is by guffawing in unison. That’s because they are cowards. They are afraid to think otherwise in public.
It doesn’t matter so much anymore to us, the generation of self-fulfilled women of 40 or so. The worst thing is that our daughters are still brought up like this. They hear such jokes from their own dads. They’re still getting it hammered to their heads that their only worthy mission in life is to marry. And gradually, but steadily, they start to believe it. Eventually they marry similar men, possibly even very intelligent men, who nonetheless continue their fathers’ traditional attitudes towards women.
The man who tells a terrible joke about a woman becomes the center of attention at the festive table. Those of us “tin cans” who dare to express indignation – whether out loud or quietly – have to be ready to be labeled “an under-sexed feminist.” This is also a quote from someone among that Halychyna male elite, the one with funny tails.
Iryna Magdysh is an editor of Ji magazine. It is published in Lviv and specializes on cultural, political and philosophical issues. This column first appeared on
http://www.zaxid.net/article/56131/and is reprinted with the author’s permission.
