boxofdelights

I think I didn't really identify with women, then; there were men and women and kids, and I was a kid. And civilization was determined to suppress everything, in kids, that prevented them from conforming to the appropriate model citizen: foolishness, willfulness, the failure to see things the way everyone else sees them, anger, despair, all sexual feeling outside the bonds of wedlock. But Kesey thinks that it is women who want to stamp all that out, in men. McMurphy gets crucified for fighting too much and fucking too much, but in real life, girls get punished much more harshly for much smaller acts of anger or sexual desire than boys.

OMG, that's exactly it. I read a lot of classics when I was younger and like you said, it's men women and kids (or adolescents), and then later I read them again and it's like the anti-woman sentiments punch you in the gut. It's so offhand a lot of the time! And it's so baked in. And the women are monsters, or angels, or devils, or saints, always tormenting or saving the men. Never human.

(There's a whole other rant about the supposed Native American narrator, but anyway.)