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Here's a random memory: Back in the seventies, there was an underground comix series called Insect Fear which basically tried to outdo EC Horror comics. I was talking with then-Philadelphian friend Judith Weiss about the latest issue, which she had also read, and she amiably dismissed it by saying, "They should have called it Women Fear."
In an instant, I saw her point: Every story in the book had an assertive, large-breasted woman who received her violent comeuppance at the end. I had missed this not because I sympathized with the underlying misogyny but because the stories were all made up of narrative tropes that went way, way back to EC and long before. I was so used to them that I couldn't actually see them.
And a small observation: I was reading something about the old hippie days of the sixties and seventies which presented feminism of the time as being little more than a list of complaints. And God knows women had good reason to complain. But I was there and I can assure you that the feminists were rarely "strident." Mostly, they calmly explained things they knew that men didn't understand. They assumed that you'd mend your ways once you saw what they were.
Perhaps they were giving us more credit than we deserved. But we shouldn't portray them in a negative manner when all they were trying to do was make the world a kindlier and saner place.
End of sermon. Go thou and sin no more.
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