yond the power of Ian- E at has been imposed on

_ women by force becomes a standard of freedom for _ women: and all women say it is so.’’ As one digs

_ deeper into radical feminist scholarship it doesn’t

_ matter what one does concerning rape, Brownmiller

_ points out the traditional heavy penalty for the crime

_ of rape is due to the basest economic motive: men protecting their property. This is a sign of patriarchy. _ Remember, patriarchy is everywhere. Itdoesn’t matter how men treat women, they always seem to be

_ oppressed according to radical feminists. Carol

_ Cassel views romantic love as ‘‘the sweetener-- artificial at that--of a woman’s virtual serfdom within _amonogamous relationship.’’ Simone de Beavoir points out that three factors contribute to generate the _ female desire for romantic love:

_ (1) the general human desire to avoid a life of respon- sible self-determination (the phenomenon of bad faith | or mauvaise foi);

: (2) the specific social and economic circumstances of _many women, [remember, all men are born into rich families] and

(3)a romantic ideology which is carefully inculcated

S

pe

_in girlsand women froman early age (Pauly Morgan, 268-9; see this on reserve for Can St 222).

Now radical feminists have turned romantic love into _a form of ‘‘false consciousness.’’ Men are so bad that we have to inculcate women into loving us. This i brings to recollection the feminist saying ‘‘A woman needs aman like a fish needs a bicycle.’’ Bicycles ‘inculcating fish? And of course, as we noted at the first of this article, men can oppress women by look- ing at them ‘‘sexually’’. So if we were to try to count _the number of ways men can oppress women, the “exercise would be futile--at least according to radical feminists. Infinity is rather hard to count to. Profes- sor Rahman noted in his critique that ‘‘the creation of policies for every specific form of unwanted behav- _iourcan lead to Orwellian committees of ever-watch- ful big-brothers and big-sisters keeping tabs on trips to the coffee shop to quantify ‘unwanted pressure.’ Orwell's apprehension that North America would ‘quietly slip into totalitarianism by apparently demo- -ratic measures would then be fully vindicated.’’ One can look atthe poster posted by a feminist group in Toronto (below) and only wonder.

[It may be of interest to some to note that ‘‘The ‘Backlash’’ is on the student union agenda for March Ast.)

UPEI X-P RESS

Here it is, early 1992, and the comics have already begun the year’s first major crossover series. Yes, yet another crossover series. Before weary comic fans run screaming from the stores, though, they should give this series a look. It’s actually pretty darn good.

February 20, 1992

Operation: Galactic Storm will not appear in aself- tilted miniseries, as did Marvel’s overhyped and underwritten Infinity Gaumtlet. Instead, the story will appear in nineteen installements in the pages of books related to the Avengers (including Captain America, Avengers West Coast, Quasar, Wonder man, Iron Man, and Thor), beginning with Captain America #398 (which went on sale in January) and concluding in Avengers #347. Each issue will bean equally significant chapter of the central plot (unlike the legion of vaguely related crossover tales that came with series like Infinity Gaun tlet, ‘‘Acts of Venge- ance’’, and Secret Wars I]),and the story is com- pletely contained within the nineteen chapters running from January to March. It’s a well-organized crosso- ver series.

Organization aside, the series has a promising plot. It’s not another ‘'o mnipotent menace that can reshape reality on awhim’’ story, a plot that Marvel has milked for at least three of its crossovers (Infinity Gauntlet and the two Secret Wars series); instead, Marvel is this time working on an interstellar war epic (sure, that’s not incredibly down to Earth either, but it’s a lot easier to swallow than Thanos orthe Beyonder). The story involves three alien empires that have appeared in past Marvel comics: the Kree, the Skrulls, and the Shi’ar. The Kree and Skrulls have menaced Earth in the past with their centuries= long war, a war in which the Earth isa strategically important area between the two races; hence, superheroes like the Fantastic Four and Avengers have been fending off these aliens for years, most notably in the classic Kree-Skrull war storyline that ran in the Avengers #89-97 years ago. This time out, though, the Kree are warring with the rival empire knownas the Shi’ar(a matriarchal empire familiar to X-Men fans), and their zapping back and forth in space-warps is destabilizing Earth’s sun. The Avengers become aware of the threat and send two-thirds of their mem- bers into space, one third bound for the Kree empire and the other bound for the Shi’ar empire in an at- tempt to try and negotiate a peace between the two powers. Other forces are at work, though as the

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