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Still others (myself included) have been disturbed by the deeply misogynist implications of the story. Pygmalion’s happy ending is only happy if you accept a number of repulsive ideas: that the only good woman is one who has no self beyond pleasing a man, the fetishization of female sexual purity, the connection of the “snowy” ivory with perfection, the elevation of male fantasy over female reality. Galatea does not speak at all in Ovid’s version. Even more tellingly, she is not given a name—that was one of the few details I took from other sources. She is only called the woman. She is meant
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For millennia there have been men who react with horror and disgust to women’s independence, men who desire women yet hate them, and who take refuge in fantasies of purity and control. What would it be like to live with such a man as your husband? There are too many today who could answer that.
