"Man=Woman"

I don't think this is such a hard equation to balance.
In response to Rich’s epitaph: “Now we dwelt in two worlds/ the daughters and the mothers/ in the kingdom of the sons,” and the novel, I think that they both put women in a very negative light. The Comfort of Strangers, especially, makes women seem helpless victims or aimless beings in a “kingdom of…sons”. Yes this is a patriarchal world, but that doesn’t mean women are subject to everything in a man’s mind. Maybe its because I was raised by a single mom, but I found a lot of references to the helplessness, and thus hopelessness of females in the novel. And a lot of it was centered on Caroline and Mary experiencing sexual tension with their male counterparts. What I really didn’t understand was, particularly with Caroline, the fact that the women knew they were being subject to the men, and with this knowledge allowed them to continue controlling them. They fueled their domination. This was seen in Mary, too, when she would just tag along everywhere with Colin, becoming his sex machine. The book in a strange way reminded me of the “Rocky Horror Picture Show” in that regard.
But back to Rich, I looked into a journal which discussed her ideas and writing interests and it said that “Rich explores the idea that Man is the Self, and Woman is his Other, and that this Otherness is the only possible location for female existence”. That concept really irked me, and I was pleased to find that Rich comes to the conclusion in her work that “[the] female identity can be imagined, defined, articulated not in relation to the male, but in feminine terms”. Still, however, I disliked the idea that women are inseparable from men, and cannot be identified on their own terms. I suppose this is seen in everything Robert stands for, and the obsession with Colin, leaving Mary only as a blurred, chopped off face. But what was the point, I still wonder? I don’t think McEwan was trying to rouse all the feminists into anger. What was he trying to prove? Perhaps he wanted to shed light on the idea that this way of hierarchal thinking is still eminent in modern times, even when traveling abroad, when one would usually think they are escaping these societal precedents. I personally think its pretty sad, is there really no escape from this manly-mindset? I think it really is all in one’s head.
The journal I cited: http://www.bilkent.edu.tr/~jast/Number11/Gorey.htm