Women Talking - Navigating the Risks of Young Masculinity
Salome:
Why would boys of 13 and 14 be left behind? Why wouldn't they leave with us?
Agata:
Surely, we don't have to be afraid of the boys of this age.
Ona:
August, you're the boys teacher. What is your feeling about this? Do boys of that age pose a risk to our girls and women?
August:
Yes. Possibly. Boys of 13 or 14 are capable of causing great damage to girls and women. And to each other. It is a brash age. They are possessed of reckless urges, physical exuberance, intense curiosity that often results in injury. Unbridled emotion, including deep tenderness and empathy, and not quite enough experience or brain development to fully understand or appreciate the consequences of their words or actions. They are like the yearlings. Young, awkward, gleeful, powerful. They're tall, muscular, sexually inquisitive creatures, with little impulse control, but they are children. They are children and they can be taught. I'm a two-bit schoolteacher, a failed farmer, and above all a believer. And I believe that with guidance, firm love and patience, these boys are capable of relearning their roles as males in the colony. I believe in what the great poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge thought were the cardinal rules of early education. To work by love and so generate love. To habituate the mind to intellectual accuracy and truth. To excite imaginative power. He said, Little is taught by contest or dispute, everything by sympathy and love. I believe the boys should be allowed to leave with the women... Providing the women choose to leave.
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Women Talking - Misunderstanding in Expressing Frustration
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Women Talking - Defending Children Without Seeking Forgiveness
Salome:
We do not need to be forgiven by the men of God for protecting our children from the depraved actions of vicious men, who are often the very same men we're meant to ask for forgiveness.
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Women Talking - Desperation Leads to Dark Thoughts
Salome:
I will become a murderer if I stay.
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Women Talking - Questioning the Nature of Their Existence
Salome:
We know we were made to sleep with cow tranquilizer!
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Women Talking - Unforgivable Actions and Lasting Pain
Salome:
I cannot forgive them. I will never forgive them.
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Women Talking - A Mother's Vow to Protect Her Child
Salome:
I will destroy any living thing that harms my child. I will tear it limb from limb. I will desecrate its body and I will bury it alive. I will challenge God on the spot to strike me dead if I have sinned by protecting my child from evil, and my destroying that evil that it may not harm another. I will lie, I will hunt, I will kill. I will dance on graves and I will burn forever in hell before I allow another man to satisfy his violent urges with the body of my four year old child.
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