ABSTRACT
Patriarchal power patterns turn out to be more resilient than Beauvoir presumed. But what is the ‘bottleneck’ today that keeps processes of change from definitely heading in egalitarian directions? In terms of our metaphor of a multi-headed monster, we argued that its ‘immortal’ head, which must still be defeated, is the ‘presentational’ realm of rite, art, and myth that conveys ideas not in a grammatical scheme of expression, but in the shape of ‘forms’, i.e. holistic ‘pictures’ or patterns that currently seem to be most resilient to change. Struggles within each of these realms are necessary in order to replace these dominant ‘forms’ that, in their arrangements of elements, or picturing of a ‘relational order of things’ (Langer 1960: 59), articulate a power asymmetry between the sexes.
