Westerners have a strange relationship to knowledge. The best I can say about it is that it is by no means natural or organic.

Knowledge, for the typical Westerner, has a moral meaning above and beyond any other value. Its importance is not related to the realm of practicalities, to the ability to learn and/or perform new actions with greater capability.

It is very important to realise, that a typical Westerner will become very confused (ultimately leading to punitive behaviour) if he catches wind that gaining knowledge has changed you in any way. Instead of understanding that you have just confessed to intellectual growth, the computer of his mind will spew forth the data: "Either she lacked moral character before, or else she lacks it now." It's at this point that he will start his punitive behaviour, which he thinks you well deserve, due to what he considers to be your moral inconsistency of character.

He has merely misunderstood you -- but he is not in any position to know that. He is just trying to rectify your character, to make up for the fact that you have changed. Although he isn't sure if the change he hears about is good or bad, he thinks a certain amount of punishment is always good for restoring moral order. (And he is not to know any differently about that, since he has been taught that knowledge has a moral character primarily.)

It is extremely likely, too that such a person feels threatened by your additional knowledge. He feels that by claiming to have gained more knowledge in your travels you are casting subtle moral aspersions at him, to make him feel more badly about himself in comparison to you. He can't get to the bottom of these aspersions and what they might mean because, actually, they don't exist. Nevertheless, he feels them to be present. That is another reason why the typical Westerner, feeling you have a different basis for knowledge than he does, typically attacks. He becomes very aggressive and even vengeful -- but his feelings of inferiority are all in his head.

Westerners, most typically, view the possession of knowledge as something that assures the moral superiority of the one who has it. They are at one with Plato, in fact, equating knowledge with morality, with power. (This is typically why they make another error -- they assume that if you claim to have knowledge but do not also have power then your claim to knowledge much be spurious, morally reprehensible. Little do they know!)

Knowledge, however, is a practical affair. To claim I do not have knowledge in some areas does not signify me as morally weak. It signifies, more likely, a lack of education in a particular area.

Nobody should be made ashamed for admitting that they do not know something. A lack of knowledge has no direct relation to the integrity of one's character.

Consider Derrida's notion that language always needs supplementation to give it its metaphysical "presence". Otherwise, it tends to remain slippery, unstable -- which is effectively to say "without authority". I think about how much of patriarchal thinking is designed to make language seem to be stable -- indeed to stabilise it so that certain words can have only one meaning, or at best a few of them, that are considered to be authentic currency.

And yet, despite all this effort to stabilise reality through language -- to, in effect, hypostatise language into ideology -- the patriarch remains victim to slippages, to the assaults of contingency against the absolutism of the ideological system he wishes to set up. That is why he tries to bring women into play, to BE that supplementation of language, that emotional presence, that gives language its ideological quotient -- its stability.

But this means that women cannot be their own meaning; cannot position themselves at their own centre (not even for a moment). Rather, they are made to be decentered from themselves -- so that patriarchal meaning can be furnished by women's emotional quotient.

This is why men are typically inclined to preach at women: "What you say isn't what you mean, it's just emotionalism. In fact, what I am saying, as a male, in re-inscribing the overarching ideology (the hegemony) is what is really meaningful."

At the same time as he says this, however, the patriarch must surely also sense that his words are just words -- basically inclined to slip away from the emotional quotient of his intended meaning. He implicitly understands then that it is not the words themselves, that have meaning, but rather his capacity to decenter women with them that makes them seem so meaningful. For it is by this practical (and not at all merely intellectual or symbolic means) that he seeks to give his words a more stable and thus "objective" meaning.

It is only by destabilising women's meanings that he seeks and obtains his psychological supplement -- giving to his words an emotional presence. "These words," he says to himself "are Spirit. For see how they are can actually create  reality."

Let me give you a more succinct definition of a patriarch. A patriarch is somebody who presumes to read minds, most especially and predominantly the minds of women.

A patriarch doesn't need to read a book, because he already knows what is in it -- that is, if said book has been written by a woman.

You can talk to a patriarch about all sorts of things, but at the end of it, he will only register about 5 per cent, if that, of what you had to say. He will mingle that in with his vague ideas about "what all women really are like," and will draw his conclusions about you on that basis. This is the precise manner by which a patriarch does his mind reading: He will allow his lack of attention and vain imaginings to run away with him. Finally he will pronounce his views -- and nothing about them will be right.

A patriarch is nothing if he is not a mind reader. He will second guess any woman -- even about the details of her own life's experiences. He will come up with some generalisation that somehow just seems more apt to him than any explanation she has given.

"I get a sense that this is how it REALLY was," he will say. "A lot of what you are saying does not correlate with my own experiences and therefore doesn't make any sense at all."

"Let me tell you the real truth about your experiences from my perspective," he will drone on.