Considering David and Women

I'm going to bring up again David's comment at the end of our Beauvoir class. He quoted a book and said something along the lines that women are the stabilizing core of society. Men go off on adventures, confident their wives will maintain the society they left. I'm not taking a side on this point, but I think it's an interesting perspective that doesn't deserve all the negative retaliation David received. Do some societies function in this way? Some women? I don't really know. But I realized this perspective isn't alien to that one book, and relates to reading I've done in my Chinese cinema class. In one of the most widely known texts to those who study Chinese cinema (and healthily criticized as well), Rey Chow's Primitive Passions, she writes, "women are always the places where primitive passions are cathected" (44). When we read her work, we looked at the big shots of Chinese Fifth Generation filmmakers (who's audience is larger outside China than within) and considered whether or not these directors were feeding to a Western view of China, using women protagonists as the centerpiece.