Chapter 207 Tuttle's Enlightenment
Tuttle was so angry that he laughed: "Do you take me for an idiot, undead! Do you think I don't know how good the business of the two coppers store on the main road in the town is? What woman can't even take out two copper coins?!"
"Have you ever carefully looked at the things in the baskets of those housewives who go in and out of Ertong Supermarket?" Ji Tang asked patiently.
"What do you mean?" Tuttle asked irritably.
"The best-selling product in our Ertong hypermarket is salt," said Ji Tang, "followed by plates, bowls, basins, buckets, soap, washing powder... and other daily necessities shared by family members."
Without waiting for Tuttle to speak, Ji Tang continued, "Do you know what the least-selling categories are? They are hair accessories, scarves, sleeves, and scarves."
After a pause, Ji Tang said solemnly, "Do you understand, Tuttle? When housewives enter the supermarket, the money they have is used to buy more goods needed by the whole family, rather than what they need themselves. The scarves that are sold in small quantities are bought for daughters, towels and socks are prepared for the family, and the beautiful hairpins that women always linger on are not as popular as fruit knives."
"You only see them shopping at the Ertong hypermarket, but never notice that out of ten items they buy, not even one is for themselves, even if it's a waist sleeve that they can use for housework."
"Now, tell me, Tuttle, how many women from the lower classes do you think can easily fight on their own for her 'private affairs that cannot be known to others' and make their families accept the extra two copper coins per month?"
Tuttle's mouth was half open, and there was no sound for a moment.
Ji Tang was not at all surprised by his reaction.
Ji Tang was born in a rural area in the western mountainous area of China. Before he became an adult, Ji Tang never found anything wrong with the environment in which he grew up.
It was not until he grew up and saw how women lived in big cities that he suddenly realized something he had never realized before - he had never worn torn socks from the time he joined the army at the age of eighteen, but he had seen his mother mending socks, and they were her own socks.
When he was a teenager, he and his father put on new clothes to go to the market . The loin cloth tied in front of his mother when she saw them off had been worn for at least five or six years, and the edges were worn out to exaggerated frayed edges.
Looking back, the mother who waved and reminded them to be careful when going out had a conspicuous patch on her sleeve.
How many years has it been since my mother wore new clothes? Ji Tang, who grew up with his mother, couldn't tell.
Even for housewives in cities with relatively affluent families, the items they put into their shopping carts during shopping festivals are mostly purchased for their families.
This kind of dedication that everyone in the family can see is often ignored by everyone.
Even the Chinese people who have generally received compulsory education cannot avoid this, let alone this world where the illiteracy rate is as high as 99%.
Tuttle's half-open mouth slowly closed, and the impatience and irritability on his face gradually faded, replaced by a kind of panic.
He also thought of his mother.
His mother looked for compound bows made of the latest materials for him, she customized new shirts for him that fit his body shape every year, and she carefully prepared lizard skin boots for him as a coming-of-age gift...but the newest skirts in his mother's closet were all purchased before he got married.
Are there times when the mother wants to buy something for herself but finds it difficult to ask the father?
The father, whose income is considered good in Kargath, has he ever paid attention to the needs of the mother?
Tuttle felt a sharp pain in his heart and his lips trembled slightly.
"Only women can give birth to children. They are forced to bear all the burdens of nurturing new life alone, just like your mother and mine." Seeing Tuttle's reaction, Ji Tang slowed down his tone and said softly, "We can't help with the difficulties of childbirth, but at least we can do our part to help them get rid of embarrassment and awkwardness during the menstrual period. This is a very meaningful thing."
Tuttle was silent for a while and didn't nod, but at least he didn't resist anymore... probably meant he agreed.
Ji Tang patted the shoulder of the alien who was about his age, and sighed: "It may be difficult for you to understand why we do this now, but we must take this step. We must remove the thorns on this road, because this is Westram... No, because this is Innadri, the Rhine Kingdom, and the human society of this world. If we want to move towards civilization, we must take this first step."
Ji Tang had never seen the old society with his own eyes, and his understanding of it was limited to written and visual materials.
After seeing with his own eyes the living conditions of the lower classes in this alien world, the somewhat one-sided and thin text and image materials in Ji Tang's mind gradually came to life, and the suffering people in the black and white photos in the modern history books of China gradually overlapped with the faces of the people in the alien world that he had seen.
Westram is only a few dozen kilometers away from the big city of Innadri, but these few dozen kilometers are like two different worlds... An artificial fur scarf that costs ten copper coins is hot-selling in Innadri, but in Westram, not a single one can be sold even if it is on display for ten days or half a month.
Ten copper coins just to keep their necks warm was too much of a luxury for the people of Westram.
Those who were willing to buy a set of new four-piece bedding for twenty copper coins were reluctant to use it, because most people's beds were covered with hay and people were afraid that the grass stems would damage the sheets.
People looked at the thermos bottle that cost twenty copper coins, touched it again and again, and discussed it with their families for a long time. Only those who had elderly people at home who wanted to drink some hot water in the winter would be willing to spend money to buy it.
And this is the town's residents who can usually see copper coins.
If you are a farmer in the countryside, you will be even more frugal... If you have money, you will have to buy enough salt before considering other things.
In contrast, there is the former Lord of Westham, Baron Marcus, who has a huge fortune, and the former mayor's magnificent mansion, which can be used as a foot massage parlor after renovation...
This can still be seen in the town.
When I went to the countryside, I was shocked even more.
How big is the gap between the private farms of the nobles and the farmlands of the free people?
The former is vast with interconnected fields and paths stretching as far as the eye can see, while the latter is fragmented by mountains and hills. In many villages, the total land area is less than half the size of the farms.
The former had plenty of animal power, while the latter could only rely on their hands - many free people even had to rent iron farm tools from nearby farms, at the cost of working for the farm for free when they had free time.
The mansions of the farmers were as magnificent as castles, and the houses of the peasants were all made of mud walls, with stones pressed on straw as roofs...
While taking Rex to the countryside for research, Ji Tang heard a lot about the deeds of some "countryside scoundrels". What did these scoundrels do? They stole horse feed beans from the farmer's house and picked up wheat ears from the farmer's field. They were hung up and beaten by the strong male servants and guards, becoming the laughing stock of the villagers...
Yes, the peasants in this world even believe that it is reasonable for the farmer to lynch his fellow villagers. They do not think it is wrong for the noble stewards or the scion of the side branches who are in charge of the farm to arbitrarily punish and humiliate the villagers. They think that gentlemen of status are qualified to be judges, policemen and executioners, and this is a common rule in the world.
Ji Tang, a Chinese, would definitely not accept this incredible "traditional rules".
If we want to talk about fairness and liberation, we must face the plight of women head-on.
Human beings are creatures with animal nature, and animals are the law of the jungle, they bully the weak, and they bully the weak and fear the strong. In any society or ethnic group under any cultural background, if there is oppression and a food chain within it, then women and children will definitely be at the bottom.
To protect the rights and interests of women and children, women must be liberated.
During China's feudal history, illegitimate sons and daughters suffered unfair treatment, the root cause of which was that the status of women was too low. Without thoroughly reforming the society and completely breaking the old society that used class oppression as a means of ruling, it would be useless to rely on one or two illegitimate sons and daughters who played the leading role to change their fate.
In a nutshell, if we don’t liberate women, there’s no point in talking about revolution or not.
Tuttle is not as idealistic as Rex. In Ji Tang's eyes, this guy is just a petty bourgeois who misses his past affluent life. He is a potential right-wing capitulationist who will speak out only when his interests are touched and will shut up when his interests are satisfied.
However, the Chinese people, who have thousands of years of rich experience in internal strife, have their own fine tradition of "inclusiveness"... Just as the great man summed it up, having fewer enemies and more of our own is the magic weapon for struggle. As long as the centrists with different positions do not go to dead ends, they can all be won over, they can all be pulled into the friendly camp, and we can all form a united front!
In order to persuade Tuttle to take over Rex's position as spiritual leader and undertake the important task of leading by example in publicity, before officially launching the publicity campaign, Ji Tang took time out and personally took Tuttle to conduct research at the grassroots level.
The target group of this survey is rural women. In order to facilitate the work, Ji Tang specially brought along the family members of two officers from the Logistics Department.
Three humans and one undead went deep into the countryside. Ji Tang did not allow Tattle to go up and talk. He only let the operators' families chat with the peasant woman and pulled Tattle to a farther place to listen.
The content of the chats mainly focused on caring about the peasant women's family and personal lives.
There are no entertainment activities in the countryside of this world. In order to save kerosene, most villagers do not light lamps and go to bed early after dark. This inevitably leads to the most secret oppression: rural women have even less right to refuse sex than urban women. As long as a village woman is of childbearing age, she will inevitably get pregnant again and again.
Tuttle's jaw almost dropped when he heard the weather-beaten face of the peasant woman, who looked like an old woman, shyly and uneasily reveal under the care of the operator's family that she had miscarried an unborn baby last year.
Most of the healthier peasant women had more than five children...some of them were lucky enough to grow up, some died young, and this does not include the fetuses that were accidentally aborted.
This excessive fertility, accompanied by miscarriage, caused most peasant women to be older than farmers of the same age - there was no need for Ji Tang to remind them of this, as Tuttle saw it himself after visiting just a few peasant women.
In addition, there are widespread gynecological problems among rural women that cannot be ignored, and this is all related to the improper use of sanitary products - the cloth strips they use are passed down from mother to daughter, and even if they have tried to hide as much as possible and wash these cloth strips, it is still difficult to avoid adverse infections.
Some women, when in extreme distress, have used substitutes such as corn leaves, grass balls, and even tree bark...
Tuttle, who was eavesdropping at a safe distance, was almost going crazy.
Women in reality and women in his perception are like two different creatures!
Poor menstrual products are not the worst issue; there is even worse discrimination against menstruation. Almost all the rural women interviewed, when asked about how they dealt with their menstrual periods when they were young, mentioned how embarrassed they were at the time. There were also many experiences of becoming the laughing stock of others and being looked at with strange eyes because of accidentally getting blood stains on their pants.
At this time, another hidden oppression caused by women's physiological characteristics was suddenly and bloodily exposed to Tuttle, who had known nothing about it before, through the narration of a peasant woman interviewed.
That is... the experience of being harassed or even violated during menstruation.
Women in the countryside do not have the conditions to stay at home and not work during their menstrual period. When they feel uncomfortable while working in the fields and have to find a place to change their clothes... they are at very high risk .
When Tuttle first heard this jaw-dropping reality, he was being pulled by Ji Tang to sit in the courtyard of a farmer's house.
The woman who told this experience was hiding in a house and talking in a low voice with the two agents' family members. She lowered her voice for fear of being heard by others.
Her voice was a little hoarse, trembling slightly with pain and with a strong nasal tone. If it weren't for the extraordinary hearing of Tuttle as a ranger, he would not have been able to hear what the sobbing peasant woman was saying.
This terrible and cruel reality, which seemed to be encountered by many people but which he knew nothing about even after living to his thirties, made Tuttle's hands and feet turn cold.
how so?
The countryside he saw was miserable enough, and the people living in such an environment were miserable enough. No one had fair skin, everyone had a furrowed brow, and the older people were bent over early by the burden of life.
We are already working so hard, why do we still have to oppress each other?
Tuttle's mind was in a mess.
He was a former thief who had participated in caravan robberies, farm plunders, and murders.
Tuttle has always been angry about what happened to him, and he never saw anything wrong with robbing or even killing those who were better off than he was.
This is how the world is. The powerful oppress the powerless, and the powerful oppress the powerless. His family and his future are destroyed because of these fucked-up rules that actually to vent his anger on the rich people he can deal with.
But these poor country women...what's the point in oppressing them?
They were already close to the ground, and their survival was extremely difficult.
The woman in the room was still whispering.
Even though many years have passed, the peasant woman with dark skin, who was not at all attractive to normal men, was still suffering. She tried her best to suppress her voice, fearing that others would find out that she had experienced such an unbearable past.
Tuttle stood up gently and tried to walk out of the yard.
Ji Tang did not come to hold him back, but just looked at him silently with his dark eyes.
Tuttle hesitated for a long time, unable to bear to leave, but also unwilling to sit back.
Ji Tang stared at the uncomfortable alien for a while, and said softly: "You are indeed just a puppet lord that Lord Yang casually picked up. You really have no responsibility for what happens to Westram."
"But... you can also be responsible if you want to do it." Ji Tang turned his head and glanced at the closed wooden door. "Carrying the future of the people here, if you are willing to do it, you can do it."
Tuttle said nothing.
The humble and fearful face of the peasant woman in the house when he entered flashed through his mind.
After standing there blankly for a while, Tuttle slowly sat back on the stone pier.
On the way to the next household, after a long silence, Tuttle asked Ji Tang in a hoarse voice: "What's the point of doing this? Do we have to capture all the men in the village to build the road?"
Ji Tang shook his head and said sincerely, "There is solid evidence of illegal activities, and people should be arrested, but the root cause of the current plight of women is that people are used to dividing people into different classes, and then decide which group has the right to bully others and which group should just accept it based on their status."
"To eliminate the plight of women, first of all, we must break down the so-called 'order of superiority and inferiority' that everyone accepts as the norm. Everyone's life should be equal, and everyone's personality should be respected. This is what a normal and harmonious society looks like."
Tattle didn't understand anything at first, but after a while he slowly realized something was wrong, and the look he gave Ji Tang became gradually more horrified.
"...Are you sure that all you want is to eliminate the plight of women?" Tuttle said horribly.
"Of course." Ji Tang said as a matter of course, "Women can be bullied justifiably, employers can exploit workers justifiably, landlords can turn free people into tenants or even serfs justifiably, and nobles can justifiably bully the common people. Any kind of oppression here is completely unreasonable and should be overthrown, right?"
"Since we know it's wrong, we should correct it; we should start from the most basic part, that is, we should first liberate women and solve their plight. Isn't this obvious?"
Tuttle: “…”
"Wait a minute, wait a minute." Tattle didn't remember how many times he had said "wait". It was really hard for him to keep up with the thinking mode of the undead mayor in front of him. He said with difficulty, "So... Rex and I are just puppets, and the real lord is Yang... Do we have to defeat Yang in the end?"
What he didn't say was that although he had seen from the beginning that you undeads didn't have much respect for Yang, you wouldn't openly rebel against Yang, right? !
"You think too much. Yang arranged all the production lines in the factory, including the sanitary napkin production line." Ji Tang almost laughed at this guy. "If Yang didn't support us, how could we carry out our work?"
Players would be happy to treat Yang as a boss, but the national team certainly wouldn't.
Tuttle was stunned and horrified at first, then his face was full of disbelief.
The Nightmare Butcher actually had such a crazy idea... This is not difficult to understand, this guy even killed the prince.
No, that's not the point!
The Nightmare Butcher is actually a friend of women? !
Tuttle felt that his worldview had been shattered into pieces. This horrible truth would probably make Pansy laugh out loud if he told it to outsiders, let alone to others.
Next, Tuttle was dragged by Ji Tang to run through all the villages in Westram, including the poorest village that had reorganized Rex's worldview, amidst multiple denials of doubting life, the world, and his own cognition. Fortunately, there were no farmers working naked in the fields in this season, otherwise Tuttle might have poked his eyes out on the spot.
After working hard for several days, Tuttle's face was weathered, and even his thorny temperament of a rebellious young man was smoothed out by the sufferings of the world he witnessed.
Entering December (the time in another world), the sanitary products factory’s products are launched on the market.
When the hard-working clerks and the female employees of the Logistics Department who came to help put the goods on the shelves of the women's products store next to the Ertong Hypermarket, without Ji Tang's urging, Tuttle took the initiative to change into the formal dress "inherited" from Rex and made his appearance.
Tuttle, with a heroic look on his face, had just walked out of the town hall door when a bearded man wearing a small fur hat standing on the steps immediately raised his camera and took a few pictures of him.
Tuttle: “???”
Ji Tang, who was waiting at the door, introduced with a smile: "This is the reporter from Innadeli Weekly invited by Rex to help promote our sanitary napkin launch conference."
The bearded man didn't dare get too close to the Undead Mayor. He just nodded and bowed to the new Lord of Westram in a flattering manner.
Tuttle: “…”
Tattle suddenly had the urge to rush to the city to fight Rex.
