Position # 2: Patriarchy does not truly exist anywhere in the world.
Everything trades on definition. Men may dominate the public sphere, but does that mean that they have more power than women? Does that mean that they are better off? I intend to argue, rather, that all social divisions into “masculine” and “feminine” involve a trade off that is as oppressive of men as it is of women.
If we turn to page 190 of Gender in Cross-Cultural Perspective, we find David D. Gilmore’s article “The Manhood Puzzle.” In it he describes the process by which men are made, which is distinguished by the way women grow into womanhood naturally. While both men and women face standards concerning their sexual identity “Women who are found deficient or deviant according to these standards may be criticized as immoral, or they may be called unladylike or its equivalent and subjected to appropriate sanctions, but rarely is their right to a gender identity questioned in the same public, dramatic way that it is for men” (191). Men are pushed to live dangerously—to prove their male status. This is reinforced by both men and women: “men are encouraged to take risks with life and limb…they challenge fate by going on deep-sea fishing expeditions in tiny dugouts and spearfishing with foolhardy abandon in shark-infested waters. If any men shrink from such challenges, their fellows, male and female, laugh at them, calling them effeminate and childlike…youths fight in weekend brawls, drink to excess, and seek sexual conquests to attain a manly image. Should a man fail in any of these efforts, another will taunt him” (192). The process by which men are made is brutal, and their very value as human beings rests on their proving themselves men: “They must submit without so much as flinching under the agony of the knife. If a boy cries out while his flesh is being cut, if he so much as blinks an eye or turns his head, he is shamed for life as unworthy of manhood, and his entire lineage is shamed as a nursery of weaklings” (192). This degree is not always present, but this forging of men seems universal. “In urban Latin America, for example, as described by Oscar Lewis (1961:38), a man must prove his manhood every day by standing up to challenges and insults, even though he goes to his death ‘smiling’” (194). “In contemporary literary America, too, manhood is often a mythic confabulation, a Holy Grail, to be seized by long and arduous testing” (195).
Gilmore goes on to tie the brutal process of making and insecure state of holding manhood as the result of the Oedipal conflict that boys go through. The mother is the primary caregiver, and the father is a shadowy figure. The boy must be broken of his first role model, his mother, and thrust into a new state as a man. This model, however, relies on women, rather than men, being the primary caregivers. Why should this be the case? As we discussed before, the traditional division of labor seems to be drawn down biological lines. Women serve as the primary source of care, and men are forged into warriors.2 Men, as a collective, do not oppress women. Society (the superorganism) oppresses both men and women—treats them as things to be used instrumentally and to be thrown away at its discretion. There are women that support rigid roles for men and women, there are men that support rigid roles for women and men, and there is a sort of institutional inertia / collective unconsciousness / group dynamic that maintains old patterns somewhat independently of the conscious decisions of any particular individuals.
Women have a certain security in their status, but they lack certain kinds of influence. Men, on the other hand, have influence in their status, but lack certain kinds of security. As men, they are thrown into the field of battle or the outer world of work, and are cut off from social and familial connections. Their status is always in question. Women are provided with a greater degree of psychological health, but they do not get to have the same external influence as men—the farther from the home we get, the more men dominate. As the world is becoming more “modern,” both sexes are facing double standards. Women are supposed to be successful in the work place and as mothers/wives/nurturers. If they fail in their modern role they are backward. If they fail in their traditional role they are undesirable to certain men. Men are supposed to be sensitive equal-opportunists and dominators. If they fail in their modern role they are barbarians. If they fail in their traditional role they are undesirable to certain women. These gender double standards seem topped only by a culture that promotes consumerism and productivity—thus requiring its citizens to both eat a lot and be thin.
Nicholas W. Townsend discusses “Fatherhood and the Mediating Role of Women” on page 105. Men say that they want better relationships with their children than their fathers had with them, yet in reality this is not something they achieve. If a man gets divorced from his wife, he often also becomes divorced from his children—unable to relate to and be there for them. Why? Because his relationship with his children is mediated by his wife. The mother is the primary caregiver, and the father’s role with his children is determined by her. He is an alien—a stranger to his own children and in his own home. He is built to be a worker—he does not know how to relate to people on his own. We also see this manifest in Micaela Di Leonardo’s article “The Female World of Cards and Holidays: Women, Families, and the Work of Kinship” on page 380. Women control the social relations of the extended family and friends. I remember when I was a child feeling bad that, as a man, my children would always love my wife more than they loved me. I would have to be on the outside. This idea was repugnant to me.
Steve Payne’s article, “Why do we say, I do? There’s something about marriage” from the Toronto Sun, discusses the dominance that women enjoy. “I’ve got another kid in the family, my husband.” “Many men are incapable of anything other than a career and need someone to take care of them, like a mom.” “In nursery school it’s the boys who are always looking for mom.” “As a woman once told me, women can do everything, men can’t.” These statements, presented almost as if describing inherent superiority in femaleness, represent both a social myth that women are inherently stronger and a social reality that in certain ways we have made them so. While men still dominate the marketplace and in politics, we are beginning to see a trend of “alpha females” in academics—where women are dominating men in all subjects (one interpretation of this, of course, is that men don't try as hard academically because they know they don't have to). Turn on any sitcom and you are likely to see a fat, stupid, lazy husband, and an attractive, intelligent wife who can do it all. When we consider the way in which men are psychologically conditioned to feel insecure and that they have something to prove, these images almost seem to fan the flames of gender antagonism and encourage a reactive male desire to dominate women. One wonders if it is unintentional.
Laura Zimmer-Tamakoshi discusses an extreme form of male dominance in her article “‘Wild Pigs and Dog Men’: Rape and Domestic Violence as ‘Women’s Issues’ in Papua New Guinea” on page 550 of Gender in Cross-Cultural Perspective. In it she describes the political and social circumstances of Papua New Guinea. Colonial rule produces frustration among the people. Violence towards and rape of women serves as a sort of social outlet for men who feel that women are becoming too powerful and independent. They point to elite women as a scapegoat to explain their social woes. The ill-treatment of women by men was once accepted by both men and women as an appropriate sanction, but more and more women are coming to oppose this kind of violence as unacceptable.
Or consider the discussion of the Gusii in the article by Beryl Lieff Benderly, “Sexual violence is not innate; it depends on the status of women, the relations between the sexes, and the attitudes taught to children” below:
“'Normal heterosexual intercourse between Gusii males and females is conceived as an act in which a man overcomes the resistance of a woman and causes her pain,' writes Sanday. It’s customary for respectable old ladies to taunt the young bridegroom about his inadequate sexual equipment on the way to his wedding. He retaliates and asserts his manhood by bragging to his friends that he reduced his bride to tears on their wedding night, that she remained in pain the next morning. No wife respects a husband who fails to take her by force."
Certainly, then, these situations must be ones of patriarchy, in which men have more power than women, right? If that were really the case, however, why do these men feel so insecure? Why do they make elite women their scapegoat instead of all elites? Why do they feel that their violence towards women is right and good? Certainly we can see a parallel in the American South. The whites no doubt were the ruling class in that situation, yet the liberation of the blacks became a source of much dread and insecurity for them. They used blacks as a scapegoat and used violence as an expression of their displeasure. Perhaps we are merely seeing the same thing here? One wonders, however, if women do not have their own outlets of power, even in this social situation, to which men do not have access. If the model we seem to observe elsewhere holds here, women probably have a certain psychological security in their identity that the men in this situation lack. Perhaps the men resent the women for being able to maintain what, as men, was taken from them by force. If men are built to be warriors, dominators—are encouraged to show force and told, by society as a whole, that this is what makes them men, that this is what makes them worthy of life—it would seem insufficient at best and counterproductive at worst to then merely create another standard that tells them they are not allowed to be men. You tell them to dominate and then you do not like the way that they dominate—make up your mind.
(Just to be clear, I'm not saying any of this to justify rape. On the contrary, I wish to put an end to it. I'm merely trying to understand and discuss the cause and effect reality of the situation, which is essential for any fundamental change.)
Some feminists may feel that I am glossing over women’s issues by arguing that men are oppressed—a group that they see as the ruling class. Money, political office, physical dominance—these are the things that are important. These are the things that count. Psychological health? Social relations? Physical health (since men die younger)? Who cares. That is not important. That is not real oppression. But values are subjective. Things are important because you say they are important. I would hope that such feminists would come to appreciate that I am in truth their ally.
As long as you treat oppression from only one end (as the terms “feminism” and “patriarchy” suggest) you are working against yourself. When women are against men, you are creating struggle. When men and women are unified in the desire for mutual liberation because the current division of labor is mutually oppressive, you have developed an effective ideology for change. “From each according to ability, to each according to desire.” We should encourage individualism as well as community in such a way as to seek to maximize the potential of every individual, unlimited by rigid social definitions of what they should be. Women who want to be able to work and to become economically independent should be enabled to do so. Men who want to be self-sufficient and socially engaged should be enabled to do so. Everyone should be able to have a balance. Everyone should be able to feel complete and to go after their own joy in life, unobstructed by rigid standards that seek to turn them into mere instruments for the will of others. Our common enemy is a society that has come to use people as means to its ends, whereas society should be a means to our ends. The categories of masculine and feminine are as false and as much tools of oppression as the categories of race. The recognition of this matriarchy / masculinism as the shadow to the conscious division of patriarchy / feminism is a necessary development in the dialectic if a synthesis that will allow for genuine liberation is to be achieved. To the extent that you can play with gender roles and be master over them, they can be useful. But to the extent that they limit your self-actualization and self-determination they are abhorrent and have outworn their welcome.
Break old tablets!
1 Even all this, however, doesn’t come to us in neat little boxes. These are statistical norms, not absolute rules. Some degree of inter-sexuality in individuals is not entirely uncommon. Our culture only acknowledges two sexes, but other cultures define things differently. I am tempted to say that even biological sex exists more as a spectrum than as distinct categories, but even this seems to presuppose too much, as if an ideal masculine and ideal feminine existed as poles that things could be placed between. Besides ovaries and testicles, there are all sorts of qualities that we associate with being masculine or feminine, but these qualities exist as independent features that are only masculine or feminine because we say they are. The concept of some cosmic, essential “male” and “female” attributes becomes even more absurd as we look to the animal kingdom. What could be more aggressive than a lioness? What could be more sexually domineering (non-passive) than a female preying mantis? Sea horse and giant water bug fathers are the ones that get “pregnant,” not mothers. Among spotted sandpipers the female is the more aggressive and the male is the more nurturing of the young. While some of these sort of juxtapositions are only found in rare examples, they show that male and female roles are adaptive, not absolute. They are pragmatic styles that come about—not incarnations of essences.
Everything trades on definition. Men may dominate the public sphere, but does that mean that they have more power than women? Does that mean that they are better off? I intend to argue, rather, that all social divisions into “masculine” and “feminine” involve a trade off that is as oppressive of men as it is of women.
If we turn to page 190 of Gender in Cross-Cultural Perspective, we find David D. Gilmore’s article “The Manhood Puzzle.” In it he describes the process by which men are made, which is distinguished by the way women grow into womanhood naturally. While both men and women face standards concerning their sexual identity “Women who are found deficient or deviant according to these standards may be criticized as immoral, or they may be called unladylike or its equivalent and subjected to appropriate sanctions, but rarely is their right to a gender identity questioned in the same public, dramatic way that it is for men” (191). Men are pushed to live dangerously—to prove their male status. This is reinforced by both men and women: “men are encouraged to take risks with life and limb…they challenge fate by going on deep-sea fishing expeditions in tiny dugouts and spearfishing with foolhardy abandon in shark-infested waters. If any men shrink from such challenges, their fellows, male and female, laugh at them, calling them effeminate and childlike…youths fight in weekend brawls, drink to excess, and seek sexual conquests to attain a manly image. Should a man fail in any of these efforts, another will taunt him” (192). The process by which men are made is brutal, and their very value as human beings rests on their proving themselves men: “They must submit without so much as flinching under the agony of the knife. If a boy cries out while his flesh is being cut, if he so much as blinks an eye or turns his head, he is shamed for life as unworthy of manhood, and his entire lineage is shamed as a nursery of weaklings” (192). This degree is not always present, but this forging of men seems universal. “In urban Latin America, for example, as described by Oscar Lewis (1961:38), a man must prove his manhood every day by standing up to challenges and insults, even though he goes to his death ‘smiling’” (194). “In contemporary literary America, too, manhood is often a mythic confabulation, a Holy Grail, to be seized by long and arduous testing” (195).
Gilmore goes on to tie the brutal process of making and insecure state of holding manhood as the result of the Oedipal conflict that boys go through. The mother is the primary caregiver, and the father is a shadowy figure. The boy must be broken of his first role model, his mother, and thrust into a new state as a man. This model, however, relies on women, rather than men, being the primary caregivers. Why should this be the case? As we discussed before, the traditional division of labor seems to be drawn down biological lines. Women serve as the primary source of care, and men are forged into warriors.2 Men, as a collective, do not oppress women. Society (the superorganism) oppresses both men and women—treats them as things to be used instrumentally and to be thrown away at its discretion. There are women that support rigid roles for men and women, there are men that support rigid roles for women and men, and there is a sort of institutional inertia / collective unconsciousness / group dynamic that maintains old patterns somewhat independently of the conscious decisions of any particular individuals.
Nicholas W. Townsend discusses “Fatherhood and the Mediating Role of Women” on page 105. Men say that they want better relationships with their children than their fathers had with them, yet in reality this is not something they achieve. If a man gets divorced from his wife, he often also becomes divorced from his children—unable to relate to and be there for them. Why? Because his relationship with his children is mediated by his wife. The mother is the primary caregiver, and the father’s role with his children is determined by her. He is an alien—a stranger to his own children and in his own home. He is built to be a worker—he does not know how to relate to people on his own. We also see this manifest in Micaela Di Leonardo’s article “The Female World of Cards and Holidays: Women, Families, and the Work of Kinship” on page 380. Women control the social relations of the extended family and friends. I remember when I was a child feeling bad that, as a man, my children would always love my wife more than they loved me. I would have to be on the outside. This idea was repugnant to me.
Steve Payne’s article, “Why do we say, I do? There’s something about marriage” from the Toronto Sun, discusses the dominance that women enjoy. “I’ve got another kid in the family, my husband.” “Many men are incapable of anything other than a career and need someone to take care of them, like a mom.” “In nursery school it’s the boys who are always looking for mom.” “As a woman once told me, women can do everything, men can’t.” These statements, presented almost as if describing inherent superiority in femaleness, represent both a social myth that women are inherently stronger and a social reality that in certain ways we have made them so. While men still dominate the marketplace and in politics, we are beginning to see a trend of “alpha females” in academics—where women are dominating men in all subjects (one interpretation of this, of course, is that men don't try as hard academically because they know they don't have to). Turn on any sitcom and you are likely to see a fat, stupid, lazy husband, and an attractive, intelligent wife who can do it all. When we consider the way in which men are psychologically conditioned to feel insecure and that they have something to prove, these images almost seem to fan the flames of gender antagonism and encourage a reactive male desire to dominate women. One wonders if it is unintentional.
Laura Zimmer-Tamakoshi discusses an extreme form of male dominance in her article “‘Wild Pigs and Dog Men’: Rape and Domestic Violence as ‘Women’s Issues’ in Papua New Guinea” on page 550 of Gender in Cross-Cultural Perspective. In it she describes the political and social circumstances of Papua New Guinea. Colonial rule produces frustration among the people. Violence towards and rape of women serves as a sort of social outlet for men who feel that women are becoming too powerful and independent. They point to elite women as a scapegoat to explain their social woes. The ill-treatment of women by men was once accepted by both men and women as an appropriate sanction, but more and more women are coming to oppose this kind of violence as unacceptable.
Or consider the discussion of the Gusii in the article by Beryl Lieff Benderly, “Sexual violence is not innate; it depends on the status of women, the relations between the sexes, and the attitudes taught to children” below:
“'Normal heterosexual intercourse between Gusii males and females is conceived as an act in which a man overcomes the resistance of a woman and causes her pain,' writes Sanday. It’s customary for respectable old ladies to taunt the young bridegroom about his inadequate sexual equipment on the way to his wedding. He retaliates and asserts his manhood by bragging to his friends that he reduced his bride to tears on their wedding night, that she remained in pain the next morning. No wife respects a husband who fails to take her by force."
Certainly, then, these situations must be ones of patriarchy, in which men have more power than women, right? If that were really the case, however, why do these men feel so insecure? Why do they make elite women their scapegoat instead of all elites? Why do they feel that their violence towards women is right and good? Certainly we can see a parallel in the American South. The whites no doubt were the ruling class in that situation, yet the liberation of the blacks became a source of much dread and insecurity for them. They used blacks as a scapegoat and used violence as an expression of their displeasure. Perhaps we are merely seeing the same thing here? One wonders, however, if women do not have their own outlets of power, even in this social situation, to which men do not have access. If the model we seem to observe elsewhere holds here, women probably have a certain psychological security in their identity that the men in this situation lack. Perhaps the men resent the women for being able to maintain what, as men, was taken from them by force. If men are built to be warriors, dominators—are encouraged to show force and told, by society as a whole, that this is what makes them men, that this is what makes them worthy of life—it would seem insufficient at best and counterproductive at worst to then merely create another standard that tells them they are not allowed to be men. You tell them to dominate and then you do not like the way that they dominate—make up your mind.
(Just to be clear, I'm not saying any of this to justify rape. On the contrary, I wish to put an end to it. I'm merely trying to understand and discuss the cause and effect reality of the situation, which is essential for any fundamental change.)
Some feminists may feel that I am glossing over women’s issues by arguing that men are oppressed—a group that they see as the ruling class. Money, political office, physical dominance—these are the things that are important. These are the things that count. Psychological health? Social relations? Physical health (since men die younger)? Who cares. That is not important. That is not real oppression. But values are subjective. Things are important because you say they are important. I would hope that such feminists would come to appreciate that I am in truth their ally.
As long as you treat oppression from only one end (as the terms “feminism” and “patriarchy” suggest) you are working against yourself. When women are against men, you are creating struggle. When men and women are unified in the desire for mutual liberation because the current division of labor is mutually oppressive, you have developed an effective ideology for change. “From each according to ability, to each according to desire.” We should encourage individualism as well as community in such a way as to seek to maximize the potential of every individual, unlimited by rigid social definitions of what they should be. Women who want to be able to work and to become economically independent should be enabled to do so. Men who want to be self-sufficient and socially engaged should be enabled to do so. Everyone should be able to have a balance. Everyone should be able to feel complete and to go after their own joy in life, unobstructed by rigid standards that seek to turn them into mere instruments for the will of others. Our common enemy is a society that has come to use people as means to its ends, whereas society should be a means to our ends. The categories of masculine and feminine are as false and as much tools of oppression as the categories of race. The recognition of this matriarchy / masculinism as the shadow to the conscious division of patriarchy / feminism is a necessary development in the dialectic if a synthesis that will allow for genuine liberation is to be achieved. To the extent that you can play with gender roles and be master over them, they can be useful. But to the extent that they limit your self-actualization and self-determination they are abhorrent and have outworn their welcome.
Break old tablets!
1 Even all this, however, doesn’t come to us in neat little boxes. These are statistical norms, not absolute rules. Some degree of inter-sexuality in individuals is not entirely uncommon. Our culture only acknowledges two sexes, but other cultures define things differently. I am tempted to say that even biological sex exists more as a spectrum than as distinct categories, but even this seems to presuppose too much, as if an ideal masculine and ideal feminine existed as poles that things could be placed between. Besides ovaries and testicles, there are all sorts of qualities that we associate with being masculine or feminine, but these qualities exist as independent features that are only masculine or feminine because we say they are. The concept of some cosmic, essential “male” and “female” attributes becomes even more absurd as we look to the animal kingdom. What could be more aggressive than a lioness? What could be more sexually domineering (non-passive) than a female preying mantis? Sea horse and giant water bug fathers are the ones that get “pregnant,” not mothers. Among spotted sandpipers the female is the more aggressive and the male is the more nurturing of the young. While some of these sort of juxtapositions are only found in rare examples, they show that male and female roles are adaptive, not absolute. They are pragmatic styles that come about—not incarnations of essences.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
