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Just in case you forgot what you were living in and tacitly supporting… from I Blame the Patriarchy.
“It’s like when I happen to run into the occasional woman who thinks Bust is a feminist magazine. Or maybe she believes that femininity is “natural,” or that “radiant skin” is desirable. Look at her sails! Her bloomy, billowing sails, bloated with hot wind! What can I do? If I don’t take that wind outta them things she might go around the rest of her life arguing that burlesque is an empowering form of feminine self-expression.
So I cram down her neck the truth that our patriarchal social order, despite what she’s been told since the cradle, doesn’t really have her best interests at heart. I explain that she is defined in this social order solely with respect to male interests, and that she is a member of an oppressed sex class out of which she may not opt, and that her success in life is entirely a matter of the degree to which she appeases her oppressor.
She protests. She demurs. She vituperates. She calls me a sex-hating harridan prude.
And then her lobe starts to pulsate. The mascara falls from her eyes. She grasps that, yes, patriarchy is founded on oppression and suffering, that Ponzi schemes and thread-count cons are logical consequences in a world order that is itself the Mother of All Scams, and most horribly of all, that she is both complicit and a dupe in the whole set-up.
Her life is ruined, and she has me to thank for it.*
Trust no one.”
Patriarchy offers so many yummy selections of shit sandwich for women. Rape culture, sexism, inequality are hallmarks of the patriarchal construction of our society. The implicit nature of Western patriarchal norms have nothing on what is going on in cultures where said norms are firmly entrenched in the bedrock of society. Modern medical technology coupled with ‘traditional’ societies views on women make female lives even more tenuous.
“Dr Neelam Singh is on the front line of India’s battle to save its girls.
Modern medical technology – specifically ultrasounds for determining the baby’s sex – coupled with ancient cultural values which give preference to boys, mean that hundreds of thousands of girls are never being born.
There were only 914 girls for every 1,000 boys under the age of six in India, according to the 2011 census, compared with 927 for every 1,000 boys in the 2001 census. Today’s ratio is the highest imbalance since the country won independence in 1947.
“I feel the demand [for abortions] every day,” Singh told Al Jazeera. “Parents say it’s important to have a son in the family. They want to keep their family name. I see this as the most heinous kind of discrimination towards a girl child.”
Outdated customs coupled with new technology = death for women.
“In India, there is a confluence of factors leading to passive infanticide, active infanticide or sex selective abortion,” Valerie Hudson, a professor of political science at Brigham Young University who studies birth rates, told Al Jazeera.
“Probably the most important is the tradition of dowry [payment to a prospective husband]. Having to marry a girl off may be the equivalent of several years of income for a family. A daughter is often seen as a thief who will rob necessary resources.”
Restrictive property rules, where inheritance is passed from father to son rather than to daughters, male dominated funeral rights and parental hopes that male breadwinners will support them through old age also play a part in skewing demographics, Hudson said.
The world’s largest democracy still fares better than China, where the ratio is 121 men per 100 women. Globally, 163 million girls have gone “missing” from the world’s population due to sex selective abortions in the last thirty years, according to the calculations of Mara Hvistendahl, author of Unnatural Selection.
By 2020, an estimated 15 to 20 per cent of men in some regions of northwest India will lack female counterparts. “In Punjab, there are entire villages with no girls under [age] five,” said Rohini Prabha Pande, an independent demographer who works on gender issues in India. “There are some districts with 700 girls per 1,000 boys,” she told Al Jazeera.”
It is an ugly cycle as high sex ratio’s favour a more traditional society which in turn promotes less female children which raises the sex ratio. A destructive positive feedback patriarchal loop in action.
“These massive social imbalances could spark a host of social problems.
“When 15 per cent of young adult males in your population will never become head of household or heirs you will alienate these men in ways that cannot be fixed,” Hudson said. Poor men will be the biggest losers in this equation.
“The historical record shows there can be distinct negative impacts on levels of violent crime, riots and rebellion against the state,” when large groups of single young men are alienated and lack family commitments, according to Hudson.
The lack of women is being felt by bachelors, policy makers and women’s rights activists across Asia. By 2020, China could be home to 40 million bachelors who won’t be able to find mates.
“North Korea’s largest export is women across their northern border with China,” Hudson said, noting that the ruling 
communist party is particularly worried about prospects for unrest from angry, unmarried men.”
Nothing like hoards of frustrated young men roaming about to stabilize your society.
“After India’s 1991 census, a prolonged campaign by women’s rights activists over the skewed child sex ratio led to the enactment of the Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act in 1994.
“Technology allowing families to detect the sex of a foetus at an early stage and plan for an abortion has been banned,” said Mohammed Asif, director of programme implementation with Plan India, an NGO which lobbies to save baby girls.
“The government’s law is stringent, but people have been trying to work around it, going to far away clinics and giving fake addresses. Loopholes have been exploited and a key strategy would be to take action against illegal ultra sound clinics,” Asif told Al Jazeera.
Other researchers don’t think legal changes are the best way to improve the situation. If cultural values discourage against having girls, families can find other ways of getting rid of them without advanced screening techniques.
“Ultra sound technology is just the latest wave to select a son preference,” Pande said. “In rural Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, you see a fairly balanced sex ratio at birth. But when you look at what is happening between birth and age six, they resort to traditional means of neglecting girl children. They are less likely to be immunised, less likely to be taken to a health centre and more likely to be chronically malnourished.”
When women lack autonomy and control of their bodies this sort of discriminate killing can happen as the norms of society trump their reproductive choices.
“Contrary to popular belief, education, status and upward mobility can actually make the problem worse.
“You have a much greater chance of survival as a girl baby if born to a poor family, rather than a rich family,” Hudson said. “Richer families have more assets which could be put in jeopardy by girls due to dowry payments,” she said, adding that wealthy groups worry about having their family name tarnished if their daughter marries from a lower class.
While national trends are cause for concern, the situation is improving in some areas. “Tamil Nadu is one of the few states where we have seen an improvement,” said Sharada Srinivasan, a professor of gender studies at York University in Canada.
In addition to counselling, and the creation of self-help groups for women, the southern state is using the carrot and the stick approach. “The government has created a massive cash transfer programme” to entice parents to keep baby girls, Srinivasan told Al Jazeera. Parents who commit infanticide are increasingly being prosecuted for homicide, she said.
Tamil Nadu also hosts some of India’s new outsourcing and information technology and these post-industrial jobs could improve women’s rights. “Before, women’s work was either at home or on the farm,” Plan India’s Asif said. “With globalisation, girls are now picking up jobs in banking, manufacturing and hi-tech. This is creating a lot of buzz in the family to start considering girls.”
While cash incentives, laws against gender selective ultrasounds, harsh punishments and economic changes all play a role, changing deeply ingrained social values is arguably the most important issue, and the most difficult.
Some communities in Punjab and elsewhere are taking collective pledges not to kill or abort girls, considering the practice a source of shame and an example of backwardness. This is where government policy ends and grassroots action begins.
“There is no way you can tax patriarchy,” Srinivasan said. “Public action has a role to play in changing social norms. History is full of examples of this.”
There are so many factors involved in the commodification of women. The dowry aspect, the class aspect, the inheritance aspect; all contribute toward the strengthening of the patriarchy and the continued abuse of women.
On a similar note, I’ve been down a similar road when discussion abortion with various anti-choice nutters over the years. This seems to be one of their examples they point to when they need example of how “evil” abortion is and all the human life lost. The skewed abortion rates in places like India and China are precisely that way because of the patriarchal rules that make women less than human. Consider that the quest for a male heir to carry on the family name and inheritance trumps any sort of choice/anti-choice discussion because it is not an issue: a male heir is required, end of discussion.
We do not hear about the oppressive nature of the society that perpetuates the sex selected abortions, oh no, it is usually just “They’re killing baaaaaaabies….” with no regard for the normative patriarchal precursors that set the stage for such a sad state of affairs.
(*update* – For a further breakdown on how the anti-choice gambit works, and how absurdly farcical it is, go to The Words on What.)
The only solution, treat women as fully autonomous human beings.
Learning about how our culture operates is critical for enlightenment and understanding. Jill from I Blame the Patriarchy shares her view on consent within the culture. In this case, a simple link would not do, as I want to copy/paste this concise definition in another spot on the internet, maybe pissing off some MRA’s in the process.
“For it is the stated position of the Savage Death Island Chapter of Spinster Aunts International that, in a patriarchy, “consensual sex” (between women and dudes) doesn’t even exist. This is because, in a patriarchy, agency is not conferred equally upon women and dudes. This untoward circumstance creates a contingency wherein the notion of consent is, for women, entirely non-substantive, a figment, a desperate fantasy invented to obscure the true nature of women’s status as the sex class. The true nature of our status as the sex class is, by the way, that we are imprisoned in a rape continuum. This continuum ranges from the “voluntary” performance of femininity (which quantifies women’s usefulness to men), to compulsory heterosexuality (which ensures availability to men), to pornography (which eroticizes inequality), to violent sexual assault (which is at the apex of the Global Accords Governing Fair Use of Women).
Wait. What?
The issue of consent — or, more precisely, the idea that women are considered by both custom and law to abide in a persistent state of always having given consent — is the absolute crux, nub, hub, axis, polestar, and epicenter of women’s oppression. The thing is, women can’t freely give consent because women can’t freely withhold it. “Consent” is a meaningless concept in the context of women’s reality.
In a patriarchy, women are, at essence, considered to be giant vaginas with the word “YES” stamped all over’em in red. Because of the sex-based power discrepancies inherent in our social structure, members of the sex class — that is, women — are always “yes” unless they specifically, adamantly, and in front of 3 witnesses with video cameras, say “no.” But even when “no” obtains, other (subjective and arbitrary) factors are almost always seen as mitigating it into a “yes.” Such as not saying “no” loud enough, not fighting back physically, being the dude’s girlfriend, or wearing a tight sweater.
Blueprints for understanding the perspective of the marginalized can often be summarized succinctly as “STFU and listen”. Here is a longer version though just to be extra clear. A big thanks to Shakesville for the summary.
This, then, is a very rudimentary, but also very straightforward, primer for dudes who want to communicate more effectively with female partners, friends, relatives, and colleagues during good faith conversations about feminist issues:
1. Every woman is an expert on her own life and experiences.
2. No woman speaks for all women.
3. No woman speaks for all feminists.
4. Because of the way cultural dominance/privilege works, marginalized people are, by necessity and unavoidability, more knowledgeable about the lives of privileged people than the other way around. Immersion in a culture where male is treated as the Norm (and female a deviation of that Norm), and where masculinity is treated as aspirational (and femininity as undesirable), and where men’s stories are considered the Stories Worth Telling, and where manhood and mankind are so easily used as synonymous with personhood and humankind, and where everything down to the human forms on street signs reinforce the idea of maleness as default humanness, inevitably makes women de facto more conversant in male privilege than men are in female marginalization. That’s the practical reality of any kind of privilege—the dominant group can exist without knowing anything about marginalized group, but the marginalized group cannot safely or effectively exist without knowing something about the privileged group and its norms and values.
5. Which is not to say that men can’t become fluent, with effort. But it is important to remember that it does take effort. Even though men’s and women’s lives can look so similar at first glance, it is shocking how very different they can actually be. (For example.)
6. A woman with intersectional marginalizations cannot wrench herself into parts. Asking a woman to set aside her race, or disability, or sexuality, or body size, or stature, or whatever, in order to discuss a “woman’s issue,” is to fail to understand that one’s womanhood is inextricably linked to the other aspects of one’s identity.
7. It is similarly unfair to ask a woman to leave aside her personal experience and discuss feminist issues in the abstract. You are discussing the stuff of her life. Asking her to “not make it personal” is to ask her to wrench her womanhood from her personhood.
8. You are not objective on women’s issues because you’re not a woman. Your perception is just as subjective as hers is, but for a different reason. Either we stand to be marginalized by privilege or stand to benefit from it. That’s the reality of institutional bias; it compromises us all.
9. Don’t play Devil’s advocate. Seriously. Just don’t.
10. Listen.
Discussing our society is difficult at the best of times. Getting a handle on some of the basics can never hurt as we struggle to make our civilization more progressive and humane. Toward that end a look at some of the salient features of how we have organized our society is in order. I’m borrowing from FinallyaFeminism101, a blog that helps set the stage and create the tools for discussions on how society has been structured.
**update** – A big thanks to Rob F from the Words on What for bring to my attention to a specific listing of male privilege on the blog, Alas a blog.
The first installment is about privilege or white male privilege (WMP) and how it affects all aspects of our society.
Privilege is: About how society accommodates you. It’s about advantages you have that you think are normal. It’s about you being normal, and others being the deviation from normal. It’s about fate dealing from the bottom of the deck on your behalf.
[Betty, A primer on privilege.]
Since social status is conferred in many different ways — everything from race to geography to class — all people are both privileged and non-privileged in certain aspects of their life. Furthermore, since dynamics of social status are highly dependent on situation, a person can benefit from privilege in one situation while not benefiting from it in another. It is also possible to have a situation in which a person simultaneously is the beneficiary of privilege while also being the recipient of discrimination in an area which they do not benefit from privilege.
Male privilege is a set of privileges that are given to men as a class due to their institutional power in relation to women as a class. While every man experiences privilege differently due to his own individual position in the social hierarchy, every man, by virtue of being read as male by society, benefits from male privilege.
When first dealing with the concept it might be easier to approach it from a systematic, rather than personal, approach. Consider what Lucy says here:
[T]rue gender equality is actually perceived as inequality. A group that is made up of 50% women is perceived as being mostly women. A situation that is perfectly equal between men and women is perceived as being biased in favor of women.
And if you don’t believe me, you’ve never been a married woman who kept her family name. I have had students hold that up as proof of my “sexism.” My own brother told me that he could never marry a woman who kept her name because “everyone would know who ruled that relationship.” Perfect equality – my husband keeps his name and I keep mine – is held as a statement of superiority on my part.
In this case the inequality is perceived, in part, because taking one’s husband’s name is considered “normal” for a woman, whereas choosing to keep one’s own name deviates from that. Popular culture often labels this behavior as “emasculating” to a man, but never bothers to question how a woman might feel being asked to give up something that has been part of her since her birth. This is an example of a culture of male privilege — where a man’s position and feelings are placed above that of the woman’s in a way that is seen as normal, natural, and traditional.
Going back to Lucy’s article, this is what she said in the paragraph directly preceding the one quoted above:
Male privilege may be more obvious in other cultures, but in so-called Western culture it’s still ubiquitous. In fact, it’s so ubiquitous that it’s invisible. It is so pervasive as to be normalized, and so normalized as to be visible only in its absence. The vast, vast, vast majority of institutions, spaces, and subcultures privilege male interests, but because male is the default in this culture, such interests are very often considered ungendered. As a result, we only really notice when something privileges female interests.
Most people do not think twice about a woman who shares the same name as her husband; they simply assume that the shared name is his family name. This is an illustration about how male privilege operates in stealth. When a wife does not share the same name as the husband, however, it often leads to confusion and even anger — as Lucy’s example illustrated. This is because the male-oriented option (wife taking husband’s name) is seen as default, and the neutral option (both parties keeping their original names) is a deviation from that norm and therefore comes across as privileging the woman because it doesn’t privilege the man.
It is important to keep in mind that the above example is not an outside incident; male privilege is an institutional problem that has a long history associated with it. In addition to her anecdote above, Lucy discusses how male privilege interacts with fandom; in “Occasionally Conversations with my Man Are Instructive” Ilyka talks about the impact of it in terms of male commenters on feminist blogs; and in her “Privilege in Action” series tekanji takes instances of privilege that she’s witnessed in various aspects of her life (both online and off) and deconstructs them, looking specifically at why they are problematic. All of which points to one thing: it’s not about one person saying or doing one thing, it’s about a whole lot of people saying and doing things that, collectively, end up giving men an overall advantage.
Sociological Images also comes through with some data about women and the workforce and the precentage of money they make in relation to a man doing the same job.
The misogyny of the past in the so called ‘civilized’ West is quite chilling. We often ascribe Female Genital Mutilation as am exclusive product of Islam and other cultures. We overlook the fact we had our own FGM establishment running strong and publishing articles in respected journals about the so called benefits of FGM.
It is most unfortunate that Ms.Gabor need to have her right leg amputated because of a stubborn infection that would not heal, even with the help of antibiotics. Ms. Gabor is 93 years old and as most people her age, her health is in decline. The twilight of Ms. Gabor’s life is not really the focus of the post. Her reaction to the media is.
“Gabor has used a wheelchair since she was partially paralyzed in a 2002 car accident, and she had a stroke in 2005.
She retreated from the spotlight after the accident and stroke. She liked staying home and watching soap operas, game shows and old movies, husband Prince Frederic von Anhalt told reporters in July.
She detested having her picture taken by the paparazzi while she was in her wheelchair. “She wants people to remember her as she was years ago,” von Anhalt has said.”
Of course, Ms. Gabor is a star and in the Hollywood game, image is everything, especially for women as their talent is often evaluated on a secondary, even tertiary basis when compared to their physical appearance.
The crazy looking glass that is Hollywood can sometime focus our attention on how our society systematically undervalues and denigrates women based solely on whether they are easy on the eye. Is it right to blame Ms. Gabor for trying to desperately avoid the media so “people [can] remember her as she was years ago”? I think not, as she understands the rules of the game all too well.
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