The Gender Knot: |
| "Twenty-five men and women gather for a workshop on gender issues in the workplace. In a simple opening exercise, they divide into small single-gender groups and brainstorm four lists: the advantages and disadvantages of their own gender has in the workplace, and their perception of the advantages and disadvantages the other gender has. The women dive into the task with energy to spare that gets more intense as their lists of women's disadvantages and men's advantages spill over onto second and third flip-chart pages. Sometimes the energy comes out in waves of laughter that role out into the room and wash up on the still quiet shore of men's groups. At other times it's felt simply in women's furious scribbling of one item after another: paid less, held to higher or double standards, worked harder, granted little power or respect, judged on physical attractiveness more than performance or ability, confined by glass ceilings, not taken seriously, sexually harassed, given little support or mentoring, allowed little space or privacy, excluded from informal networks, patronized, expected to do "housekeeping" chores from taking notes to getting coffee, treated as weaker and less intelligent, often denied credit for ideas appropriated by men, and treated without recognition of the family roles that also claim their time and energy in a society that makes few such demands on men. |
| "On it goes. The men work in tight-knit little groups on the fringes of the women's energy. Surprisingly for many, their lists are quite similar to the women's lists, if a bit shorter. Men miss many of the forms that advantages and disadvantages take, but in a basic sense, they know very well what's going on. They know what they've got and what women don't. When the men are done, they stand and watch the women, still at work, in awkward silence. After a while each group shares what it's come up with. There is some good-natured if somewhat nervous laughter over the inevitable throw-away items: men don't have to wait in line to use the bathrooms; men can get away with simpler and cheaper wardrobes. But there soon follows a steady stream of one undisputed fact after another about how gender shapes and limits the lives of women and men in the workplace and beyond. The accumulated sum hangs heavy in the air. There are flashes of anger from some of the women, but many don't seem to know what to do with how they feel. The men often just stand and listen, muted, as if they'd like to find a safe place to hide or a way to defend themselves, as if the lists were about them personally. In response to questions about how the lists make them feel, one man says that he wants to hang onto the advantages without being part of their negative consequences for women. 'Depressed' is a frequent response from women. |
| "A silence falls over the room, and in the silence, two things become clear. The lists say something powerful and serious about people's lives. And don't know how to talk about them. If we don't know how to talk about them, we certainly don't know what to do about them. The result is a kind of paralysis that hangs in the air. The paralysis reflects not only where this particular group--and many others like it--finds itself as it confronts the reality of gender inequality, but where entire societies are in relation to these issues. Where we are is stuck. Where we are is lost. Where we are is deep inside an oppressive gender legacy, faced with the knowledge that what gender is about is tied to a great deal of suffering, injustice, and trouble. But we don't know what to do with the knowledge or the trouble, and this binds us in a knot of fear, anger, blame, defensiveness, guilt, pain, denial, ambivalence, and confusion. We're unsure of just about everything except that something is wrong and we're in it up to our necks. The more we pull at the knot, the tighter it gets. |
| "We're trapped inside a legacy, and its core is patriarchal. To understand it and take part in the journey out of it, we have to find ways to unravel the knot, and this begins with getting clear about what it means to be inside a patriarchal legacy. To get clear, we first have to get past the defensive reaction of many people--men in particular--to the word "patriarchy" itself, which they routinely interpret as a code word for "men." . . . patriarchy is not simply another way of saying 'men.' Patriarchy is a kind of society, and a society is more than a collection of people. As such, 'patriarchy' doesn't refer to me or any other man or collection of men, but to a kind of society in which men and women participate. By itself this poses enough problems without the added burden of equating an entire society with one group of people. |
| "What is patriarchy? A society is patriarchal to the degree that it is male-dominated, male-identified, and male-centered. It also involves as one of its key aspects the oppression of women. Patriarchy is male-dominated in that positions of authority--political, economic, legal, religious, educational, military, domestic--are generally reserved for men. Heads of state, corporate CEOs and board members, religious leaders, school principals, members of legislatures at all levels of government, senior law partners, tenured full professors, generals and admirals, and even those identified as "head of household" all tend to be male under patriarchy. When a woman finds her way into such positions, people tend to be struck by the exception to the rule, and wonder how she'll measure up against a man in the same position. It's a test we rarely apply to men ('I wonder if he'll be as good a president as a woman would be') except, perhaps, on those rare occasions when men venture into the devalued domestic and other 'caring' work most women do. Even then, men's failure to measure up can be interpreted as a sign of superiority, a trained incapacity that actually protects their privileged status ('You change the diaper, I'm no good at that sort of thing'). |
| "In the simplest sense, male dominance creates power differences between men and women. It means, for example, that men can claim larger shares of income and wealth. It means they can shape culture in ways that reflect and serve men's collective interests by, for example, controlling the content of films and television shows, passing laws that allow husbands to rape their wives, or adjudicating rape and sexual harassment cases in ways that put the victim rather than the defendant on trial. Male dominance also promotes the idea that men are superior to women. In part this occurs because we don't distinguish between superiority of positions in a hierarchy and the kinds of people who usually occupy them. This means that if superior positions are occupied by men, it's a short leap to the idea that men must be superior. If presidents, generals, legislators, priests, popes, corporate CEO's are all men (with a few token women as exceptions to prove the rule), then men as a group become identified with superiority even though most men aren't powerful in their individual lives. In this sense, every man's standing in relation to women is enhanced by the male monopoly over authority in patriarchal societies. |
"Patriarchal societies are male-identified in the core cultural ideas about what is considered good, desirable, preferable, or normal are associated with how we think about men and masculinity. The simplest example of this is still widespread use of male pronouns and nouns to represent people in general. When we routinely refer to human beings as 'man' or to doctors as 'he,' we construct a symbolic world in which men are in the foreground and women in the background, marginalized as outsiders and exceptions to the rule. (This practice can back people into some embarrassingly ridiculous corners, as in the anthropology text that described man as a 'species that breast-feeds his young.') But male identification amounts to much more than this, for it also takes men and men's lives as the standard for defining what is normal. The idea of a career, for example, with its 60-hour weeks, is defined in ways that assume the career-holder has something like a wife at home to provide the vital support work of taking care of children, doing the laundry, and making sure there's a safe clean, comfortable haven for rest and recuperation from the stress of the competitive male-domnated world. Since women generally don't have wives, they find it harder to identify with and prosper within this male-identified model. |
| "Another aspect of male identification is the cultural description of masculinity and the ideal man in terms that closely resemble the core values of society as a whole. These include qualities such as control, strength, efficiency, competitiveness, toughness, coolness under pressure, logic, forcefulness, decisiveness, rationality, autonomy, self-sufficiency, and control over any emotion that interferes with other core values (such as invulnerability). These male-identified qualities are associated with the work valued most in most patriarchal societies--such as business, politics, war, athletics, law, and medicine--because this work has been organized in ways that require such qualities for success. In contrast, qualities such as inefficiency, cooperation, mutuality, equality, sharing, compassion, caring, vulnerability, a readiness to negotiate and compromise, emotional expressiveness, and intuitive and other nonlinear ways of thinking are all devalued and culturally associated with femininity and femaleness. |
| "Of course, femaleness isn't devalued entirely. Women are often prized for their beauty as objects of male sexual desire, for example, but as such they are often possessed and controlled in ways that ultimately devalue them. There is also a powerful cultural romanticizing of women in general and mothers in particular, but it is a tightly focused sentimentality (as on Mother's Day or Secretaries' Day) that has little effect on how women are regarded and treated on a day-to-day basis. And, like all sentimentality, it doesn't have much weight when it comes to actually doing something to support women's lives by, for example, providing effective and affordable child day-care facilities for working mothers, or family leave policies that allow working women to attend to the caring functions for which we supposedly value them so highly. |
| "Because patriarchy is male-identified, when most women look out on the world they see themselves reflected as women in a few narrow areas of life such as "caring" occupations (teaching, nursing, child care) and personal relationships. To see herself as a leader, for example, a woman must first get around the fact that leadership itself has been gendered through its identification with maleness and masculinity as part of patriarchal culture. While a man might have to learn to see himself as a manager, a woman has to be able to see herself as a woman manager who can succeed in spite of the fact that she isn't a man. As a result, any woman who dares strive for standing in the world beyond the sphere of caring relationships must choose between two very different cultural images of who she is and ought to be. For her to assume real public power--as in politics, corporations, or her church--she must resolve a contradiction between her culturally based identity as a woman, on the one hand, and the male-identified position she occupies on the other. For this reason, the more powerful a woman is under patriarchy, the more 'unsexed' she becomes in the eyes of others as her female cultural identity recedes beneath the mantle of male-identified power and the masculine images associated with it. With men the effect is just the opposite: the more powerful they are, the more aware we are of their maleness. Power looks sexy on men, but not on women. |
| "But for all the pitfalls and limitations, some women do make it to positions of power. What about Margaret Thatcher, Queen Elizabeth I, Catherine the Great, Indira Gandhi, and Golda Meir? Doesn't their power contradict the idea that patriarchy is male-dominated? The answer is that patriarchy can accommodate a limited number of powerful women so long as the society retains its essential patriarchal character, especially in being male-identified. Although some individual women have wielded great power, it has always been in societies organized on a patriarchal model. Each woman was surrounded by powerful men--generals, cabinet ministers, bishops, and wealthy aristocrats or businessmen--whose collective interests she supported. and without whom she could not have ruled as she did. And not one of these women could have achieved and held her position without embracing core patriarchal values. Indeed, part of what makes these women stand out as so exceptional is their ability to embody values culturally defined as masculine: they've been tougher, more decisive, more aggressive, more calculating, and more emotionally controlled than most men around them. These women's power, however, has nothing to do with whether women in general are subordinated under patriarchy. It also doesn't mean that putting more women in positions of authority will be itself do much for women unless we also change the patriarchal character of the systems in which they operate. Indeed, without such change, the Margaret Thatchers of the world tend to affirm the very systems that subordinate women by fostering the illusion of gender equality and by embracing the patriarchal values on which male power and privilege rest. |
| "Since patriarchy identifies power with men, the vast majority of men who aren't powerful but are instead dominated by other men can still feel some connection with the idea of male dominance and with men who are powerful. It is far easier, for example, for an unemployed working-class man to identify with male leaders and their displays of patriarchal toughness than it is for women of any class. When upper-class U.S. President George Bush "got tough" with Saddam Hussein, for example, men of all classes could identify with his acting out of basic patriarchal values. In this way, male identification gives even the most lowly placed man a cultural basis for feeling some sense of superiority over the otherwise most highly placed woman (which is why a construction worker can feel within his rights as a man when he sexually harasses a well-dressed professional woman who happens to walk by). Lina Wertmuller beautifully portrays this dynamic in her film, Swept Away, in which a working-class man is marooned on an island with an upper-class woman. Although disadvantaged by class, he's very aware of his right to sexually dominate any woman he chooses, which he uses to accomplish a temporary overthrow of her class privilege. Under patriarchy, this scenario would have little credibility or mainstream audience appeal if we reversed the situation and had a lower class-woman subdue and dominate an upper-class man. The objection is not based on social class but on its threat to the gender order that subordinates women. She wouldn't be seen as bold or heroic; rather, he would would be judged for his lack of masculine power and control. |
| "In addition to being male-dominated and male-identified, patriarchy is male-centered, which means that the focus of attention is primarily on men and what they do. Pick up any newspaper or go to any movie theater and you'll find stories primarily about men and what they've done or haven't done or what they have to say about either. With rare exceptions, women are portrayed as along for the ride, fussing over their support work of domestic labor and maintaining love relationships, providing something for men to fight over, or being foils that reflect or amplify men's heroic struggle with the human condition. If there's a crisis, what we see is what men did to create it and how men dealt with it. |
| "If you want a story about heroism, moral courage, spiritual transformation, endurance, or any of the struggles that give human life its deepest meaning and significance, men and masculinity are usually the terms in which you must see it. (To see what I mean, make a list of the twenty most important movies you've ever seen and count how many focus on men as the central characters whose experience forms the point of the story.) Male experience is what patriarchal culture offers to represent human experience and the enduring themes of life, even when these are most often about women in the actual living of them. Films about single men taking care of children, for example, such as Kramer vs. Kramer and Sleepless in Seattle, have far more audience appeal than those focusing on women, even though women are more likely to be single parents. And stories that focus on deep bonds of friendship--which men have a much tougher time forming than women do--are far more likely to focus on men than women. In the closing scenes of Dances with Wolves, for example, the white male hero and his Native American-raised wife leave his recently adopted tribe, which is also the only family she has known since early childhood. The focus, however, is clearly on the drama of his moment as she looks on supportively. She is leaving her adoptive parents, but we see only the emotionally charged parting (with a touching exchange of gifts) between son- and father-in-law. And the last words we hear are the deeply moving cries of a newfound warrior friend testifying to the depth of feeling between these two men (of which, oddly, this is the only expression we ever see). By contrast, films that focus on women, such as Girlfriends, Leaving Normal, Passion Fish, Strangers in Good Company, and Thelma and Louse, are such startling exceptions that they invariable sink quickly into obscurity, are dismissed as clones of male themes ('female buddy movies'), or are subjected to intense scrutiny as aberrations needing to be explained. |
| "A male center of focus is everywhere. Research makes clear, for example, what most women probably already know: that men dominate conversations by talking more, interrupting more, and controlling content. When women suggest ideas in business meetings, they often go unnoticed until a man makes the same suggestion and receives credit for it (or, as a cartoon caption put it, 'Excellent idea Ms. Jones. Perhaps one of the men would like to suggest it'). In classrooms at all levels of schooling, boys and men command center stage and receive the lions share of attention. Even when women gather together, they must often resist the ongoing assumption that no situation can be complete or even entirely real unless a man is there to take the center position. How else do we understand the experience of groups of women who go out for drinks and conversation and are approached by men who ask, 'Are you ladies alone?' |
| "Many men, however, will protest that they don't feel at the center of things, and this is one of the many ironic consequences of patriarchal male privilege. In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf wrote that women often serve as 'looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size. Woolf's insight suggests several things about what happens to men in patriarchal societies. As part of men's patriarchal training, they are affirmed through what they accomplish. This contrasts with women, whose training mirrors then in different ways, affirming them less for what they accomplish than for their ability to empathize and mirror others as they form and maintain personal relationships. If men want to satisfy the human need to be seen and acknowledged by others, it will be through what they do and how well they live up to the standards of patriarchal manhood (which is one reason why male friendships tend to focus so heavily on competition and doing things together). This affects both individual men and patriarchy as a system, for men's focus on themselves ('See me!') and women's focus on others reinforces patriarchy's male dominance by making it easier for men to concentrate on enhancing and protecting their own status. |
| "Another consequence of patriarchal mirroring is that heterosexual men in particular are encouraged to relate to women with the expectation of seeing only themselves. When men's reflection is obscured by the reality and demands of women's own lives, men are vulnerable to feeling left out and neglected. Like cold-blooded animals that generate little heat of their own, this dynamic makes it hard for men to feel warm unless the light is shinning on them at the moment, something well-known to wives, who spend inordinate amounts of time worrying about whether they're paying enough attention to their husbands, about whether they should be sitting quietly and reading a book or spending time with women friends when they could be with the men in their lives. It is a worry few men wrestle with unless their wives complain. |
| "All of this is compounded by the expectation that in order to feel normally alive men must be reflected as larger than life. This makes it difficult to develop an acceptable sense of themselves as ordinary human beings with a relatively stable center from which they can relate to other people. As a result, feeling themselves the focus of a one-way flow of attention is the closest that patriarchal training allows many men to come to authentic personal relationships. This shouldn't be confused with most of what passes for 'male bonding.' When men get together with other men, they typically are male-centered in the general sense of focusing attention on men and what men do. On an interpersonal level, however, men generally don't put other men at the center of their attention because they are in competition with one another and because they are too busy looking for someone to put them at the center. As I've wrestled with the difficulty of forming friendships with other men, for example, it's both puzzled and pained me to realize how rarely it occurs to me to telephone a male friend simply to ask how he is, to place his life at the center of my attention at my own initiative. For many years I simply couldn't see the point to it. I was in the middle of one of many patriarchal paradoxes: that men live in a male-centered society and yet act as though the reality of other men's inner lives matters very little. |
| "Although men generally don't provide one another with the kind of mirroring they expect from women, they do play a part in fostering the illusion of being larger than life, especially through competition. When men compete, they enter the pumped-up world of winners and losers, in which the number of times a ball goes through a hoop or is carried over a line elevates men over other men (and, by default, over all women) in ways judged to be important in patriarchal culture. If ever there was an assertion of larger-than-life status, the triumphant shout of 'We're number one! We're number one!' is it. (Not asked is, For how long? Compared to whom? So what?) Even the losers and the male spectators share in the reflected glow of the noble masculine striving after the coveted opportunity to stand before the mirror that makes us look bigger than we are, if only for a little while--until the next season begins or someone faster, stronger, or younger comes along. |
| "All of this, of course, is impossible for men to sustain. Women have distracting lives of their own in spite of their training to keep men at the center of their attention. And the fleeting moments of actually living up to expectation of being larger than life are just that. As a result, patriarchal expectations that place men at the center paradoxically perch men just a short drop away from feeling that they aren't at the center and, therefore, on some level, that they don't exist at all" (p. 3-11). |