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(Short bus class)
The subject of gender equality has been an active issue for all of my adult life. I have watched with mixed feelings as the women’s movement has belittled the very things which give their gender it’s strength, even while their male counterparts have increased their efforts to repress the women from fear of those very strengths which are being slandered. It is a sad fact that failing to repress the women folk far to many of these wanna-be men turn to abusing the women with physical violence. The focus of the lecture was physical abuse, as the most heinous of the abuses, but the physical misuse of the women folk is only one of several forms of abuse that has been installed in the anglo culture for many centuries now. Along with brutes taking advantage of sheer size the culture itself has launched any number of social and psyche assaults against the girls, from discriminations against their citizenship to corporate assaults on their inherent humanity: their right to vote or own property to their right to their own independent legal identity separate from their mate to commercial elements demanding they must validate their femininity, their sexuality, by purchasing the required components of womanhood from the fashion and cosmetics industries.
The culture at large is guilty of great hypocrisy in the job market and the realms of the interpersonal as well. By the laws now on the books it does not matter if a worker is purple with pink polka-dots and it takes three of their kind to make a baby: if a person does the work the person should be paid the same as anyone else doing the same type and amount of work. That justice is and continues to miscarry on this point is shameful.
This situation is not as bad now as it was, but it is still very much of a problem. Newer and more subtle weapons are being brought against the female of the species. It is a hard call for me to say which is the more wicked: the grotesque images found in deviant hard-core porn, or the secretly damaged and diminished lives of those grown to adulthood who fell prey to the Madison Avenue insecurity machine of the diet and cosmetic industries.
Having observed both it comes up about equal in my mind. One is as bad as the other, if not worse on a case by case basis. I suspect it would be easier for the porn model to forgive herself and find a new way to make money than it is for a hardcore anorexic/bulimic/compulsive eater to overcome the core deep fears which drive her and re-establish a normal self image and ego structure. Those who participate in the production of pornography are a very minor percentage, while those driven near despair by the advertising industry are a legion beyond count.
The point I should like to challenge, however, is one which is ultimately pertinent, and yet seemingly mentioned very little. I have heard only the most trifling of whispers in this area, and then only sporadically. In and amongst all the debate, division, academic discussion and analysis, self-help regimens and other such psycho-babble no one seems to be making a serious attempt to cure this problem at the only place where a fix might stick: no one is really asking with any intent of getting an answer to “what drives the males to take this position?”
In straight analysis it is apparent that these men, even those who are of lesser guilt, are spending an exorbitant amount of their time and energy on a pursuit which cannot generate any positive results. Social problems are full circuit phenomenon, one must understand the full path of the energies involved to descry the correct point to make intervention.
Women need men, and men need women. The survival of the species depends upon it. And in most cases so does the survival of the individuals, at least as complete human beings. Mother nature does not waste energy on what does not work, her processes of evolution cull such dead ends to preserve the remainder. Taking this self evident point to anchor the assertion that these behaviors cannot be instinctive one must then ask “what forces could be at play to produce behavior so counter to common sense?”
It is my opinion that the root causes of gender discrimination trace back to an attempt on the part of males to limit the number of competitive factors present in the search for a mate. The more advanced the culture the less advantage brute strength enjoys, and in the realms of raw intelligence the female is certainly the males equal, although perhaps focused in differing areas. The lesser males are fearful enough of the competition from other males, fears born of and cemented in the primal combats of physical prowess which established tribal pecking orders. Adding the additional fear of competition from the females in the realms of knowledge and intelligence is beyond their endurance.
In the modern world that half of males who are below the average of physical prowess may still compete successfully on the basis of intelligence, and that half which feels themselves below the average of intelligence may still compete on the basis of the physical. It is the remaining quarter, those who feel themselves, for whatever reason, to be below the averages in both areas which are the problem. It is these lesser males who must at all costs try and suppress the female. This percentage of the male population has motive aplenty to band together to build social structures which attempt to keep the female from assuming an equal status.
The raw problem then becomes one of supporting the ego structure of these lesser males without damaging that structure. When that structure no longer feels fear it has no further motive for the high energy effort required to maintain this repressive attitude. Relieved of this costly drain of resources the lesser males may find that they are not so handicapped as they had thought. But this is a problem both pernicious and pervasive, for in the modern society it is not objective measurement of abilities which determine this subset of mankind, but far more often a matter of self image which is spread like a communicable disease generation to generation.
Is it any wonder then that these males, who live in such an absolutely secret hell of a derogatory self image, would use this very tactic against the female? They work to create a culture which places on the females demands which, in reality, are as impossible for the girls to achieve as are the self-defeated self image they themselves endure. They work to create a culture wherein a percentage of females equal to their own number will fail the test of self image, so that there will be a population of their own kind from which they may take a mate.
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(from CompI... thoughts on required readings)
Saplings in the Storm by Mary Pipher
This essay, which would appear to be the introduction to a volume of collected case studies, is a perceptive and sad as a result of it’s perception reconnaissance across the landscape of the modern adolescent female. Pipher writes in a style which is at once gentle as a mother’s caress and stern as a surgeons scalpel, as one might expect from a veteran practitioner of the ancient art and modern pseudo-science of psychological counseling.
The text of this essay does not wander, but rather drifts over the subject under examination, in short anecdotes and vignettes recounting Pipher’s experiences while dealing with both troubled girls and their parents during her career as a counselor. In keeping with her title this is an appropriate strategy, for Pipher analogizes the changes of adolescence as a great and buffeting wind which blows away the self contained happiness of the “latent” female when the changes of puberty engulf her.
Unlike Faludi to follow, who is overtly feminist, Pipher deals with the female perspective on modern society from a curious and slightly skeptical vantage point consistent with a scientist of the female persuasion investigating the unknown in search of causal connections.
The thesis of this essay is presented almost five pages into the text, in a paragraph which begins with the sentence “Psychology has a long history of ignoring girls at this age.”(269). For the next two pages Pipher quotes from other sources in the process of defining her theories and approach to understanding at a personal, or tactical, level the forces both internal and external which cause such distress to her young clientele. In these key pages which Pipher no doubt intends as the perspective she hopes her readers will carry into the case studies Pipher sets forth three key concepts: firstly, that some collaboration of physiology and sociology is compelling a destructive division within the psyche of these girls, compelling them to exist on several contradictory levels: one the level of the self they have become throughout their childhood and the other the self they are compelled to believe must be in compliance to some externally defined ideal; secondly, that their inner self image is undermined when first they encounter the dichotomy between the self empowered confidence of childhood and the peer generated permissions of society; and finally the damage done by the incredibly contradictory and confusing signals generated by a society where the idealized female is both a most desired decoration and simultaneously the subject of blatant debasement played back against the deeper realization from an instinctive level demanding recognition of the fact that her responsibilities to her own life must be weighed in compromise with nature’s demand that her ability to gestate and nurture the next generation not be compromised. And all of this, as Pipher observes, when the girl has isolated herself from parental advice to take up the counsel of her peers who are just as embattled as she. Among the sadder facts of my own observations is how often these confusions become foundation level attributes of so many women, often seeming to endure deep into her life, a life damaged by these confusions and damaging to all around her for the same reasons.
In keeping with Pipher’s weather based metaphor I will close with the following analogy of her message: were a ship of the fleet named after Mary Pipher she should need be as swift and sea worthy a vessel as ever to ride the wave, a craft fit to challenge the very eye wall of the storm so that the good captain could look out at the boiling seas and swirling clouds of the hurricane from her chair on the bridge and need say no more than “storms be damned, those girls are drowning, not waving. Helm, take us in.”
Blame it on Feminism by Susan Faludi
In this essay Faludi is charting the society wide perils and pitfalls facing the first generations of American’s attempting to form a society without formally defined gender roles. In the opening six pages Faludi presents the media image of the liberated woman as a disillusioned and bitter old maid mourning the expiration of her “biological clock” and the prospect of a childless old age. In one particularly short and biting quote taken from the self-help manual Being a Woman Faludi presents perhaps the essence of the popular vision of the liberated woman she wishes to contest: “Feminism, having promised her a stronger sense of her own identity, has given her little more than an identity crisis.” (247). The futility of careerism as a motive for life is explored, as if this syndrome afflicts the female exclusively, and in paragraphs replete with multiple quotes she delineates how the female gender is coming to understand all of the multitude of stresses and conflicts which prior to feminism had been the exclusive burden of those “unfeeling, uncaring, insensitive, repressive” males which feminism so heroically contested to win women their “freedom”.
The second portion of this essay, slightly longer than the first, is dedicated to rebutting by misdirection the media based claims of the first section. Using extensive quasi-statistical data, Faludi proceeds into a non sequitur presentation of evidence to support claims of continuing socio-economic discrimination against women, claims which few if any deny.
What Faludi does not explore in this section is of far more import to her intention than what she does examine. The complaints of the first section are the complaints of anyone, male or female, who must make life altering choices whose full ramifications are beyond immediate recognition. Faludi builds a flawed argument asserting that the unhappiness felt when the deeply ingrained desire for the comfort of family and progeny has been sacrificed to careerism is the direct result of having been stymied in that careerism by discrimination, as if total success in one arena would remove the pain of less than desired results in a totally separate area of human existence.
What Faludi actually proves is that the American woman is free, free to compete against the seniority of the male in the world of business, to build her own “old girl” network which will favor the female over the male, free to sacrifice her maternal life to the cause of material self-sufficiency in support of personal “freedom”, and of a matter of course, free to do so without the support of governmental intervention or a legally bound male slave to subsidize her endeavors.
What Faludi studiously ignores is the fact that children are born of woman, and all of nature demonstrates the legitimate role of the male as supporting the welfare of the female as she undertakes the truly monumental task of nurturing those young lives until they are able to undertake achieving their own self sufficiency. The undertones of her argument are that independent women should receive the benefits which her married sisters enjoy without the requirement that she undertake the labor of love which is a family and be partner to the shared joys and tribulations which alleviate the unhappiness which is presented in the first section.
Faludi also ignores the imminently pertinent question of why so many women are placed in the position of being single or working mothers. She does not speak to materialism creating unrealistic economic expectations based upon media driven norms, nor does she address the short sightedness of one segment of society who concludes the other segment is free simply because the chains they wear are only visible to those who also wear them. She does not claim that the extreme instances of unhappy and embittered women reported in a sensationalizing media are false, but rather that all such claims great or small, public or private, are crimes to be charged to the account of the male of the species who, willingly or grudgingly, with or without prejudice for or against the presence of breasts, has at the insistence of his sisters allowed her to enter the world he has occupied since the beginning.
The most pertinent fact Faludi avoids, knowing it for the lethal blow to her argument that it is, is the historical fact that there has never been any group of new workers welcomed into an established economy as equals. The entire history of immigration into America screams this fact, but Faludi refuses to recognize the commonality between “Irish need not apply” and “we’ll hire you if you can start at (.7*male salary) dollars.” The discrimination she and her sister feminists are mistakenly attributing to their gender is nothing more, and nothing less, than the age old, perhaps ugly, perhaps wise realization that the more who draw from a finite source the smaller each portion becomes, as proven out by the remainder of the statistics which are not quoted. It is my considered opinion that these new workers are female is strictly a matter of social coincidence being exploited to sell books and lecture tours.
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