File spoon-archives/marxism-feminism.archive/marxism-feminism_1997/marxism-feminism.9707, message 140


Date: Thu, 24 Jul 1997 11:10:22 -0500
From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood-AT-panix.com>
Subject: Re: M-FEM: Enough telling off


malgosia askanas wrote:

>Yes.  The image seems to me gendered by virtue of the fact that for men
>it defines a societal expectation, a model (one of several) of what it means
>to be successful _as a man_.  The women you refer to are successful as
>Wall Streeters; their success _as women_ is regarded, at best, as ambiguous.
>A more exaggerated example of this would be male transsexual entertainers:
>I am sure many of them are successful precisely by virtue of assuming, mutatis
>mutandis, a traditionally female sexual persona -- of kitten, or dominatrix,
>or what have you.  But they don't make it as pop models of successful
>masculinity.  You might say that female Wall Streeters are regarded, in a
>more subtle way, as transsexuals.
>
>This is simply, it seems to me, the other side of the Madonna coin: if the
>feminine model of success is woven around the ability to get stuff out of
>men,
>the masculine one includes the ability to provide, through "legitimate"
>channels, the stuff that the women are supposed to be getting out.  Both
>models seems to me equally oppressive.

These may be our received impressions, but aren't things changing rather
dramatically? The criteria of the successful male and the successful
capitalist were once inseparable, but over the last 20-30 years, haven't
they come a little unstuck from each other? There are more women on trading
floors, in courtrooms, and even in boardrooms than there were even 10 years
ago. Today's Welleley undergrad, say, has never known a world in which
there weren't female financiers, lawyers, and executives. Things may look
very different for poor and working-class women; most of the highly
gendered non-professional occupations remain so (in the U.S., truck drivers
are almost all male, and secretaries almost all female - in numbers that
have barely changed over the last 20 years). But at the elite level, the
numbers have changed a lot. I'm certainly not arguing that work and
"success" have been rendered gender-neutral, but I think it's a lot more
complicated it was a generation ago.

Besides, Bill Gates isn't very "manly" in the traditional way. He's an
uber-geek. There's an industry joke that he named his firm after his penis.
Gates complicates the definition of manly sucess, emphasis on the manly.

Doug




   

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