Date: Wed, 12 Nov 1997 13:06:47 -0500 (EST) From: malgosia askanas <ma-AT-panix.com> Subject: M-FEM: Patriarchy (fwd) I am re-posting this from the anarcho-feminist list, because it touches on a discussion Yoshie tried to start here once, but which we never wound up having. -m ------------------------ Date: Wed, 12 Nov 1997 11:08:05 -0500 From: Jacqueline Sokolinsky <sokol-AT-bway.net> To: MujeresLibres-AT-tao.ca Subject: Re: Patriarchy Patriarchy is one of the most insidious and damaging of all systems of oppression percisely because it disguises its presence and threats under the mask of love and protection. It is hard for me to write "analytically" about a subject which is for me profoundly personal and immediate -- my caveat at responding to this, because I really don't want to resort to confessional cr stuff. Women are trapped in abusive marriages and other relationships all the time because they are so deeply convinced that they are incapable of fending for themselves in the world; this is a lesson taught them through "tenderness" as well as through beatings. How many vulnerable girls are trapped into prostitution by the same promise that a bourgeois man gives his own daughter: let me protect you? How many other girls join the ranks of disappointed women whose dreams of meaningful work were crushed by self-doubt after a long parade of family and professors urged them to use their educations to be "good mothers" instead of pursuing a career -- because a "normal" (not-neurotic) woman WANTS to be sheltered in the love of a man, goes the theory? How many others suffered bouts -- or worse -- of mental illness from the crushing of their personalities in the homes of "protective" fathers, husbands, or simply in the world which does not recognize the right of "unattached" women to exist? To summerize, in a more "theoretical" style: patriarchy oppresses by using emotional manipulation to trick women into trading their freedom for "security". When women subsequently experience the traumatic consequences of their loss of freedom, they are labeled "neurotic" and "maladjusted" and sent to psychiatrists or, alone and ashamed, read piles of women's magazines trying to be a "normal" woman. Patriarchy is, finally, probably the oldest of all the forms oppression takes. Before class there was patriarchy. Before racial categories were imagined, there was patriarchy. (I don't say all over, and I don't say it is something which simply "was" and is a part of humanity forever, I am simply pointing to its great age.) My point: patriarchy is the underpinning for the State itself, which borrows patriarchal ideology. You, as an American, are the vulnerable individual incapable of self-determination, whom the paternal State must lovingly care for, seperating you from a thousand "dangers" (war, "criminals", social "instability"...) But unlike the State, the powers of patriarchy are far more insidious because the oppression is tied to genuine enough love. I will stop here because if I go on I WILL get personal. Anyway, I'm sure there will be plenty of other responses. In solidarity, Jackie Sokolinsky sokol-AT-bway.net
Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005