Patriarchy hurts men too: contradiction in social institutions - Essay Example

?Patriarchy (and the Law) Hurts Men Too: Contradiction in Social s [ID In a multi-causal social world, all factors have to be taken as ceterus paribus, or all else held equal. Institutions like patriarchy, the state, race, capitalism... they are all immensely complex and have numerous, often paradoxical, goals, methods and results. Oprah is a black woman with immense wealth, influence and power. “Black” and “woman” are categories which are normally not thus associated. Whilst many men are in a privileged position because of their sex, and virtually all men are positioned as men in a superior way, some are disadvantaged by patriarchy and the law; in fact, all are disadvantaged in terms of the serious costs of patriarchy even for the oppressor or superior class. The role of patriarchy in altering patterns of privilege, availability of resources, value of one's labor, etc. is obvious to any serious sociological observer. In the UK, “British women are under-represented in Parliament, paid less than men at work and increasingly being sent to prison for committing minor offences” (Verkaik, 2008). The UN found evidence of patterns of gender discrimination across major swaths of society (Verkaik, 2008). The example of discrimination in minor offences is particularly interesting as, in general, men commit far more crimes and are punished far more often (Kanazawa, 2008). In general, the criminal justice system works against men (but in a paradoxical way as we shall see that still reinforces patriarchy), so this change is particularly noteworthy. Similarly, a major study found that “[a] partnered mother with a child aged under 11 is 45% less likely to be in work than a partnered man” (BBC, 2007). The study's researchers claim that this discrimination costs ?28 billion annually, an important fact that indicates that patriarchy has complex costs that are not just localised onto women. In the legal industry in particular, despite the number of women increasing in the profession to close to their numerical representation in the population, there is still persistent discrimination such as the “mommy track”, an “old boy's club” of elite lawyers at the top of the profession who are primarily white males and control promotion patterns and the distribution of good cases. Looking even further, comparatively or in other institutions, does not end the litany. Women face systematic discrimination in media, industry, employment and the economy. In America, a country with very similar social circumstances to the UK, the Glass Ceiling Commission, which includes among its founders conservative politicians such as Bob Dole, argued in their seminal 1995 report, “Minorities and women are still consistently underrepresented and under utilized at the highest levels of corporate America. For example, 97 percent of the senior managers of Fortune 1000 Industrial and Fortune 500 companies are white,and 95 to 97 percent are male; in the Fortune 2000 industrial and service companies, only 5 percent of senior managers are women, and almost all of them are white; African American men with professional degrees earn 21 percent less than their white counterparts holding the same degrees in the same job categories. But women and African Americans are not the only ones kept down by the glass ceiling. Only 0.4 percent of managers are Hispanic, although Hispanics make up eight percent of America’s workforce. Asian and Pacific Islander Americans earn less than whites in comparable positions and receive fewer promotions, despite more formal education than other groups”. The Economist declared in 2009 that, despite fifteen years of change in corporations, in most European countries all that has changed in any serious way is “the mindset of... businessmen”. In Australia, also a Anglo-Saxon country, women have been graduating from law schools at as high a rate as 60% of their graduating classes yet female solicitors are one-quarter as likely to be partners as men and are only 18% of barristers practicing law (McLeod, 2008)! Though women tend to be full-time workers just as often as men, they are far more likely to do the additional fourty hours of work a week of domestic tasks in families (Hochschild, 1991). It is possible to go on for hundreds of pages in this vein. Suffice it to say that, in the UK, women continue to face discrimination, sexism and patriarchy in law (particularly family law), the economy, the criminal justice system, promotion, hiring, firing, psychiatry and psychology, depictions in media such as news, television and film, and otherwise systematically throughout society (Teo, 2005, Chapter 7; Rutherford, 2007; Thomas, 2010; Walter, 2010; UMSU, 2010). This much is simple to establish. What is even more simple to establish is the utter failure of comparable analyses of men to demonstrate a comparable pattern of discrimination. While analysing the men's rights movement is a difficult and complex task, suffice it to say that their criticisms of feminism tend to fail on three levels: First, they don't even bother to deny consistent discrimination nor the disproportionate presence of men in the halls of economic and political power; second, they tend to be exclusively about fighting against feminist initiatives rather than advancing men's interests per se like the right for men to wear skirts; third, they tend to point to vectors such women doing better in the educational system and getting more Ph. Ds without following through and seeing if there is any broader implications like women getting less tenure track positions (FanPop, 2010; Mason, 2010). But this clear tendency of women to be discriminated against doesn't mean that all men are complicit in that discrimination, or that all men are advantage, or even a majority. More careful analysis is needed. Some obvious philosophical and sociological correctives have to be noted to address rampant misconceptions. First of all, it is important to note that gender and race are ascribed statuses at birth (Schoepflin, 2010). While teaching two basic concepts in sociology this semester-- ascribed status and achieved status --I gave the usual examples for each. An ascribed status is involuntary, something we cannot choose. Race, ethnicity, and the social class of our parents are examples of ascribed statuses. On the other hand, an achieved status is something we accomplish in the course of our lives. To some extent, achieved status reflects our work and effort. College student, college dropout, CEO, and thief are examples of achieved statuses. (I made a sarcastic comment in class that some CEOs are thieves, but no one laughed. I’ll try that joke again next semester.) Then I brought up homelessness as an interesting status to think about. Many people think homelessness is definitely an achieved status. They see homelessness as a result of a poor work ethic or irresponsible lifestyle choices. But when you think more deeply about homelessness, you gain an understanding that homelessness can be considered an ascribed status in many cases. (Schoepflin, 2010) Many people clearly do embrace their racial or biological sex, but many don't: Transgendered people and people who “pass” as another race or adopt mannerisms common to another culture clearly don't. When people discuss the behavior of capitalists or politicians, they are pointing to statuses that are earned over time by the decisions of those people. Politicians and bureaucrats are elected or appointed. It's difficult to claim that a corporate executive who despoils the land can't help it, but when a white person claims that they are not responsible for their white privilege or a man claims that they aren't responsible for patriarchy, the claim holds much more merit because there is no choice that's possible to renounce those privileges. Wise (2005) makes clear in White Like Me that race and gender privilege are not asked for by their recipients, but those recipients then have the choice to unproblematically and unapologetically deploy that privilege, try to renounce it (itself a “privileged move”) or try to use it for good and work with people of color and women to end racism and patriarchy for everyone's sake. This is important to decode the statement, “Whilst many men are in a privileged position because of their sex, and virtually all men are positioned as men in a superior way, some are disadvantaged by patriarchy and the law”: This can be true because men are given the privilege and its associated costs without ever being asked. Second, not every social phenomenon effects everyone evenly. In fact, the idea that exceptions to rules always disprove rules is utterly at odds with even basic science. The fact that human beings are bipedal is not disproven by a human mutant with three legs or someone who has lost a leg in an accident. At quantum levels, many elements of classical physics break down, but that doesn't make those laws valid when they apply. The fact that someone doesn't get an infectious disease from being around someone else with it, or doesn't get cancer from second hand smoke, doesn't disprove that diseases are spread in an infectious pattern by carriers or the influence of second hand smoke on cancer. Perhaps the most salient analogy to drive home this point is that, while many Jews survived the Holocaust, this does not disprove the fact that the intended policy of the Holocaust was their complete eradication. Phenomena are complex, and encounter other competing phenomena; there are probabilities, chances and likelihoods rather than certainties. But that doesn't disprove the immense weight of those probabilities. This ties into gender analysis because, while it is certainly true that there are many men who are poorer than many women, or many men who because they are effeminate are mocked and thus do not reap the full benefits of male privilege, and so forth, this doesn't disprove the model that patriarchy overwhelmingly serves to advance men and impede women. Exceptions always exist, but as we've established, the averages are clear: Women tend to earn less, be less represented in parliament, etc. Third, one has to control for other social factors. It is irrelevant to the claim that women earn less to point out a rich woman. In a multi-causal world, one must hold all other factors equal. Very few of those who try to deny the salience of patriarchy would deny that supply and demand tend to determine pricing, or that an increase in supply tends to lead to a decrease in price, yet there are many times when that is not the case in basic economics due to the presence of another factor, such as a government or private monopoly that always charges a specific price for a good. Once one controls for race, class, national origin, disability status, and a host of other factors, women are on average treated worse than men. A good way of thinking about this is as competing forcefields. A black woman has two forcefields pushing down: Her race and her gender status. A white man has two forcefields pushing upwards: His race and his gender status. But the black man and the white woman are more complex, because they have one forcefield pushing up and one pushing down. Finally, “patriarchy hurts men too” (Redfern, 2003). Again, a good analogy can be made to other elements of life. In World War II, the average German was miserably poor near the end of the war, facing bombed-out buildings and constant attack. Yet it was better to be German than to be Jewish. That example is particularly important because, to no small extent, it was the German-ness, and the superiority of the German over the Jew in terms of social outcomes and benefits, that led to the war. The same social factors that privileged Germans over Jews also allowed the rise of Nazism which in turn led to a situation that was bad for everyone. Wise makes this clear in White Like Me as it applies to sexism and racism (2005, 119-150). There are costs for the victor class, some of which are lesser versions of the costs incurred by the losers and some of which are totally unique. Each deserves commentary. Of the first type, women are not the only people constructed into strict gender roles that harm them and serve to limit their mobility and choices of options and presentations of self. Men also face those issues clearly and prominently. Men are required to embrace hyper-masculinity, never admit feelings, never once be like a woman even if they might prefer to be so for a brief moment. But the relevant point here is that, even if a man does fail to be a man, he can only decline as far as a woman already is, not much further. It's true that very poor whites as a parallel example can suffer terribly from economic dislocation and the inability to get a good job, but they always have the ability to clean up and potentially be assumed to be one of the club. Women can never ascend to the status of men, but an emasculated or effeminate man can regain his perceived masculinity and thus emerge victorious once again. Of the second type, Wise points to white people who, in focus groups and discussions, end up finding it very hard to describe what they like about being white aside from what they don't have to endure (not being pulled over as often, for example; 2005). But black participants can list a litany of things they enjoy about their racial status: Music, food, the love of the community, spirituality, shared values. Similarly, women do get some advantages men don't get. Women are able to express their feelings without social reprisal: This can be an advantage when they are feeling depressed and need to seek a human connection. Wise (2005) points to the Columbine shootings, where SWAT members were unable to enter because if they did anything wrong, they would be sued by the white middle-class parents of Littleton. Every other day of the year, being white would benefit them; but that one day, it would harm them because their parents' privilege would be deployed against them, paradoxically. However, both these examples do not disprove the general point of patriarchy. Why? Because women are hurt far more. In the feminist blogger community, the slogan PHMT is used: Patriarchy Hurts Men Too. It states, simply and unequivocally, that men are hurt by patriarchy. Feminists disagree about whether men are ‘damaged by patriarchy’ to the same extent as women (or at all), but all feminists...would accept that men are stereotyped and limited by the mainstream notion of macho masculinity...[M]ainstream masculinity is flawed and problematic. Most feminists would argue that apart from some fairly obvious physical differences, men and women are actually pretty much the same, except for the fact that men are trained to be ‘men’ and women are trained to be ‘women’. The kind of thinking that says ‘women have always been and always will be like this and men have always been and always will be like that’ is an idea called biological determinism. This is the idea that men and women’s behaviour, brains, and everything else, are totally different and prescribed by ‘nature’ or genes, or whatever. That’s why the determinists argue that women are just more suited to doing the housework because they are gentically programmed to be good at vacuuming and dusting, and men are generally more suited to lying around drinking beer. Women just naturally, genetically, want to get breast implants, liposuction and botox injections...Feminists are the least likely people to say ‘all men are bastards’. Some of them might say ‘many men behave like bastards’. But they don’t imply that such behaviour is acceptable because its genetic or ‘natural’ for men to behave that way, like those arguments defending rapists which imply that men are really all just stupid cavemen who can’t be blamed when they rape because, hey, men just can’t help it when they see someone in a mini skirt...That’s because actually, feminists think men should be treated as fully functional human beings with brains and morals who should be held responsible for the choices they make. (Redfern, 2010) Masculinity is limiting. It sets men up for violence instead of caretaking. It argues that their bad behavior should be excused because they are somehow incapable of controlling their instincts. It sets men up for a fall when they begin to perceive that their privilege is fading and don't know how to deal with it. There are many pathologies associated with having privilege, with having everything go one's way. The key point, though, is that for men, they get privilege and costs, while women gets costs and a few things that try to but fail to mitigate those costs. It's about the package. Men get to have their viewpoints accepted as the norm and women's the (occasionally right) secondary corrective, get to get the best jobs, make more money, ascend to the halls of power, and have the legal and political systems of the country work for them. Women do not. A good example of these contradictions plays out in the criminal justice system. As we've already seen, men commit more crime (Kanazawa, 2008). They are tried and punished for more crimes than women. Why would this not disprove patriarchy's existence? Putting someone into jail is a sign that they're a threat. It is in some ways an empowering exercise: This thief is capable of harm. The justice system just assumes that women can't commit an assault, or a rape, or a theft, because they don't have the potency or strength. It is important to note that no man is underprivileged as a man. They may face problems due to individual background and coincidence, like being in an accident or having a genetic ailment. They might be underprivileged because they are gay, reaping only half the benefit of gender relations that heterosexual men get. They might be underprivileged because of other social factors, like being black or being poor. And they may get only part of the benefit of being men due to their individual proclivities such as being too compassionate or effeminate. But they always have the ability to play the game once more, and those who don't know them will overwhelmingly assume until proven otherwise that they are as capable as men are supposed to be. Many men are victims of their own gender and sexuality. Many men are poor despite being men. Many men face difficult circumstances such as abusive families or being locked into jail. The law, particularly the criminal justice system, acts against them because of patriarchal assumptions about male proclivities for violence. But this does not disprove the overwhelming advantages that men have over women. Patriarchy in the UK is a real phenomenon, in law, economies and so forth. Works Cited I. Journals and Newspaper Articles Nedelec, G. 2007, “Discrimination against Women Lawyers in England and Wales”, (2007) Gender Forum 17. BBC. 2007, “Mothers face 'job discrimination'”, 27 February. 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Fall 2007. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb1412/is_3_16/ai_n29398466/ The Economist. 2009, “The glass ceiling”, May 5 Weisberg, DK. 1996, Applications of feminist legal theory to women's lives: sex, violence, work, and reproduction. Temple University Press.- Weiss, DC. Women Underrepresented in Ranks of Top Law Review Editors. ABA Journal. August 24, 2010. http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/women_ underrepresented_in_ranks_of_top_law_review_editors/ Wise, T. 2008, “The Tyranny of Not-So-Independent Variables: ?Racism, Sexism and the Deceptive Social Science of the Far Right”, Alternet, Available at: http://www.timwise.org/2008/05/the- tyranny-of-not-so-independent-variables- II. Books Wise, T. 2005, White Like Me, Soft Skull Press. Read More