The Gender Order of Things

This gender rewrite has been going on ever since the women’s movement began sometime before or after 1969. By now, the litany (mainstream and not so mainstream) is pretty much locked in. Without changing the basic institutions that help keep women (and men) in a constant state of confusion about what’s what with gender oppression, the result, in popular consciousness, is that some feel feminists have won their rights and should shut up and move on. Others feel that feminists went too far and won too much and it is now men who are oppressed. 

While these gains confirm the importance of the women's movement, in the absence of institutional changes, gains are often mixed blessings, making many women confused about the benefit of fighting for them at all. For instance, the family wage for men has been replaced by women’s right to compete. Women’s greater access to “independence” has been matched by economic insecurity and women doing double duty. Greater personal freedom and sexual autonomy has often made women more vulnerable to exploitation and abuse.  

Activism had been marginalized into separate “women’s spheres of women’s concerns,” which are considered “lesser.” Women who choose to work on other issues find that the intersection of class, race, and gender is often subsumed under a more traditional “working class” politics—working class still being consciously or unconsciously thought of as mostly blue collar white men. 

The result is that, while women can be mobilized around discrimination or violations of individual rights or to better the lot of the poor and disadvantaged, there is little coherent organized raising of consciousness about revolutionary change. As Brenner points out, women join in family “partnerships” based on gender divisions of labor in which men specialize in income earning while “helping” out at home, while women specialize in care-giving while helping out with income earning. Women, more often than men, must limit education, enter less competitive workplace situations, or accept more flexible part-time work. Women must try to maintain partnerships in isolation and to find work with some value, while sexist media messages bombard them from all sides. 

Mainstream media (through books, magazines, TV ads and shows, movies) hammer women with images of ravaged, passive, anorexic females. Other images keep women in a constant state of insecurity about their weight, skin tone, hair color, size and shape of their facial features, breasts, thighs, etc.  

Popular psychology presents sexism as just a lack of communication that can be solved by understanding each other better. There is no oppression of one gender by another, no patriarchy in the “men are from Mars, women are from Venus” thesis that has been popular for many years. Rather, men and women are described as being from two different cultures and our “problems” can be solved by better communication and by spending money on books and lectures by experts who are not interested in challenging the basic institutions, such as patriarchy, that perpetuate sexist oppression. 

Popular evolutionary psychologists and biologists use dubious “scientific” studies to promote the view that the male and female division of labor evolved over millions of years and these “differences” are now embedded in our genes and brains. Men and women are genetically different along stereotypical lines (what a surprise) that cannot be changed. Rather, say the pop “scientists,” why not celebrate the fact that men are men and women are women. Just because women are genetically programmed to be more “nurturing, communicative, and passive” doesn’t mean they’re inferior, they say. In fact, they’re poised to take power in the new information technology. Suddenly, the very traits imposed on them and used to make them the property of men for thousands of years are now the traits that will liberate them. 

Women can defy convention, leave friends and family, and become part of feminist culture—and hopefully find a job they can tolerate and live on; or they can continue to accept their so-called “god-given” roles as dependent wives and mothers in households headed by men, where their lives are defined for them; or women can work and consume in a mainstream society where feminism has become a lifestyle choice, devoid of all radical politics. 

In this lifestyle feminism, fashion magazines define liberation and women’s images for them and these images change from moment to moment. Feminist liberation is anything that sells a product. A woman can be competitive, yet sweet as pie; adventurous, yet a helpless bimbo; intelligent, yet totally without a clue; strong, yet starving enough to be a walking skeleton; aggressive, yet scared of her own shadow; independent, yet helpless; equal, yet inferior; important, yet irrelevant; fascist about her politics, revolutionary about her makeup. In this lifestyle feminism, revolution is a makeup by Revlon who is “changing the world one face at a time.” Controlling your own body means having breast surgery “for the shape that says you love yourself.”  

Perhaps, most importantly, one of the basic tenets of sexism remains unchanged and unchallenged: that is, the deeply held belief that man is the essential, the quintessential human being. Woman, then, is defined in relation to him. She can never be equal, she can only be what she is—i.e., not a man.  

T he women’s movement changed history, reaching into every home, school, business, and workplace. But it wasn’t able to translate political consciousness into concrete revolutionary social change. It criticized institutionalized sexism, but left sexist institutions in place. It challenged institutions, criticized them as patriarchal and undemocratic, and then women proceeded to join them. It left the institutions in place so that its victories could and often did disappear with the pounding of a gavel in a courtroom.  The Cinderella fantasy still lurks around every corner, in every movie house, telling younger generations of women that they should be longing for salvation and protection in the arms of a prince. We are left straddling between being legally blonde and/or being fantasy heroines (or CEOs) who show cleavage, as if that will help us annihilate the enemy (or get a corporate job where showing cleavage is praised as being liberated at the same time as it is the brunt of sexist comments and jokes). 

Also, until recently, there has been no articulated vision or solidarity among leftists in the U.S. Instead, there was a legacy of distrust, some as a result of experiences working together, some from inequalities among us, some from personality clashes that become insurmountable in movements where we are all supposed to love each other and be equal. 

Still other problems result from political differences having to do with disagreements about the centrality of Marxist ideas and their limits regarding feminism, racism, hierarchy, and even class. Marxist feminists believe women’s liberation lies in women’s participation in the labor movement; radical feminists see the original class division as that between the sexes and liberation will come from the elimination of obligatory sexualities and sex roles. Socialist feminists see the intersection of class and gender requiring an overthrow of capitalism and patriarchy. Liberal feminists see the problem as one of civil rights. Some Black feminists oppose white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, others see race alone as the defining issue. We often became trapped in internal competition for “who is the most oppressed,” resulting in a hierarchy of oppressions, each group guilt tripping the other. White feminists distrust white leftists, black feminists distrust white feminists, and working class radicals distrust leftists who seem to come from elite backgrounds. Anarchists distrust left organizations that are structured like corporate firms. Sectarian organizations with party lines and hierarchical, anti-democratic structures disrupt attempts to move forward collectively. 

Clearly, the oppressions of class, race, and gender must be looked at together. They are connected in the world and should be connected in our theory, practice, strategy, and vision. Many activists have been attempting to make these connections and to encourage solidarity among radicals, rather than distrust and competition. The anti-globalization movements and world social forums have been a step forward in dispelling this legacy of distrust.  

Additionally, with the slogan “another world is possible,” many have pushed for what is often being called participatory democracy. As a result, the possibilities for radical social change seem greater now than at any other time in history. Revolutionary feminists who have tried to raise consciousness about the way sexism is maintained in our societies through laws, cultural images, dehumanization, science, fear and violence, control of our bodies via reproduction and sexuality, and a hierarchical, racist, and patriarchal division of labor need to become central to this global movement. 

There are, of course, numerous women already involved, but too much of the social forums—and other global efforts—lacks sufficient gender focus. There is a sense that a  focus on class, rather than a more inclusive analysis, is in command. In addition, there are always concerns about the tendency, because of our socialization, for women to “end up” as secretaries, there to assist and record decisions made more often by men. Then there are the subtle things that go on, such as: when most men talk in meetings, they are listened to; when women talk, most men wait until they’ve finished, then go on to address what the men have said. There are also concerns about the still recurring dynamic that women are important in activist groups as they are sexually available to men. 

If these and other concerns are left to fester, there is a danger of these exciting long-term global movements self-destructing, as past movements have done. 

Among many options, we spend our days, unsettled and unsatisfied, critiquing the gender order of things as it plays out in the mainstream. Additionally, we can continue doing “double duty,” judging and correcting individual men’s behavior in our “equal” partnerships at home as well as men’s individual and group behavior inside various organizations and movements. 

But this is getting tiresome. For some of us it's been going on for 25 to 30 years or more. Isn’t it time to join with others who are beginning to answer the question, “As activists, what do we want?” Isn't it crucial now for revolutionary feminists to push aggressively, publicly, and globally for a total social vision of what we want? We should not only be creating, together with men, a vision of “life after capitalism,” we should also be creating a vision of “life after patriarchy,” as well as a vision for a “life after white supremacist capitalist patriarchy,” that is, for a wide-ranging, diverse participatory society.