Have you ever heard the phrase “hoist by his own petard”? As in the sentence “Newt Gingrich was hoist by his own petard: his general douchebaggery has probably cost him the presidency”?
Do you have any idea what a petard is?
Seriously. I have talked to dozens of people who have used the phrase, and not a single one of them knows what a petard is. The meaning is understood, but the words might as well just be a bunch of random syllables for all the meaning we’re getting out of them. According to Wikipedia, “hoist by his own petard” means “blown up with his own bomb,” that it derives from Hamlet, and that it was originally a fart joke, because Shakespeare.
You know what that means? The phrase “hoist by his own petard” has stuck around approximately three hundred years after anyone knew what the hell it meant.
The same thing is true with the patriarchy.
We’ve discussed in this blog before the practical problems with the term ‘patriarchy,‘ but I absolutely refuse to write an entire article using the phrase “the institutional, societal system of sexism” every two sentences, so we’ll just have to live with it. Just to be clear about my terminology use: “patriarchy” does not mean a gender system that benefits men, it means a gender system which benefits patriarchs. Men who are not hegemonically masculine get fucked over– whether they’re feminine, gay, unsuccessful, young, poor, of color, unathletic, or what.
Here’s the thing: our gender assumptions are not old. The whole “man goes to work outside the home, woman stays home” thing is not more than a few hundred years old at best– it got its start with the Industrial Revolution. Before that, the majority of people worked within the household, even if men and women tended to have different tasks; for most people, there wasn’t really an “outside the home” to go work at. (Note: I am generalizing over thousands of years of history here. The generalization usually holds true, but I don’t want to make the mistake of painting The Past as this homogeneous entity. It’s not.)
Even after the Industrial Revolution, a whole fuckload of people didn’t get to participate in the “domestic angel too pure for this sinful earth” separate spheres bullshit. Poor women, for instance, always worked. Women of color always worked. And I’m pretty sure there were a fuckload of slave women who would be quite surprised to discover how much their masters respected and honored women.
And then the Second Wave happened. I think it’s really difficult for those of us who grew up after the Second Wave to realize how much fucking changed because of it. When my mother was growing up, her teacher assigned her class to write an essay on what they wanted to be when they grew up, and told the female students they could write about how they wanted to be a teacher, nurse, or housewife. (My mother, being my mother, said that she wanted to be an acrobat.) When I was growing up, my teacher arranged for a female scientist to speak to us about how we could grow up to be whatever we wanted to be. It’s a completely different situation.
And then we get into the Petard Problem. Even though no one remembers what a petard is, we keep saying the phrase “hoist by his own petard,” because Tradition! Even though no one remembers why we’re supposed to believe all this crappy, patriarchal shit, we keep believing it, because Tradition!
Take the whole “golddigger” concept. The idea that men should pay for meals (to show off that they have money and hence are desirable). The Harlequin Romance guidelines that basically require that the hero be a member of the 1%. My grandmother’s advice that it’s as easy to fall in love with a rich man as a poor one. My father’s advice that, if I intended on being a writer, I ought to marry someone rich. I don’t think men get half this shit.
And the thing is, it makes sense! If, as a middle-class woman, you are not going to be able to work outside the home, it makes sense to select your husband as much for his earning capability as his personality, character, or forearms. Your economic stability for the rest of your life is going to depend on whether he has money. Whether you marry a rich man means the difference between going on nice European vacations and having to choose between food and rent.
But the thing is, now women can earn their own money. We don’t have to marry men to support us! We can marry men (or women, or miscellaneous) with charming personalities, good character, and nice forearms, who also happen to make poverty-level wages, and then support them! Or, more realistically, given the levels of assortative mating, make poverty-level wages together.
And the weirdest part is that as I write this I feel a kind of… instinctive revulsion. On an intellectual level, I know that a poor woman is exactly as desirable as a poor man, and yet I cannot help but think that the waitress swept away by a dashing entrepreneur is a romantic heroine, and a waiter swept away by a dashing entrepreneur is kind of a loser. This shit is buried down deep.
But that doesn’t change the fact that all this “women should marry a rich man” stuff is just… hangovers. Random detritus left over. Strategies that, in their time, were logical and helped people, but have long outlived their usefulness– just like “hoist by his own petard” was once a vivid image and apparently a fart joke, but has long outlived its meaningfulness.
“Speaking as a woman, I’d take your trade in a heartbeat. ” I can see how life seems much easier for men but the price is lack of freedom – something one easily takes for granted when one has never experienced a life without it. It’s a classic reaction we can see elsewhere too. After the wall came down, a few years later, people started longing for the “good old days” and the simplicity of life under government oppression. They simply forgot what it cost them and only remembered the good things. A similar thing we see when people long… Read more »
Oh, and I’d take women’s fashion freedom over men’s fashion oppression ANY DAY. With freedom comes more choices and they’d obviously make that more complicated. While we often hear women complaining about how much depends on their fashion sense, I doubt very much they would want to swap with men on this one. It’s always easy to take freedom for granted. Speaking as a woman, I’d take your trade in a heartbeat. That would mean that I could walk into any “professional wear” store and get a properly tailored suit right? And that once I knew the tailoring for my… Read more »
@ T Even Steve Jobs got called out not long ago by AT&T “suggesting” he wore a suit. While he refused dismissively, the mere attempt to make him conform is very telling. Imagine things had gotten difficult for Apple for whatever reason. We can bet the criticism of his public appearance would have grown. The point is that nobody is safe from the conformist crowd not even your 0.01%. In fact, they are especially restricted. I would like to postulate that, the higher up you climb in the “patriarchy”, the more you are pressured to conform. The evidence for this… Read more »
@Adi, young Steve Jobs wore a suit when he still had to rely on investors for money…but even then, his shameless casual-wearing habits could only be afforded by the 0.01% :V
@ Patches I think you’re massively oversimplifying the “patriarchy” as everyone likes to do. First of all, your reasoning rests on a simplistic ruling class vs underclass model. You just presume that rising up in the ranks gives you more freedom to break from conformity. This is gravely mistaken. At best it depends on what you’re doing. In Entrepreneurship, you can SOMETIMES get away with being not quite conformist. Steve Jobs is a good example as I don’t think I’ve ever seen him in a suit. But still, his clothes were just casual. I doubt he’d have been able to… Read more »
@Ozy: Xakudo: In a certain sense, I am a radical feminist: a lot of my basic theoretical framework comes from radical feminism, I just took a left turn at Albuquerque when everyone else took the right. What definition of radfem are you using? Because it seems like we could just as easily say that in a certain sense you are an MRA, too. And sure, most modern mainstream feminism has adopted certain things from radical feminist thought. The whole privilege framework derives from radical feminism, IIRC (which in turn got it from Marxism, IIRC). I hardly think that makes them… Read more »
If you have such a problem with patriarchy, then why not use the more accurate kyriarchy? The structural, institutional, microaggressions, and miscellaneous aspects of oppression do not correlate along only gender lines. There’s class, race, sexuality, disabled/non-disabled, age, religion, and even other crap that matters even less — like political affiliation. More importantly, even extremely “masculine” (whatever that means) men get effed by patriarchy. It’s really only the top 1%, the white, straight, able-bodied, old rich Christian men who benefit from the kyriarchy. Shoot, the top 1% aren’t even wholly hegemonic anymore, though they are mostly. I think, like the… Read more »
Ozy while I’m all for what you say here for the most part there is one thing I have a bit of an issue with: Just to be clear about my terminology use: “patriarchy” does not mean a gender system that benefits men, it means a gender system which benefits patriarchs. Men who are not hegemonically masculine get fucked over– whether they’re feminine, gay, unsuccessful, young, poor, of color, unathletic, or what. Surely you don’t think a man getting fucked over hinges on whether or not he is hemogenically masculine do you? We’ve discussed in this blog before the practical… Read more »
@Adi Alright, alright. So I was a little imprecise. Let’s try this again: The point that Ozzy is driving at is that the rules of our society operate to protect the PATRIARCHS who sit at the top, and that our obsession with the implication that “the patriarchy” means that “men don’t get oppressed” misses the point. It means that there is a collection of rules and cultural memes that define behavior on a way that controls people beyond what’s probably required for polite society and pushes into “we want to define who gets to be in charge and who doesn’t.”… Read more »
Xakudo: In a certain sense, I am a radical feminist: a lot of my basic theoretical framework comes from radical feminism, I just took a left turn at Albuquerque when everyone else took the right. Just a Metalhead: Yep, thanks. 🙂 Like I said, I was generalizing massively… I mean, even if you just look at the Greeks, the Spartans and the Athenians had massively different gender roles for their upper class (Spartan women did much of the routine work of the city while their husbands were off soldiering). In the cities of Renaissance Europe, I’m told, you’d quite often… Read more »
@AB: Could you give some examples of those contradicting definitions? In the case of the word patriarchy, Ozy’s OP here illustrates it well: […]“the institutional, societal system of sexism” every two sentences, so we’ll just have to live with it. Just to be clear about my terminology use: “patriarchy” does not mean a gender system that benefits men, it means a gender system which benefits patriarchs[…] There are plenty of feminists who disagree with this definition, and would argue that, yes, patriarchy does mean a gender system that benefits men. It’s the same kind of feminist that would argue that… Read more »
“I’ve heard that before, but not only is it not that contradictory (both statements agree on the basics), it’s also the same situation with every single other system in which one group has had power over another.”
That depends what you consider the basics. In my opinion the two are radically different. And yes this is a question that is relevant in any situation where power is unequaly distributed among groups
Just an historical correction. The idea that “women work in the house, men work outside the house” didn’t originate in the Industrial Revolution. It goes back much farther than that, however, it was mainly a high- or ruling-class idea. Whether it be nobles or rich merchants, the tradition that women shouldn’t have to work and that men had to administer the external affairs like trade and war was well-entrenched probably for millenia. What writings we have from the Greeks (more precisely, Greek elites) imply the same idea that women stayed in the home as much as possible, whereas the men… Read more »
@ Patches, I’m having a hard time following your reasoning. I’m not even clear if you agree with me or not. “Your CHOICES can also be influenced by the actions of the patriarchy..” What are these “actions of the patriarchy” and how do they influence your choices any differently to how anything that happens around us influences our decisions – from bad weather to mainstream advertisement? “Ozzy also implies something in that statement that isn’t always clear: Your masculinity is always on trial. EVEN if you’re the leader in your group, there is almost nearly someone to whom you need… Read more »
Patches asked, “when I say “starving artist” you think “male” don’t you? Can you imagine how much a woman would be badgered for being single and pursuing a non-lucrative dream!?”
No, I don’t think of a male.
Women,in my experience, are encouraged to follow their dreams while men are encouraged to work. Personal fulfillment vs feeding the beast.
And, single men are often seen as losers. As in, why can’t they find a woman? Where people say, “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle”.
Sorry from my perspective reality is not as you describe or suggest.
So men who are “hegemonically masculine” don’t get fucked over?
And what does “hegemonically masculine” mean? What percentage of men are “hegemonically masculine”?
What about the “hegemonically feminine”. What percentage of women are “hegemonically feminine”? And do these women benefit from the (so called) patriarchy too?
What Patches said.
“When will you people start accepting the fact that men get screwed over even when they are normal masculine white etc.?”
We DO. 90% of the posts on this blog are about how traditional gender rules hurt everyone.
@JE:
I’ve heard that before, but not only is it not that contradictory (both statements agree on the basics), it’s also the same situation with every single other system in which one group has had power over another.
@Adi There ARE two sides to this issue. I think there are three central things at work here: 1. Your CHOICES can also be influenced by the actions of the patriarchy, even if you belong to a patriarchal phenotype. It would explain why so many of my friends went into consulting after pursuing math or economics degrees and espousing the most liberal philosophies in college: because money and success are GOOD THINGS and the pressure to pursue them over happiness is great (doubly so if you blew all your $$ on an Ivy-league education). 2. HOWEVER, as Ozzy points out,… Read more »
“Men who are not hegemonically masculine get fucked over– whether they’re feminine, gay, unsuccessful, young, poor, of color, unathletic, or what.” It’s sentences like this that prevent me from seeing this blog as a place for true equality. Even though I’m one of those non-hegemonically masculine men, I do not want that alone to be the reason why feminists give a flying f*** about discrimination that affects me. When will you people start accepting the fact that men get screwed over even when they are normal masculine white etc.? It’s the same old feminist dogma that men cannot be discriminated… Read more »
Most people who point it out see it as an issue of wether it’s “some people have power and they’re all men” or “all men have power”.
@Xakudo:
Could you give some examples of those contradicting definitions? Because I’ve heard a lot about how necessary it is to stop talking about it, but I have never heard anyone make an argument for it, except “In some specific situations, two people might not always agree about whether something is patriarchal or not”, which seems to hold true for most words.
Isn’t Kyrachy the new term for this though?
We all hoist ourelves by our own petards when we adopt other people’s standards and definitions as our own without proper thought, then try to blame “society” for our resulting predicaments. Your mother did not fall into this trap, obviously. She somersaulted her way right out of that ol’ teacher’s attempted hypnosis re: gender roles!