She brings up first the matter of how establishments maintain their dominance:
Enforcement alone, whether by physical or legal means, is rarely successful in the long term because of the conflict and resistance that it inevitably fosters.
Justification is far more effective. It works by persuading subordinate individuals and groups that there are valid reasons for their own inferiority and equally valid reasons for the enhanced status of those who are designated superior.
My first note here is that, throughout this chapter, she seems to work from the perspective that thought systems work only from the top-down, with the least dominant basically acting as passive sponges for the viewpoints of the dominant. I'm not sold on this point: human brains are pretty obsessive about interpreting things in a non-dissonant way, and I don't see why many establishment-promoting beliefs couldn't, or wouldn't, be provided by the oppressed classes themselves. The possibility I'm suggesting works like this: underprivileged classes are trying to find a way to explain their lack of privilege, and would be unlikely to accept that they're lazy, since that would conflict with their views of themselves as basically good, hard-working people; unless they're fairly cynical, they're unlikely to believe that the upper classes are evil, since that could conflict with their view of the world as basically just; so that leaves the conclusion that the upper classes just deserve it, somehow. I think this is especially likely, in many cases, because throughout Western history, at least, it's been common practice for the rich (and especially rich women) to dispense of their largess through charity and philanthropic works. Religion could also play a part here; if God's in control of everything, why would He put these evil people in control? It's very difficult for most people to accept that someone could, on the one hand, donate heavily to charity, and on the other hand promote slavery, abuse, and imperialism, or other abominations, so I don't think it's absurd to suppose that at least a few of them would conclude on their own that the privileged were so simply because they deserved to be so. In practice, this does tend to benefit the continuation of whatever regime happens to be in power at the time, but I don't think it's necessary to assume that this is directly or entirely the doing of the regime itself.
Also, I think these kinds of things can become self-fulfilling prophecies: when people make these sorts of rationalizations, they frequently begin to act in accord with them, or, when someone identifies a negative trait in themselves, saying "Well, it's not my fault, that's just how my gender is" can be a powerful excuse to not rectify that kind of behavior, even when it happens again in the future.
A final note: something strikes me as a little odd. If the people in charge of education usually made use of that power to benefit themselves, even at the expense of others, and women had virtually sole charge of children, frequently in schools as well as the home... wouldn't women therefore have used that power to benefit themselves? This is sort of where I see that logic headed, like the way that radical masculists will invert feminist thought and argue that clearly we live in a matriarchy and that women are making use of their power to indoctrinate children while they're still young and "feminize" them. It's a bit ridiculous, but the mainstream feminist interpretation seems to have some of the same issues - clearly, there's more going on here than that.
She goes on:
Studies have shown that people react differently to tiny babies according to their perception of the child’s sex. Babies perceived as female are treated with greater care and gentleness whilst being spoken to quietly and soothingly.
Infants perceived as male elicit an opposite response, being handled with greater physicality and being spoken to in louder and more jocular terms, all based on the ‘common sense’ understanding that girls are ‘feminine’ and boys are ‘masculine.’
Everyone has a working knowledge of what these terms mean and this is invariably couched in bipolar terms. Blue-pink, hard-soft, active-passive, the bigendered nature of humanity seems to fill it with a desire to divide its world in half – and then to use this demarcation as a basis for the allocation of power, opportunity and advantage. The problem for women, however, is that the masculine half of the equation has always appropriated far more than its fair share of half of all available resources, rewards and authority.
I want to emphasize the point about males being handled more roughly than females, even when they're newborn and there's no physical difference between the sexes that would justify such treatment, because as we go deeper into the book, that general point is going to become more important.
I also, as you should probably be able to guess by now, take a little exception to the last sentence I quoted; I'll grant that men had more authority than they deserved, but I'm less sold on the rewards and resources, and even less sold on the unmentioned sacrifices. When a woman marries a rich man, she probably enjoys the servants, cakes and fancy clothes just as much as he does; and I know that corsets are uncomfortable, but then so is military training, sleeping in campgrounds, and getting shot, and I don't think you can argue that wearing a corset is any less a choice than being drafted.
Again, I want to stress that women's issues are important, and whatever discrimination men face would never lessen the issues faced by women, or make them any more acceptable - but still, when people say that women are the primary victims of traditional gender roles, I just have to ask, "But what about this? what about that?"
Historically this inequity has been justified via the ideology of the ‘natural’ gendered dominance of men, based on time-honoured definitions of the masculine that reach back as far as written history allows us to trace their origins. History tells us that men have been dominant for two reasons. Firstly, because it is allegedly part of their inherited biological nature to be so. Secondly, because the perpetual defining of the masculine as superior to the feminine means that they have been continuously presented as deserving to be so.
I think this goes back to what I was saying about cognitive dissonance, and the ways that people try to prevent themselves looking like the bad one by somewhat creatively interpreting events. I also want to add that I think it's important to note what men were deemed superior at: namely, activities related to politics, athletics, war, and academics. Women, on the other hand, were considered to be generally more morally pure, better with children and other things related to the feminine sphere. One of the main problems, I think, with this gender division is that over the past few thousand years, men's domain has expanded exponentially due to the rise of science, globalism, and economic growth, whereas the things considered feminine have pretty much stayed the same they were when gender roles were first getting written. I don't think there's as reason to assume that people knew back then just how much people would have to learn, or how many kinds of jobs there would be, or how many different peoples your average politician would have to engage with on a regular basis, just in order to survive in society. The ancient Greeks did typically deny women an education, at least of the masculine kind, but what this education consisted of is a rudimentary understanding of political rhetoric, athletics, basic arithmetic and learning to play a flute - and that was for those rich know-it-alls who had the money to send their kids to school for some larnin'. It seems to me that the main problem of gender is that it failed to evolve with the times - at least until things became so untenable that you simply had to start expanding on women's rights just to keep the economy going.
Finally, she turns to masculine bias in academia. She doesn't name names, but the two most obvious examples I know are from psychology: Freudianism and various theories related to women's cognitive development. These are excellent cases of why it's important to have gender equity in the sciences: when men looked at the way that women developed, they basically didn't understand what they found, and were forced to conclude that women were just underdeveloped - for instance, women very frequently didn't develop of sense of inherent rights, or developed it very late compared to men, which was (still is, I think) considered the epitome of moral-rights development. What they didn't realize is that there are other ways of conceptualizing morality, such as by relationships, that the women they studied were adept at and the men weren't. They couldn't see that because, of course, they lacked that moral perspective themselves, and it wasn't until the influx of women into psychology that they were able to get at the real story.
For the most part, she says, Women's Studies was the main avenue of studying the ways that gender had influenced, and continued to influence, the academic world. Almost as soon as Women's Studies had gotten established, however, in came Men's Studies, whose proponents argued that you needed to study both sides of the equation to get at the true answer. Not only that, many of them argued that only men could study masculinity, in much the same way that only women could properly study femininity. (I don't personally quite agree with either; while obviously it's important to get feedback from people that experience what you're studying, the entire point of science is to learn things that you didn't already know - if only men could ever really understand or learn anything about masculinity, for instance, it seems like that would kind of defeat the purpose of doing science.)
She says:
Women mostly acceded to the concept of the male exploration of masculinity, it was after all a step forward that they were looking at it at all and it would have seemed churlish not to encourage this development.
However, leaving the dominant to investigate themselves in never a good idea..........[sic]
That's the end of the chapter. My oversensitivity seems to be at work here again - her overall perspective seems to be that men are like little children that need permission to study their own masculinity, and that while it's not that important an issue, well, at least he's studying something. I wouldn't necessarily mention it, but her book (and many other feminist writings I've seen) come off as having kind of a paternalistic attitude toward men's interest in gender studies, and whenever men disagree, it regularly seems to be assumed that men are just acting out and their complaints don't need to be taken seriously. This also, interestingly, is a complaint I've heard from many feminists regarding other people's (and especially men's) responses to feminism. I wonder if this isn't more of your typical gendered tunnel-vision, but I can't really do more than speculate at the moment.
Link: Dangerous Children: Chapter 2
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