Over the years, socialist feminisms have made the best impression on me out of all the strains of feminisms. And I feel I owe a debt from what I’ve learnt from their virtues, to be repaid through my own analysis and knowledge (putting it in a shareable format).
However, ‘oppression’ of women is a problematic concept in itself when it implicitly portrays women as the weaker sex vulnerable to male exploitation. It, in some instances, degrades the virtues of women – it overlooks their unique virtues as a ‘sex class’ and certain privileges that come with these virtues. This includes their (generalised) lack of involvement in militarism and imperial violence, even if they did on occasions wed or sleep with male victors. On this, women can proudly assert they have been more peaceable having greater empathic consciousness, and have thus saved themselves the devastation and horrors that men have faced on the battlefields often fighting for ‘their women’, so women didn’t have to fight or be conscripted.
More one-sided objectification, poor sexual etiquette culture on behalf of the male sex class as a generalisation (not ‘rape culture’ – see https://henrywilloughbyssocialjusticeblog.com/2021/01/02/on-rape-culture-allegation/), indecent assault, sexual assault, rape, domestic and intimate partner violence, sexual harassment, control over women’s bodies through anti-choice sexism, unpaid labour, and underpaid labour exists. And this is not something to under-acknowledge.
But let us state a key point clearly: the essence of patriarchy is self-flagellating for men, as well as being oppressive to women. Being expected to be the breadwinner, and working dehumanising jobs or hours should not be underestimated in its effect on men, the sacrifice on the battlefield, high incarceration rate of males and men, and the ill-health effects of hegemonic masculinity to men in terms of the high morbidity and mortality rates are real issues. Men also have sexual issues being that of sexual cuckolding, and even the threat of reproductive cuckolding.
The point is, is that this masculine ‘hegemony’ for all the damage it does to women, does an equal amount of damage to men and to masculinity itself.
It is idiotic and self-flagellating to oppress women.
So women’s oppression should not be conflated with women being the weaker sex.
Quite the contrary, the key reasons why women are not the weaker sex, and this – the shallow-minded weaker sex argument – is in need of specific refutation, are that women seem to have a biological proclivity to empathy which may be accounted for by the larger and more active anterior cingulate gyrus in the female brain, and they carry and give birth to their own offspring annulling ‘maternal angst’. They, as a sex class, generally have more emotional intelligence, whereas men find it difficult to express and regulate their emotions, in part leading to a higher suicide rate of men.
So when we talk about oppression of women, we should add or acknowledge that men suffer just as much as women, and that just because we live in a patriarchal culture it does not mean women are the weaker sex! They’ve had their unique virtues and strengths all along!
Where I think some socialist feminisms go too far, is the attack on the family as inherently patriarchal, as opposed to attacking the patriarchal form it takes at present in many instances. We should attack female domesticity within families, acknowledging it is patriarchal. However, the family itself is not inherently patriarchal, lest we all end up as Bonobos where the males don’t know who their offspring are, leading to a cataclysmic paternal angst, where children are reared collectively robbing them of having a humanising and caring emotional and material support connection and relationship with their parents. Schools do the good job of helping to raise children communally. But to decimate the family unit is dehumanising, as Huxley warned us of in his Brave New World. It is the reactionary impetus to tear down all established institutions even when they have merit, which is the tendency here that need be critiqued.
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