Monthly Archives: March 2011
What Happens When “A Woman’s Place is in the Home”?
See anything odd in this argument about why rape should be illegal?
“Women’s power to withhold or grant sexual access is an important bargaining weapon… it fosters, and is in turn bolstered by, a masculine pride in the exclusive possession of the sexual object… whose value is enhanced by sole ownership.”
How about the lack of concern about women’s suffering from violence and violation? Nope; women are instead straightforwardly called sex objects that are owned by men.
Understanding the roots of this strange view brings me to a project sponsored by CARE, a poverty-fighting group who are discrediting “The Top 10 Myths about Women” for the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day. To understand what went wrong with the above explanation on rape, it helps to consider this myth: A woman’s place is in the home.
What would happen if that wish actually came true?
If women are home, they’re missing elsewhere–among professors, researchers, law schools, courts, Congresses, media, business managers and religious hierarchies. And what happens when women are largely absent in the halls of power? Consider a few scattered examples:
* Turning first to the strange thesis on rape’s illegality, consider that the article was published in the 1952-53 Yale Law Journal, when the editorial board was 95 percent men, and lacking much female perspective. And, in the 1950s women’s psychology was not studied much because male researchers focused mostly on men.
* In the Old Testament (Judges 19:22-29) depraved men pound at a door, demanding a male guest be turned out to be raped. A concubine is sent out instead, to “use and do whatever you wish.” The woman is raped and abused throughout the night. At daybreak she staggers home, falls down and dies. No one seems too upset at her suffering. The concern back then was over defiled property (the concubine). Whether you take this story as historical fact, or simply as evidence of the writer’s bias, a male-dominant power structure is in play.
* In 2009 Arizona Senator John Kyle declared to an 83% male Senate that maternity leave needn’t be mandated since “I don’t need maternity care.” Well, if a man doesn’t need it, clearly it’s not important. You have to wonder if he’d be so brazen in a Congress that was half women.
* More recently, in the current 83.6% male House of Representatives, Rep. Bobby Franklin of Georgia introduced a bill to criminalize some miscarriages. Pennsylvania Rep. Joe Pitts feels hospitals should be able to refuse to terminate pregnancies even to save a mother’s life. Others want to slash support for international family planning and reproductive health care. Or as the New York Times summed it, a war on women is being waged.
* Soon after Justice Sandra Day O’Connor exited the Supreme Court, leaving an eight men and one woman jury, the ban on “partial birth” abortion was upheld. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, the sole remaining woman, noted, the ban saves no lives, but makes the procedure more dangerous for women.
We need women out in the world in places of power. Not surprisingly, women med students are pushing for abortion training at Bay Area universities (most prominently UC San Francisco and Stanford) so that women’s lives can be saved.
When women’s place is in the home, women are at the mercy of the patriarchy’s ways of seeing. And that is more than a little scary.
Georgia Platts
March is Women’s History Month
A version of this article was originally posted on the Ms. Magazine Blog on March 4, 2011
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Do Kids Bully from Low Self-Esteem? Or Because they’re Popular? No and No
As Nadin Khoury walked home from school last January, a “wolf pack” of seven teens, aged 13 to 17, randomly attacked. As Nadin screamed for the boys to stop during his 30 minute nightmare, they kicked and punched him, hung him upside down from a tree, and ended by hanging Nadin from a six foot wrought iron fence.
Phoebe Prince’s horror began by merely dating a popular football player, provoking the wrath of “mean girl” rivals. “Irish slut” and “whore” began appearing on social network sites like Facebook and Twitter. Threatening messages showed up in texts. The mean girls scribbled Phoebe’s face out of photographs on school walls, knocked books from her hands, and threw things at her as other students watched and did nothing.
After months of bullying, Phoebe went home and hanged herself.
Why do kids act so cruelly?
The old view suggested bullying arose from low self-esteem. By establishing dominance over someone, a brute could bridge the gap between the lowly place she sat and the supreme rank she desired.
But recent research finds that kids who bully are higher on the pecking order, leaving Time Magazine running a piece entitled, “Why Kids Bully: Because They’re Popular.”
Or as a Huffington Post commenter put it, “kids bully because they can.”
I question both notions.
Recent research destroys the low self-esteem hypothesis.
But what about this newer idea that kids bully because they are popular? Or that strong social support allows them to?
Is persecuting people fun, in itself, so that people do it just because they can? An awful lot of people get stressed harming others. Even very young children have a basic sense of justice which is based on whether one person is hurting another. Bullying probably serves some other purpose.
Why do some bully? The real answer seems an odd mix of the old and new explanations. The somewhat popular Mean Girl has to bridge a gap between where she sits and where she thinks she belongs. She wants to be seen as more socially dominant than she already is. If she felt secure at the top of the ladder, she wouldn’t need to work to gain her position.
Those at the very top have no gap to bridge. They actually avoid harassing others because they don’t want to signal insecurity and weakness, suggesting they need to prove something.
When people act aggressively to move up the hierarchy, they are doing what sociologists call “the social construction of personal identity.” When others witness our supremacy, it feels more real. It becomes “objective.” No surprise that Nadin Khoury’s tormentors taped the abuse and posted it on YouTube – which led to their arrest. I guess the risk seemed worth it (or they were too stupid to see the eventual outcome) since identities feel more objective when others witness our power.
How do we address the problem? Some suggest focusing on the kids who aren’t involved. Cultivating their empathy so they won’t stand idly by.
Perhaps encouraging more constructive sources of self-esteem would be useful.
Or, drawing attention to the (relative) insecurity of the bully might help, too.
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Sex Objects Who Don’t Enjoy Sex
Sexualizing women can have its perks in the bedroom, with breast fetishes and butt fetishes heightening men’s arousal.
But surprisingly, sexualizing women can have the opposite effect, harming both men’s and women’s enjoyment. And in many ways. Here’s one: self-objectification.
Drowning in “sexy women” images, men and women can both come to see women as the sexy half of the species. So what happens in bed? Because men aren’t seen as especially sexy (at least by comparison) men are focused on women and women can be focused on themselves.
Caroline Heldman, assistant professor at Occidental College, found that some women become preoccupied with how they look instead of the sexual experience. “One young woman I interviewed described sex as being an ‘out of body’ experience,” she said. “She viewed herself through the eyes of her lover, and, sometimes, through the imaginary lens of a camera shooting a porn film.”
Sounds a bit like Paris Hilton: “My boyfriends say I’m sexy but not sexual,” she mused. “Being ‘hot’ is a pose, an act, a tool, and entirely divorced from either physical pleasure or romantic love.”
Heldman feels that girls and women are learning to eroticize male sexual pleasure as though it were their own. She feels they need to explore their sexuality in more empowering and satisfying ways than this vicarious act.
Cultural theorist Jackson Katz has similar concerns. “Many young women are now engaged in sex acts with men that prioritize the man’s pleasure,” he reflected, “with little or no expectation of reciprocity.”
When having sex, these young women may be enjoying themselves, and how nice they look. They may gain a boost to self-esteem as they dwell on their “hotness.” But they’re not enjoying sex.
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