“Radical feminism argues that the source of women’s oppression is a patriarchal society. [Patriarchy’s] fundamental premise is the oppression of women [and its] positions of power and authority … are generally reserved exclusively for men.”
You wouldn’t believe the crap I have to read just to make it through my week. I know, I know—women have had to read demoralizing crap for centuries. As if that helps. No, I don’t see how it helps anyone except the professional haters to view the world as men versus women.
And just to be clear: I have nothing against women. Some of my best friends are women. I was raised by a woman. I dated a woman in college.
My point is that many people gain political power and money by drumming up fear and anger, and the best way to drum up fear and anger is to refer to categories of people as if they are all the same. On top of the effort to paint life as a war between men and women, the quotation raises questions about what can possibly be meant by “generally reserved exclusively.” If power is reserved generally for men, that means some women have power; if power is reserved exclusively for men, that means no women have power. And that’s the problem: the conflation of the general and the particular.
There’s a simple cure. Just insert the word, some, into propositions about people. This produces, with the example above, “the source of some women’s oppression is a patriarchal society,” which is still debatable but at least not intrinsically offensive.
Another problem with construing the society as a battle between men and women is that it ignores the fact that the vast majority of men were raised by women. Supposedly, women are made (by men) to hate themselves and to perpetuate sexism, but that’s a perspective that itself defines women as impotent. Conflicts between societies, religions, and tribes can sensibly be viewed either as co-constructed or as a clash of agendas, depending on whether you think, say, the Israelis and the Palestinians are in a system together or in a clash of systems. But surely within a tribe, conflicts between the sexes can only be construed as systemic, as co-constructed. It’s as hard to be a decent man in a patriarchal society as it is to be a decent women (the recent movie, A Separation, set in Iran, is about that very difficulty).
So insist on “some.” When they tell you white people are privileged, ask them to say some white people, on some occasions. When they tell you black people voted overwhelmingly for Obama because he wants to give them stuff, ask them to say some black people. Once the exceptions are noted, they’ll be forced to attach a specific percentage to their generalizations, and their utter lack of data will become clear.
Michael Karson, Ph.D. 