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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   35549 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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To be specific, I am referring to the feminist understanding of the relationship of the sexes as being one of where men oppress women.

Well, again, I see that as descriptive, rather than definitional. The basic argument of feminism is that the cultures and structures which have been traditionally been seen as normal are actually oppressive.

Women have never been oppressed en masse as described in feminist patriarchy theory. Men and women simply valued different things in the past and had different roles - maleness was highly valued in male roles, and femaleness was highly valued in female roles, one was not necessarily better than the other. ... There is very little attempt to address the past on its own terms, that there might be practical and understandable, if not good, reasons for the way the things operated in the past.

But, again, these are normative arguments, not definitional. You and feminists seem to agree on what gender norms and structures existed in the past, but you disagree re whether they were oppressive

The feminist definition of patriarchy includes oppression as a core part of it. Patriarchy isn't just 'more men in political office', it's a society of, for and by men that oppresses women (for the record, the feminist view is that 'more men in political office' necessarily results in the oppression of women).

I disagree with the feminists quite a lot with what gender norms and structures exist in the past. The feminist says that the female role was one of submission that had no power. I say no, the female role actually did have wield significant power and influence, and their own form of status.

Again, I believe that the claim is that patriarchal structures are inherently oppressive, not that oppression is part of the definition. That was the core contribution of feminism: "Hey, you know this structure you social scientists have been talking about forever. Here is something you have not realized before: It is terribly flawed."

As I said in another thread, the most robust concise definition I've seen is from Sylvia Walby in Theorising Patriarchy (1989): "a series of social structures, and practices in which men dominate, oppress and exploit women."

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