Gender Equality

From LF Wiki

by banjobird

Feminism is a belief in the social and economic equality of all people, regardless of gender.
The name feminism comes from the fact that most of the ground needed to cover involves women.

Contents 1 Origins 2 What causes this inequality? 3 Consequences of Patriarchy 3.1 Economic Violence 3.2 Objectification 4 Consequences 5 Instutionalization 5.1 In Media 6 Men 7 EASY QUICK-START GUIDE TO NOT BEING A PATRIARCHAL DOUCHE 8 Tests 9 See Also 10 External Links

Origins

Feminism is not a new concept. It’s a modern term for an ancient movement that’s been under way for thousands of years and has gone by many names. The ancient Greek play Lysestrata illustrates sexual relations in a male-dominated society. Victorian women wrote at length on the fallacy of hysteria. It’s hard, today, to really get a perspective on what a long fight it has been.

For a long time, the majority of women have been fighting oppression. They were sold as slaves as tribute for conquest, raped en-mass in early forms of genocide and colonialism. They were forced into marriage with older men and forced to bear children, without legal right of representation in court and without the right to own property. Women were expected to provide grueling labor in the home without compensation, under threat of expulsion, poverty and abandonment. Soon, women were forced into the workplace by poverty – in terrible conditions and for lower wages than their male counterparts.

Here in the United States, over the past 100 years, many women have found that a thousand years of economic and social oppression created persistent, long-lasting social and economic inequalities.

Those inequalities have not disappeared. Feminism matters for all women - and men.

What causes this inequality?

Inequality and oppression aren’t caused by individuals. Individuals can and do contribute to the rape and abuse of women, but it’s much bigger than that.

What’s really at issue is the system of economic, cultural and legal norms that cause this to happen.

1. It is an economic norm that makes it okay for women to be paid less than men. It’s persisted through the decades and up until recently only paid for “women’s work” (like stitching until women went blind or painting intricate numbers onto watch faces with toxic paint). Now, in 2004, women are still getting paid 76.5% of what men make for the same work (and still pushed into ‘women’s work’ careers that pay little, like social service, childcare, etc.) You can place blame on the bosses that perpetuate this disparity. But it’s not individual bosses that need to change – it’s the broader economic norm that’s been around for hundreds of years that needs to be challenged.
2. Up until 1975, a husband was incapable of raping his wife. Her consent was not taken into account in any sexual act simply because they were married. Meanwhile, ten to fourteen percent of married women have experienced at least one forced sexual assault by a husband or ex-husband (Finkelhor & Yllo, 1985; Russell, 1990). Legal norms and “grey areas” that soften the seriousness rape depending on the situation in which it occurs are to blame.
3. There was a social norm that said that a woman’s chastity was her most important possession, while a man’s sexual success was his. Clearly, little has changed from then till now and these expectations harm both men and women.

What’s to blame? The long cultural traditions that enable this norm and the media that continues to propagate it.

Consequences of Patriarchy

story - ^{story runs a sexual assault therapy session for couples.}

There are many forms of violence experienced by women, transpeople, and men as a result of Patriarchy.

1. There is Social Violence, which we have all experienced in the media and on the playground.
2. There is Psychological Violence, like psychological abuse, embarrassment, shame, and degradation that comes from economic and social inequality.
   1. Examples include women who are unhappy with their bodies because of unrealistic media portrayals of the body, women who aren’t confident because they aren’t given leadership roles in educational settings, women who let men mistreat them in relationships because they don’t think they have low self-esteem, etc.
3. There is Physical Violence, such as rape, sexual harassment, and sexual assault.
   1. 1 out of every 6 American women has been the victim of an attempted or completed rape in her lifetime (14.8% completed rape; 2.8% attempted rape) ^{(National Institute of Justice & Centers for Disease Control & Prevention. Prevalence, Incidence and Consequences of Violence Against Women Survey. 1998.)}
4. The Pentagon said it received 2,923 reports of sexual assault across the military in the 12 months ending Sept. 30 2008. That's about a 9 percent increase over the totals reported the year before, but only a fraction of the crimes presumably being committed.
   1. The Pentagon office that collects the data estimates that only 10 percent to 20 percent of sexual assaults among members of the active duty military are reported. A woman who signs up to protect her country is more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire

17.7 million American women have been victims of attempted or completed rape. 9 of every 10 rape victims were female in 2003.

Economic Violence

Poverty rates are higher for women than men. In 2007,13.8 percent of females were poor compared to 11.1 percent of men.

Women are poorer than men in all racial and ethnic groups. Recent data shows that 26.5 percent of African American women are poor compared to 22.3 percent of African American men; 23.6 percent of Hispanic women are poor compared to 19.6 percent of Hispanic men; 10.7 percent of Asian women are poor compared to 9.7 percent of Asian men; and 11.6 percent of white women are poor compared to 9.4 percent of white men.

Black and Latina women face particularly high rates of poverty. Over a quarter of black women and nearly a quarter of Latina women are poor. Black and Latina women are at least twice as likely as white women to be living in poverty. Only a quarter of all adult women (age 18 and older) with incomes below the poverty line are single mothers. Over half of all poor adult women—54 percent—are single with no dependent children.

Women are paid less than men, even when they have the same qualifications and work the same hours. Women who work full time earn only 77 percent of what men make—a 22 percent gap in average annual wages. Discrimination, not lack of training or education, is largely the cause of the wage gap. Even with the same qualifications, women earn less than men. In 2007, full time, year round female workers aged 25 to 32 with a bachelor's degree were paid 14 percent less than men.

Women are segregated into low paying occupations, and occupations dominated by women are low paid. Women are tracked into “pink-collar” jobs such as teaching, child care, nursing, cleaning, and waitressing, which typically pay less than jobs in industries that are male-dominated. In 2007, nearly half—43 percent—of the 29.6 million employed women in the United States were clustered in just 20 occupational categories, of which the average annual median earnings were $27,383.

Women spend more time providing unpaid caregiving than men. Women are more likely than men to care for children and elderly or disabled family members. One study found that 69 percent of unpaid caregivers to older adults in the home are women. Because combining unpaid caregiving with paid work can be challenging, women are more likely to work part time or take time out of the workforce to care for family. Twenty-three percent of mothers are out of the workforce compared to just 1 percent of fathers.

Domestic and sexual violence can push women into a cycle of poverty. Experiencing domestic or sexual violence can lead to job loss, poor health, and homelessness. It is estimated that victims of intimate partner violence collectively lose almost 8 million days of paid work each year because of the violence perpetrated against them by current or former husbands, boyfriends, or dates. Half of the cities surveyed by the U.S. Conference of Mayors identified domestic violence as a primary cause of homelessness.

Objectification

A Goddamn Red
Objectification means appreciating a person as an object, in the literal sense. Objects, of course, have specific physical characteristics, which include certain things the object is capable of doing, like a match being capable of catching fire.

Apply that standard to the human body. When you are interacting with a person's body, you are interacting with a physical object. You are interacting with something that has definite spacial definitions and is capable of performing specific tasks. If I'm having sex with a man, I'm not squeezing his career ambitions. I'm not fondling his college degree. I'm not pressing myself up against his personal philosophies. I'm handling his body as a physical object capable of accomplishing the assumed goal of creating sexual stimulus.

The opposite of this could be called agency. Agency is the decisions you make and ideas you hold that have no correlation to yourself as a physical object. Having aspirations of career advancement has nothing to do with how beautiful you are. Wanting a college degree is not dependent upon having large breasts. Appreciating modern art has nothing to do with whether or not you can bend over backwards.

Women are objectified in media because they are primarily understood in terms of being an object, while men are primarily understood in terms of having agency. This is most easily illustrated in examples of teen romance movies, where one or more males may be competing over the favor of a woman. While the two men are granted agency, in that they have a goal toward which they actively engage themselves, the woman exists simply as an object, the "prize" the men are competing for.

Consequences

Patriarchy creates a (usually white) heterosexual male oriented scope of the world. This creates a condition in which all others are immediately categorized as “other”. Work places and other largely male-run establishments are not designed for them and in order to participate they need to make concessions. But it doesn’t just affect women. It harms everybody. Preconceived gender notions have distorted our scientific view of the world by choosing to interpret studies and findings through the lenses of modern society’s gender divisions. They have contributed to the breakdown of communication between men and women by insisting that we are immensely different (maybe even from different planets). It has encouraged women to behave in emotional, shallow ways and for men to behave in aggressive, emotionless ones. Neither category suits all men nor all women, yet we all find ourselves pressured to be in them. If you’re not masculine then you must be feminine – and for a male, that is ground for mockery. If you’re not feminine, you must be masculine – and for a woman, that is stigmatizing. Women and men are encouraged to have less in common, to treat one-another like subsets of different species, and in the end it often harms all who participate in it. And most do so unknowingly.

Instutionalization

Economic, cultural, and legal norms are caused by institutions – the judicial system, social relationships, the media, etc. are all institutions that contribute to the perpetuation of these outdated norms. Even the scientific community is not immune to drawing conclusions product of its time.

Feminists use the word Patriarchy to refer to the economic, social, political, and cultural institutions that produce and enforce norms that cause harm and inequality to women.

Patriarchy is not a smoky secret clubhouse of men planning how to subjugate women on weekends, but rather a thousand-year legacy of inequality that has become formalized in unfair norms and the institutions that create and sustain them. It refers to a system in which most things positive are considered masculine and most things negative or “different” than the ideal are categorized as feminine, in which the assumption is that a person in power will be male, in which pejoratives carry more weight if they suggest that the target is possessing feminine traits.

Words like Patriarchy (Sexism), or Racism, or Classism are used as a shorthand way to discuss this subject without referring to each institution individually. It’s not a conspiracy or something that all men receive a card to when they are born with a penis. It’s a massive, machine-like system.

In Media

STINKFACE
It's a societal phenomenon and less "check out this scene!" and more "check out every available avenue of communication in our culture". Patriarchy is primarily a system of domination and entitlement, with men being indoctrined from a young age that they're 'entitled' to things, including women. Consider every single movie or music video where the camera pans a woman's body. 19/20 times this is a man holding the camera, and the shot was directed by a man, and the video is released into the culture, for men. This is essentially all commercial media in our culture. If you think this is a harmless erotic scene then you'd be correct, if our culture wasn't being pumped full of millions of these images daily, creating a society where women are presented as objects and men feel entitled to them.

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Make Ready

What's important to remember is that feminism doesn't simply mean power for women, it freedom for women. The wage gap, as the OP notes, is due as much to the careers women are expected to enter as it is to wage discrimination within an individual job.

To grasp how this works requires an understanding of the fundamental consequences of the subconscious psychological conditioning we are put through from our early years. A society's broad consciousness of a concept is called a frame. A frame is the way the forces that influence us, our friends, family, and media, attach value judgments to the things they comment on. Another word for it is spin.

Disney princesses are a classic example of the way the media reinforces the dominant frame when they shoot for the widest possible audience. Disney's portrayal of what they considered to be a noble, acceptable woman has been profoundly contained within the center of the sexist frame that women should be submissive and dependent on men.

However, Disney is just the easiest target to shoot for. For example, I just heard a commercial on the radio yesterday, for Spence Diamonds: "Be the hero she needs you to be." It's easy to see these messages if you watch for them. Try the Bechdel test the next time you watch a film: When two or more women characters are talking, are they talking about a man? Do they exist as independent beings or simply foils for the probably-male leads?

This media message of men with agency (being the ones responsible for things) and passive women is drummed into us at every turn during our development as people. Once we become adults we're expected to choose the kind of lives we want to live, through our choice of careers. Neither men nor women are free from the enormous pressure of societal expectation at this point. Men, here, have something to gain from advances in gender equality.

The jobs that are presented as acceptable to women are three things:

1. They will pay less.
2. They will have less power.
3. They will require less formal education.

Draw your own conclusions from this. How do you think these expectations influence women?

Men

Nasty Kerm
Men, as well as women, are victimized by violence. Sexual abuse and rape create substantial physical and psychological harm to male victims and perpetuate the cycle of violence.1 Men and boys are less likely to report the violence and seek services due to the following challenges: the stigma of being a male victim, the perceived failure to conform to the macho stereotype, the fear of not being believed, the denial of victim status, and the lack of support from society, family members, and friends.

http://www.ncadv.org/files/MaleVictims.pdf

From the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports:

For UCR reporting purposes, can a male be raped?

No. The UCR Program defines forcible rape as "The carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will" (p. 19). In addition, "By definition, sexual attacks on males are excluded from the rape category and must be classified as assaults or other sex offenses depending on the nature of the crime and the extent of injury" (p. 20). An assault is a Part I offense and would be reported on the Return A form. Sex offenses qualify as Part II offenses and would be reported on the appropriate age, sex, race form (pp. 96 and 142). UCR Handbook

EASY QUICK-START GUIDE TO NOT BEING A PATRIARCHAL DOUCHE

1. Use your good standing with friends and co-workers to challenge their views on gender roles. If someone says something you disagree with, say something about it, even if it is met with derision at first, you're opening a dialogue and making people think about their ideals, even if they don't do anything to change them first off.

2. Don't flirt with every woman. Seriously, don't do this. If you're interested in someone and she is interested in you, that is one thing, but 'flirting' should not be your primary mode of conversation with women. This applies even if they start it cause they want that $$$$, Now I ain't sayin' she a gold digger (When I'm in need) But she ain't messin' wit no broke, broke (She steal me money) Now I ain't sayin' she a gold digger (When I'm in need) But she ain't messin' wit no broke, broke(I gotta leave) Get down girl, go 'head get down (I gotta leave) Get down girl, go 'head get down (I gotta leave) Get down girl, go 'head get down (I gotta leave) Get down girl, go 'head Cutie da bomb Met her at a beauty salon With a baby Louis Vuitton Under her under arm She said I can tell you rock I can tell by ya charm Far as girls you got a flock I can tell by ya charm and ya arm but I'm lookin' for the one have you seen her? My psychic told me she gonna have a ass like Serena Trina, Jennifer Lopez, four kids An' I gotta take all they bad ass to show-biz Okay get ya kids but then they got they friends I pulled up in the Benz, they all got up in We all went to din and then I had to pay If you fuckin' with this girl then you betta' be paid You know why Take too much to touch her From what I heard she got a baby by Busta My best friend say she used to fuck with Usher I don't care what none of y'all say I still love her Now I ain't sayin' she a gold digger (When I'm in need) But she ain't messin' wit no broke, broke (she give me money) Now I ain't sayin' she a gold digger (When I'm in need) But she ain't messin' wit no broke, broke (I gotta leave) Get down girl, go 'head get down (I gotta leave) Get down girl, go 'head get down (I gotta leave) Get down girl, go 'head get down (I gotta leave) Get down girl, go 'head 18 years, 18 years She got one of yo' kids, got you for 18 years I know somebody payin' child support for one of his kids His baby momma's car crib is bigger than his You will see him on TV, any given Sunday Win the Superbowl and drive off in a Hyundai She was supposed to buy ya shorty Tyco with ya money She went to the doctor got lipo with ya money She walkin' around lookin' like Michael with ya money Shoulda' got that insured, GEICO for ya moneeey(your money) If you ain't no punk holla' we want pre-nup WE WANT PRE-NUP!, yeah It's something that you need to have 'Cause when she leave yo' ass she gon' leave with half 18 years, 18 years And on her 18th birthday, he found out it wasn't his? Now I ain't sayin' she a gold digger (When I'm in need) But she ain't messin' wit no broke, broke (she give me money) Now I ain't sayin' she a gold digger (When I'm in need) but she ain't messin' wit no broke, broke (I gotta leave) Get down girl, go 'head get down (I gotta leave) Get down girl, go 'head get down (I gotta leave) Get down girl, go 'head get down (I gotta leave) Get down girl, go 'head Now I ain't sayin' you a gold digger, you got needs You want a dude to smoke, but he can't buy weed You go out to eat, can't pay, y'all can't leave There's dishes in the back, he gotta roll up his sleeves But while y'all washin', watch him He gon' make it to a Benz out of that Datsun He got that ambition, baby look in his eyes (Ray Charles comes in) This week he's moppin' floors, next week it's the fries So, stick by his side I know these dude's ballin, and yeah that's nice And they gon' keep callin' and tryin' But you stay right, girl But when you get on, he leave yo' ass for a white girl Get down girl, go 'head get down Get down girl, go 'head get down Get down girl, go 'head get down Get down girl, go 'head (She give my money) Let me hear that back

3. Be mindful of your physical presence around women. You might not realise it, but men make a lot of threatening gestures to women, even if they don't know they are doing it. Standing really close, leaning in really close, and making yourself look bigger by stretching or leaning are intimidating for a number of different physically and sexually aggressive reasons. This also includes being mindful of your outward actions when women are near, even if you aren't associating with them IE if you're walking behind a woman on the street and you've been behind her for more than two or three blocks, either speed up and overtake her or cross the street, because to her, you are possibly shadowing her and that is threatening.

4. Realise at all times that people are people! Gender differences are mostly limited to biological processes and anything else is just cultural indoctrination! Women aren't some alien species from outer space and if you treat them like you'd treat your male friends, you'll be surprised to find that they can be good friends without any of the patriarchal sexual tension that occurs when people can't just treat their friends like friends and have to get their genitals all mixed up with it!

Tests

Some quick tests you can perform at home:

See Also

• Domestic Abuse

External Links

• Finally Feminism 101
• Women Ski Jumpers and the Rule of Law
• Double Standard for Serena Williams
• Rain and Thunder: Advanced Feminism for Experts