TITHONUS' DIARY!!
New - Archives - Profile - Notes - Email - Design - Diaryland |
|
SMASH THE STATE!!!!!! Ok, much of what I'm going to say is stuff that I've already said or covered somewhere else while talking about masculinity with Caraxus. I'm not sure if it was in this diary or in someone else's guestbook, though, so I'll repeat myself fearlessly, and if you're bored by the repetitiveness of it all, you can always, uh, you know, stop reading. - Anyway, I've just been up in the mountains having a jolly time with some very dear friends of mine, although having a jolly time involved having a long and at times somewhat tense discussion about feminism. Because, ok, one of these friends is Frau UberFeminist, uh, to coin a phrase, and discussions about anything tend to get turned around to feminism. And, she can be a bit scary sometimes, because although she clearly doesn't hate men (she's married to one, and she doesn't hate me) then there are times when it kind of feels like she does hate men at least a little bit... or she hates certain kinds of men or certain aspects of masculine culture. Anyway, I often find myself in these discussions having little insights into things that I disagree with and not voicing them, partly because she's a bit of a talker-over-the-top-of-people and partly because these insights arrive very small and sort of half-formed, and I need to spend a little time nurturing them before I'm willing to let them fight for survival in the harsh environment of antagonistic debate. Anyway. I had this little idea about patriarchy, because she was talking about how much she hates the institution of marriage (long story) and how it contains all these ritual embodiments of patriarchal traditions. - So, this little idea was something as follows; patriarchy is kind of like "the state", in being a particular social institution that idealists of a certain bent see tremendous problems with, and therefore wish to abolish. Smash the state! They say, or, Let's Overthrow the Patriarchy! and so on. I may even have yelled the former slogan along with some like-minded people at some rally or other some years ago. Anyway. - The thing is, these social institutions exist because they are socially functional. "The state" has historically been very important for cultural groups to protect themselves and maintain their culture and so on, and what just about any cultural group that doesn't have a state wants to do is establish one. And patriarchy is socially functional too. Patriarchal societies have very successfully managed to protect and reproduce themselves over the course of thousands of years because... patriarchy works. Institutions like the payment of dowries and marriages and so on... you know, if you read the old testament, you rapidly realise that wives are essentially a special class of slaves. They are distinct from other slaves in some quite significant ways, but the attitude to them as a type of property is clear as daylight once you're looking for it. See, slavery works too. Slavery is a practice which has been around for all of recorded history... the great Athenian Democracy to which we Westerners look as the great model for our present democracies was made possible by the fact that it was founded on slavery; rich landowners could afford to sit around jawing all day in the forum because there were slaves doing all the real work for them. - Does this mean that I approve of slavery? No. Do I approve of patriarchy? No. Do I even approve of the state? Jury's still out. But... here's the vital point. You can't smash vital social institutions without there being massive repercussions. In fact, you will probably find that your efforts to "smash" them will result in... something quite different than you intended. See, in our society... patriarchy is still patently "there", I mean, it's unquestionably a presence... you can't pretend that things are equal between the sexes. But the patriarchy of the present is not the same as the patriarchy of the past. When someone like lia says she's going to wear a badge saying "save the male", she's not disavowing feminism or signing up to the Bettina Arndt school of feminism-bashing. But... see, I've got no idea what the fucking state of play in the relations between the genders is these days. I think every individual person has their own personal idea about which parts of the old system they want to keep and which parts they want to get rid of... or which parts they want to take advantage of. I mean... take my last entry on romance. Romance (as understood in films such as "Pretty Woman" or "Bridget Jones' Diary") is basically a patriarchal construct. That might sound like a rather extremist and didactic statement... but the credo that the purpose of a woman's life is to catch a man and get married to him and then the story is effectively over... that's patriarchy, baby. That's a whisker away from old-testament style patriarchy. If your value as a human being is 100% about your ability or inability to get a man, then you have no inherent worth of your own; just like a slave, you are only worth the price that someone else is willing to pay for you. You know Mr Darcy, who we're all supposed to love and think wonderful becaue he's unconventional and speaks his mind and produces dreadful romantic misunderstandings and comes through in a crisis without taking credit for it? Ok, when does our heroine actually fall in love with Mr Darcy? What does she tell us is the moment that she realised she was in love with him? - The point is... do you want to get rid of romance in order to adhere to an ideologically pure stance against patriarchy? What are you going to replace it with? What else is going to take the place in your imagination that has always been province of romance? Will it really do the job - can it provide the same richness of historical and cultural growth and development and refinement that romance can? Do you even know what "the job" it's doing now is? - ...argh, I can't put it all together neatly. It's all in bits... But, just as slavery was never abolished at the stroke of a pen (if you eat chocolate, there's a good chance it was made with cocoa grown with slave labour) then patriarchy won't be easy to abolish either. And simply... fighting harder against it, like my friend in the mountains wants to do, ain't gonna do it. Because... it's slippery, it's alive, and when you cut out one "pillar" then you rapidly find that something else takes its place... - ...bah. Idea is still only half-formed. Needs more nurturing. - "I feel a second wind blowing my way" - Claire Lynch |
Previous / Next |