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feature
 Friday July 21, 2006 08:28 by Aileen O'Carroll - WSM
Deborah Tannen’s book “You Just Don’t Understand: Men and Women in Conversation” was on the New York Times bestseller list for nearly four years and has been translated into 24 languages. Pope Benedict, when still a cardinal (and an obvious expert on gender) in a statement on the role of women wrote that women’s characteristics were “listening, welcoming, humility, faithfulness, praise and waiting” in the first statement published by the Catholic church on the role of women in a decade. In January 2005, the president of Harvard argued that women were underrepresented in science because biologically they weren’t as capable at scientific thinking as men. During his time as President the number of tenured jobs offered to women at Harvard fell from the low 36% to the even lower 13%. While we may not care very much about the pope or pop-psychology, their ideas carry weight with large segments of the world’s population.The idea that men and women are fundamentally different can also be found on the left. Some women’s peace groups, such as the Greenham Common women, base their activity on women’s supposed opposition to war and violence. Or to take a more recent example, some of the supporters of the centre-left President of Chile Michelle Bachelet, argued that as a women she is better able to multi-task and thus more able for the job; "She is going to take the reins of this country as if it were a big house. She is going to manage us well. Look at us men, we do one thing at a time, while the mom is cooking, talking on the phone, feeding the children and listening to the radio!" If you just listened to popular media and general conversations, you would expect the genders to be worlds apart. Yet a study by Shibley Hyde found far more similarities than differences. This article looks at this research, and then asks in the light of it why might the idea of gender difference be so popular presently. Mostly the same Published in the “American Psychologists” in September 2005, the research challenges the idea that men and women are very different psychologically. Shibley Hyde reviewed the results from 46 surveys and concluded that men and women are similar on most, but not all, psychological variables. Arguments about the roles that men and women play in society often revolve around whether these roles are due to nature (our genetic make up) or nurture (the type of society we live in). The implication of this research is to overturn the idea that male and female roles are connected to particular characteristics of men or women. In 1974 Maccoby and Jacklin analysed the results from over 2,000 psychological studies on gender difference and in doing so they overturned many myths; girls aren’t more social than boys, neither are they more suggestible, girls aren’t any better at learning off by heart, boys aren’t good at more abstract learning, girls don’t have lower self esteem and it is not true that girls lack motivation. In all they found only four areas where gender differences were evident; verbal ability, visual-spatial ability, mathematical ability and aggression. Yet despite the fact that overwhelmingly their story was one of similarity, almost all reports of their work focused on the differences. So why if genders, in the main, behave similarly are they perceived to be different? Same behaviour, different perceptions One explanation for this is that the meaning attached to the behaviour varies depending on whether you are a man or a woman. So, for example, if a woman isn’t good at map reading, this is seen to be proof that women are less spatially aware. If a man isn’t good at map reading, well it’s just one of those things that he’s not very good at. I once asked a teenage boy what toys he played with as a child. Like most boys, he played with action man. He went on to say that he thought action man was ‘cool’, while Barbie was stupid. Despite the fact that both toys are essentially the same –a piece of plastic representing a person – to him the possibilities and meanings attached to the male toy were far more positive than the female toy. Mars and Venus are the same place, they are just seen from different perspectives. What does it mean to come from Venus? Society attributes different meanings to similar behaviours. In fact, even stranger, society is quite happy to talk about very different behaviours as if they were all similar. So for example, what to people mean when they say ‘women’s work’? One certain thing that can be said about gender roles, despite the Mars/Venus clichés, is that they vary greatly between different cultures, classes and change over time. Venus seems to be a number of radically different planets. In Ireland, nursing is a women’s profession, in southern Italy most nurses are men. This is because in the south of Italy, labour market shortages were so great, that one of the few jobs available was nursing, and as traditionally men were seen as the major bread-owners, these became seen as ‘male’. The daughter of a manual labourer on a poor Dublin housing estate is more likely to see her role in terms of motherhood and so will often start her family early in life. In contrast the daughter of a doctor might be expected to go to university, and establish a career before she has children. And on the other end of the scale, the role of Paris Hilton, the daughter of a multi-millionaire, seems to be to be thin, shop and act stupid. Over time, the role women were expected to play within capitalism has varied. In the early factories they were valued (as were children) as a cheap form of labour. Then they were moved to the home, where their role was to provide all the social care and support required to keep the workforce ticking over. So for example, in the US during the depression working women were accused of taking men’s jobs. Although the numbers of women working outside the home increased gradually from the 1900s, in general this was acceptable only for single women. In Ireland, it wasn’t until the early 1970s that married women were allowed to continue working in the public sector. When women were in paid employment, it was in those sectors that mirrored their role in the home such as domestic work, or caring work such as nursing. But the idea that women’s role was in the home has been overturned at certain points. This happened most dramatically during World War Two when propaganda extolled the virtues of women working – in fact, the skills they used at home were argued to be the same as the skills needed in the workplace. Alice Kesser Harris explains, “They were induced into the labour force with a rhetoric which played on their housewifely role. For example, they were told that operating a drill press was just like operating a can opener; that wielding a welding torch, for example, was just like operating a mix-master might have been; that a drill press was like an iron.” After the war, although in the US 75% of women said they would like to keep their jobs, about 90 % ended up being forced to leave. Once again women’s place was in the home. Today women make up a greater part of the labour force than ever before. In the west, manufacturing has declined, while service industries and knowledge industries have grown. Throughout the world women are paid less than men and in order to attract cheaper female labour, women’s characteristics are once more being re-defined as useful on the labour market. So for example, women are argued to be good listeners and empathic, and so make good call centre employees, or women are good at multitasking and so suited to IT work; an article on Microsoft’s webpage argues that “Biology, upbringing make women more flexible” and so they are better managers.” In fact there is a certain irony that as the workplace is becoming more female, the idea that genders are very different seems to be gaining increasing popularity (or at least, if the sales of John Gray’s books are anything to go by). The idea of gender differences can be used to either exclude women (as in the position of women in Harvard) or to attract more women (as in the call centre workers). The malleability of the idea of difference, and the different political uses to which it is put, should make us very wary of arguments that take difference as their starting point. Mostly the same, a little different, what next? So far I’ve been arguing that the similarities are far greater than the difference, but that doesn’t mean that differences don’t exist or that they aren’t important. Women and men are treated differently in society and this different experience affects the roles that women and men play. In her study, Shibley Hyde conducted a review of 46 studies, each of which themselves was a review of other studies. Hundreds of reports were involved. She grouped her data into six categories and set about seeing if she could find any evidence of difference. The categories were: those studies that assessed cogitative variables; that assessed verbal and non-verbal communication; that assessed social or personality variables; that assessed measures of psychological well-being (for example self-esteem); that assessed motor behaviour (for example, how far can you throw a ball) and finally a category of miscellaneous reports, such as ‘moral reasoning’. As with the earlier Maccoby and Jacklin study, she found gender differences in a few very specific areas. The first area is, not surprisingly, throwing ability. Men can throw a ball further and faster than women. The second area was found in some measures of sexuality – men masturbate more and have different attitudes to casual sex. The third and final area was in levels of aggression, in particular in levels of physical aggression. Differences aren’t stable They also found that in some areas there are little differences in childhood, but differences develop in the teenage years. So for example, in high school, a small difference emerges favouring males in terms of solving complex problems. This small variation in differences over time, Shibley Hyde argues, overthrows ‘the notions that gender differences are large and stable’ (p588), that men have permanently set up camp on Mars which is a great distance from Venus. The study also highlights the importance of context in determining gender differences. So for example, averaging out over all the studies, it was found that men helped more. But if the studies were separated into those where the helping occurred when onlookers were present, and those where onlookers were absent, it was found that a large gender difference only occurred when onlookers were present. This difference, she argues, can be explained by looking at social roles – in western society ‘heroism’ is seen as a masculine attribute, which means that men are more likely to help others when they are doing it in a public way that might be interpreted as heroic. The difference in one trait ‘helping others’ can be large, favouring males, or close to zero, depending on the social context in which that trait occurs. Similar differences were found when looking at interruptions to conversations – very little difference were found in groups of two, and small differences were found in groups of three and more. Again the social context affects the behavioural response – and the idea that there are fixed male and female responses, which we are all hardwired to perform, is undermined. Different experiences, different responses In those areas where men and women behave differently, it is in large part because they are treated differently growing up. An example of this different treatment can be found in a study by Myra and David Sadker in which they looked at the different ways boys and girls were treated in US high schools. After three years of classroom observations, they discovered a hidden, unconscious bias that neither teachers nor students were aware of. Boys were asked more questions, were praised more, referred to more in class, girls were less often called on, often ignored, to the extent that teachers would stand with their back to the girls while talking to the boys. In addition, in the text books given to the students, women’s contribution to society was often absent, ignored or hidden. Finally there was a tolerance of sexual discrimination of girls by other children or indeed incidences of sexual discrimination by teachers. The result of this was that as you look at the progression of girls throughout the education system they become progressively quieter. In a typical US college classroom, 45% of the students don’t participate by asking and answering questions, and the majority of those are women. In light of this study, the behavioural findings on conversation interruptions don’t seem to be that surprising. The Sadker study found that over time, due to their different experiences growing up, boys and girls acted in different ways within the classroom. The Hyde study also found some differences in behaviour but emphasised that these differences are not as great as the similarities. Many voices make up the movement So where does this leave us – knowing that genders are not as different as often described but also aware that gender (as do other cultural attributes) can colour the way in which we perceive and act within the world? A key starting point for any group, movement or society who want to mobilise the full potential and creativity of humanity is to challenge the gendered nature of roles. This begins when we challenge the idea that the differences between the genders are based on biology, rather than experience. However, this doesn’t mean that we are all the same - men, women, old, young, city dweller, country person, black, white – rather that our different experiences have created a diversity of characteristics, attitudes, values and identities. The movements and the society we are trying to build have to allow a voice to this diversity. Women are under-represented in anarchist groups throughout the world, and this means our movements are considerably weaker as we are losing the point of view, the experiences, the skills and understandings of a large portion of humanity. One of the few groups who seriously and successfully faced up to this problem was the anarchist group Mujeres Libres, who fought during the Spanish Civil War. They recognised that the problem of incorporating women into the anarchist movement operated on many different levels. On one hand there was the obvious sexism of part of the anarchist movement, which needed to be combated. In a less obvious way, many men in the anarchist movement were and are, gender blind. That is they do not realise that their own way of seeing the world is coloured by their own gender and aren’t aware of or interested in understanding other perspectives. While we all naturally make sense of the world from the point of view of our own experiences, we also need to be able to realise that our experiences aren’t universal. Where those other voices are in the minority, we need to actively go out and seek those alternative perspectives. This is different from saying, as John Gray does, that women and men are so different they need a self-help book to be able to understand each other. This doesn’t mean that we believe that men and women occupy different spheres of life, that some are best suited to revolutionary organisation, while others are not. It does mean however that we try as revolutionaries to look beyond our own world-view (and of course this doesn’t apply just to gender, it holds true for race, nationality, and all the other aspects of culture). In the pages of their papers and at their meetings, Mujeres Libres gave voice to women’s experiences. Mujeres Libres also worked to challenge restrictive gender roles. It is generally true that you cannot do what you haven’t dreamt. If a woman never imagines herself taking part in an anarchist organisation, if she doesn’t see a role for herself within that organisation, it is very unlikely that she will ever feel motivated to join one. As a women’s only group, Mujeres Libres automatically gave to women a space where they knew, by virtue of their gender, that they were welcomed and needed. From that starting point, the women involved undertook work that was more usually done by men; they organised meetings, they spoke at meetings, they travelled around the country. Mujeres Libres also had the advantage that they were working in revolutionary times, and so the fight for women’s liberation became part and parcel of the new society that was being built. Today’s anarchists operate in less optimistic times and, though for women things are a lot freer than they were in 1930s Spain, the problem of how to create revolutionary organisations which reflect the full diversity of society have yet to be solved. References: A woman's place is to wait and listen, says the Vatican John Hooper and Jo Revill, Sunday August 1, 2004, The Observer Interview with Alice Kessler Harris: http://www.pbs.org/fmc/interviews/kesslerharris.htm Sadker, M and Sadker, D (1994) Failing at Fairness: How America’s Schools Cheat Girls, Scribner. |
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Comments (25 of 25)
Jump To Comment: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25Many people overlook the differences in Gender use of the Internet. Only in the last 5 years has the subject come up for any serious academic attention (use google beta's academic search to see how few citations there are).
But beyond the world of dry academia only one poll has been done ( on American men and women ) exploring how differently they use the internet, read sites, contribute to sites, & most interestingly for groups such as indymedia - interact with mailing lists.
I put this report up during the christmas holidays, but can't find it now, perhaps I didn't post it here?
Anyway -
the report highlighted some interesting differences -
* "More than men, women are enthusiastic online communicators, and they use email in a more robust way. Women are more likely than men to use email to write to friends and family about a variety of topics: sharing news and worries, planning events, forwarding jokes and funny stories. Women are more likely to feel satisfied with the role email plays in their lives, especially when it comes to nurturing their relationships. And women include a wider range of topics and activities in their personal emails. Men use email more than women to communicate with various kinds of organizations."
* "Women tend to treat information gathering online as a more textured and interactive process – one that includes gathering and exchanging information through support groups and personal email exchanges."
* "Men reach farther and wider for topics, from getting financial information to political news. Along the way, they work search engines more aggressively, using engines more often and with more confidence than women."
whereas- "Women are more likely to see the vast array of online information as a “glut” and to penetrate deeper into areas where they have the greatest interest"
http://www.misbehaving.net/2005/12/pew_internet_re.html
http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/171/report_display.asp
_____________________________________
In addition the "toy difference" is really quite something isn't it? Why is an action man cool and a Barbie crap? Those gender differences are now being seen in teenage use of chatrooms,
This study is worth a peep :- Gender, Identity, and Language Use in Teenage Blogs
by David A. Huffaker & Sandra L. Calvert of the Children's Digital Media Center, at Georgetown University USA .
http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol10/issue2/huffaker.html
other material worth looking at
* Enochsson, A. (2005) "A gender perspective on Internet use – Consequences for information seeking on the net" Information Research, 10(4) paper 237 Available at http://InformationR.net/ir/10-4/paper237.html
There can be no doubt that men and women use the Internet differently, and react to online communication differently. Just as much as there is much difference in how we all react to information, compacted emotion, inter-action. Groups which operate mailing lists or suffer Gender imbalance can and ought profit from examination of these differences. What may be inacceptable to one current user is essential to include another.
as an aside, I once asked a trans-sexual I know how s/he felt about the Mars & Venus thing. S/he confirmed that she was a barbarella hairdryer on an inbound meteoritic trajectory to Earth. I asked her / him how could I then, as a sensible intellectual and drearily self-important type take him/her seriously. S/he just laughed & told me I didn't need to take anyone seriously.
is the affect of the "user-name" and the psychological process and identity markers which lead some people to
* use their real name. (which often they can't register for email services such as hotmail or yahoo leading them to adopt on of the more common names available but with a number.
* invent a name.
Inventing a user identity is really quite interesting territory. And gender and pyschology obviously comes into it. Anyone familiar with email lists knows there are some names which are clearly "gender specific" and others which are sub-cultural. The latter come and go in ebbs of popularity often reflecting wider cultural products. Thus during the success of movies such as the Star Wars series, chatrooms and even this site abounded with character names adopted from that fictional world. But those names soon fall into disuse. The little boy who called himself Jedi Lord moves to being Harry Potter moves on to being --- whatever next is "contemporary". As the little boy grows up, his earlier choice of something like "He-man" or "Lord greyskull" begins to seem very lame and won't help him find girls. For others reading those names make choices and judgements on the information provided by Jedi or Harry based on common assumptions. This brings internet indentity psychology in a variety of directions - Names based on art, religious, scientific, or other fields of knowledge (rather like an advertising company choosing the right name for a new soap) or for some more obscure movies or cultural products - names such as Barbarella or Riff Raff communicates more than a need to be "topical", "normal", "average" it shows a need on the users part to portray erudition, sophistication & "how different they are" etc.
Most well balanced people if using a character name, will change it over time. & its often a good exercise in personal development, for not many of us have thought that perhaps our "internet names" send out the wrong message. These habits are now being established in teenage years. But many other adults came to the Internet late in the course of their personal development & thus their names are less well "designed" than those evolved by contemporary teenagers in a process of trial and error. No study has yet been done on the "lies people tell when seeking romance or sexual encounter online". But it would be worth doing to further deepen our understanding of the internet & no doubt will happen soon enough, because academics need to write books.
Gender, Identity, and Language Use in Teenage Blogs
by David A. Huffaker & Sandra L. Calvert of the Children's Digital Media Center, at Georgetown University USA .
http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol10/issue2/huffaker.html
But practical application of that theory to a specific site or chatroom would be more revealing. Some research findings would point to a significant gap between the theorists and the practicioners.
The nub therein would be that if men and women approach the use of internet differently
and use the structures available on line to communicate within, then which sex
would I be?
But doesn't that report on teenage web use engage in such an applicaiton? The authors describe their methodology as a 'content analyses of their weblogs....how adolescents present their identities online, as well as how they use language to express their experiences and feelings.'
From : The Clarion, 20th December 1912.
A New Woman's Movement: The Need for Riotous Living.
(Rebecca West)
" Decidedly what we need is a militant movement for more riotous living.
Schoolmistresses must go to their work wearing suffrage badges and waving
the red flag. The ladies of Hopkinson House must stay out till two in the morning,
and then come back and sing until the doors are opened. And we must make
a fuss about our food. ' The milk pudding must go' shall be our party cry.
I can see in the future militant food raids of the most desperate character-
I see the YWCA inflamed with text burning on Hamstead Heath, pelting the central offices
with bread and butter and threatening a general massacre of hens if the boiled
egg persists in prominence*. Armies of nurses would visit the homes of the hospital
governors and force feed them with that awful dish..."
Other articles by Cicely fairfield: Rebecca West, include
Socialists and Feminists.
The Life of Emily Davison.
The Sex War.
The Sin of Imprisonment.
The Fate of the Drudge.
and a truly charming one on Bishops being the anti-christ:
The Bishops Principles:Our Case against the Church:
"That has always been the church's attitude to women. it has always been
purely sexual. So long as it maintained among women a certain physical decorum
and corresponding ecclesiastical labels it was careless of the happiness of their
souls. Now it often abandons even the physical decorum and concerns itself solely
with the labels"
(The Clarion 24th October 1913)
The perameters for discussions on unity within anti-capitalism are
narrowly defined in the theoretical sense.
Each generation in the 2000 year old heterdoxy of supremacy
race, colonialism and elitism has to define the argument anew.
These are old arguments , but the gradual erosion of democratic rights , that are replaced
by cultural elitism is a new facet of this ongoing discussion. It is as if women
including Irish women were never imprisoned in British jails and force-fed for fighting
against control issues and for suffrage. Thus the perameters regarding an equality movement
in the left need strong theoretical grounding unseparated from it's historical base.
Rosa Luxemburg, the Irish women rebels, artist/activists such as Kahlo, all contributed
theoretically to these arguments, though accessing documents and books is increasingly difficult.
* Fay Weldon, (quasi-feminist wrote for the British state a series of ads , one of which was notoriously
"Go to work on an egg"
Doris Lessing's art contributed to the feminist debate in literary form.
which was witnessed and commented on by Mary Wollstencroft, started with a women's march for bread.
Though I can't source the exact text, this was gleaned from.
Mary Wollstencroft, was the writer of such texts as: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
She died in 'child-bed' and her memory was publicly villified because she dared take on the
establishment.
Collette, the french writer was denied a state funeral because the Church/state nexus
in france called her a great sinner. Tens of thousands of women , attended her funeral, most carried
bunches of purple violets.
Apart from dedicated feminist depts in Universities, the teaching of lit/politics tends to be linear
male -dominated and ignorant of women. We study Shelley , not Emily Bronte, Hughes not Plath.
EBB wd be the exception to the rule, but Aurora Leigh is generally the chosen text.
Re-defining the issue of feminism is not as simplistic as creating new perameters for the arguments that our foremothers fought for but an awareness of how they fit now, into a debased and debasing culture view, dominated by empire and war.
Having re-read the opening paragraph of this piece, I was struck again by the allusion to
Pope Benedict . and I re-read again the " Bishop's Principles", ( Battle axe and
Scalping knife-The Young Rebecca West).
"I can understand his claim that 'Women in Christendom today enjoy a greater freedom,
respect and dignity than was theirs before Christ was born or than is theirs now in the countries that
do not bear his name'. It would seem to me, not surprising that the world had advanced in two thousand years: and I note in non-christian countries an absence not only of feminism, but also of syndalicism, aviation and the Russian ballet. "
"It is because the church builds on emasculated pious opinions such as those rather than the naked and direct anarchist teaching of Christ that the attempts of the more respectable suffragists to capture the church congress seem to be so futile an expendidture of force"
(It's a good article, though written in October 1913, (also ,interesting essays on Larkin and Irish Politics)
In very recent times there was a row in the Episcopal church about a female bishopric, the elected candidate(a woman) also welcomed gays to " God's table'.
In Ireland and the wider Roman Catholic 'catchment' there is an ongoing discussion on
'feminism and religion (amongst women), but the wider issue of how the church views women
is largely unchanged in it's 2000 year march towards it's own obsolesence, having divorced
itself from the reality of woman and her experience for too long.
Though the pope recently met Han's Kung, the issue is not of 'granting power' within the
perverted or'emasculated' pious view of women,( which begins with the marriage ban and celibacy rule) but to invite women to the table. This is an important issue to some women of the varied christian faiths.
"Pop psychology" books such as men are from venus, etc, are popular precisely because they act as an anti dote to the academic argument of nurture over nature. These books reflect what we see in the real world, and they resonate because there is an underlying truth in them that men are different to women. Academics that tell us otherwise are generally trying to make a left wing point, such as the article above.
The article accepts that men can throw a ball futher than women. In fact, this is a trivialisation of the point that men are bigger and stronger than women. This means they are automatically more suited to manual labour work, such as, for example, soldiers, police, fire engineers, builders, labourers, etc, etc. (This also explains why men are better at sport than women, and explains why men earn more than women at sports) And so without a doctoral thesis in sight we know why men traditionally work "outside the home".
However the real core difference between men and women is that women give birth to children. Society does not force women to give birth, is a fact of life, they just have to give birth. That's it. If they didn't the human race would be gone. By extension, and easily seen by anyone who looks at the care of children is that women make better mothers and carers of their own children. And so it follows, again without having to do an academic thesis that women work "in the home" far more than men.
It's nothing to do with capitalism, it's just life.
Perhaps the pope understands this better than the academic world, after all, religion has been around a lot longer than social studies courses.
>Men reach farther and wider for topics, from getting financial >information to political news. Along the way, they work search >engines more aggressively, using engines more often and with >more confidence than women."
That's a typically ridiculous patriarchal explanation one finds.
The average Australian woman who works full time still does 70% of the housework. (And that's not extreme by international standards.)
The average male spends more time playing, and more time playing on the net. Hardly merits them being described like intrepid explorers! The 'researchers' are so conservative that they simply can't see past their patriarchal blinkers. Sloppy.
I think you'll find that most men are happy to see less housework done. Whereas a woman who has worked a day's labour comes home and really wants to sweep the floor and pick up the dirty linen and tidy it away - most men don't feel this need.
This is a small gender difference which explains why boys' rooms smell different to girls' rooms.
in indymedia ireland's "gender & sexuality" section.
Most of us probably don't know who Manuel Jalon Corominas is. But he is the man who 50 years ago in 1956 patented the wringing mechanism for a mop. Of course mops had existed before, the first patent was taken out by an Afro-American ( he was black & his parents were slaves ) Thomas Stewart in 1893.
But Stewart had overlooked the problem of "dirty water". Manuel Jalon Corominas solved that by inventing the "one piece wringer" which included a bucket and side attachment to wring a wet mop and offer whomever did the mopping an opportunity to change the water. This revolutionised mopping.
Jalon Corominas was born in 1925 in central Spain and by 1955 and the cold war entente between generals Franco and Eisenhower found himself in the USA doing an aeronautic engineering course in fighter jet maintainence.
As part of his duties he was required to mop the hanger, and there familiarised himself with the then US solution to the problem of "wringing a mop". The mop was wrung between parallel bars rather like the mangles of our forebears' time. Only 3 years later, he started a small company "Rodex" which sold a variety of patented buckets with assorted attachments to help people wring and one of them was his masterpiece the "one piece bucket and mop wringer". By 1964 he had sold 40,000,000 units in over 35 states, becoming one of Francoist Spain's leading innovators and original product exporters. His invention has been credited with the reduced incidents of chilblains, spinal injury, fungal infections and in short "softening hands".
His patent expired in 1984 by which time Spain had become a democracy and was on its way through huge social and economic changes being brought about by European integration. In the last years social progress in that country saw 700,000 people recieve some sort of easier route out of illegal migration, the vast majority were women who clean houses. The progress of "gender politics" also saw the most simple adoption of "single sex civil marriage" laws in the world, the plain inclusion of the phrase "shall be equal regardless of gender of the partners" to the definition of civil marriage. This allowed for thousands of same sex couples to marry, raise their families and argue about the housework. In the first year of such equality only three couples filed for divorce. The first suit for divorce came from a male same sex couple where the plaintiff cited "being treated as a housewife" as reason for dissolution. Upon further examination by more prurient elements of the Spanish press it was found his partner had expected him to deal with la fregona . The awe inspiring affect of Manuel Jalon Corominas may be noted : The Royal Academy of the Spanish Language had changed the definition of la fregona from meaning the woman who scrubbed the floor to a simple combination of porous fabric attached to a stick invented by an afro-american son of slaves with a bucket and a wringer.
we've a long way to go on gender and sexuality issues, but Aileen's piece reminds us the starting point :- this Earth & those who really do the work be it scrubbing or heavy lifting.
invented 50 years ago.
It's good to see an article of this nature as a feature on Indymedia. It should be food for thought for many. I think movements very often unconsciously mirror the very hierarchies and preconceptions, including ones relating to gender, of the mainstream structures they seek to overthrow. It is often so subtle that it never gets named, but even when it isn't subtle (which is often isn't), women in movements and/or political groupings have a difficult time pointing it out, and agonise about the possible consequences of doing so, precisely because of those gendered behavioural expectations mentioned in this article. Revolutionary politics are a bit pointless without self-analysis around these issues. That's sadly lacking in many cases. I hope this article gets read and reflected upon widely by Irish left-wing activists of both genders - I say this because I think women can often be complicit in the perpetration of this phenomenon.
There's been a lot written on this subject, of oppositional movements mirroring the supposed oppressor, some of it psychoanalytic as well as sociological. I don't have time to go into it at the moment as I'm busy in the Four Courts. But I do hope this article is the start of a wider conversation in Irish leftism, both libertarian and otherwise. I am sure this hope would be shared also by my two female co-defendants.
women make better mothers and carers of their own children. And so it follows, again without having to do an academic thesis that women work "in the home" far more than men.
Maybe women do make better mothers (better mothers than who!?), and I’m prepared to accept that mammals have a very strong maternal-child bond as a consequence of evolutionary pressure. What this has to do with women working in the home is an entirely different matter. Firstly there was no home for most of our evolutionary history and secondly the vast majority of women have always worked "outside the home". And that includes our pre-human ancestors. And if our closest extant species are an indication, women work more than men. Bearing children doesn’t reduce a woman’s work, it increases it. The fact that humans have an unusual (for primates) pair-bond system where the male is often roped into helping out doesn’t take away that women have always earned their crust. Victorian-and religious propaganda about women’s labour role is a relatively recent phenomenon and not to be taken seriously as an indication of historical fact.
Again the social context affects the behavioural response – and the idea that there are fixed male and female responses, which we are all hardwired to perform, is undermined.
I’m not sure that many people hold this view – well apart from pop psychologists and idiot popes. There probably aren’t many fixed responses to most social situations as it’s too complex to pre-program; unlike say touching a hot fire, the consequence is easy to predict and evolution has programmed a fast-withdrawal response. What is programmed is the brain power to asses the situation and to select the appropriate response. It is possible, though unproven, that there are slightly different biases amongst the sexes in some situations. It is also possible that society's different norms have contributed to biasing the brain power.
I’d probably disagree a bit with Aileen in that I’d reckon that there are some behavioural differences which aren’t just largely a consequence of being treated differently. For example, with regard to aggression, which is mentioned as one of the differences found, there is a good case that, other things being equal, there is a stronger inherent tendency for this in males than females. The tricky part is that other things are rarely equal, so social norms also play a significant role and teasing them apart is often extremely difficult.
I find it increasingly hard to know what 'innate behaviour' means. Behaviour has to occur in a social environment and different environments can trigger different tendencies. Genes are programmed to flourish in a certain environment. They don’t do anything without an environment. For example, humans probably have a hardwired language acquisition programme enabling kids to learn to talk amazingly well. But in the absence of other people speaking to a child, that program is going to remain untriggered. For complex behaviours there is likely to be something similar.
But while getting to the bottom of behavioural differences is an interesting scientific enterprise, it’s not the same as constructing the society what we want. There I agree with Aileen’s conclusions. The diversity is not only great, it’s essential. And people are individuals so even if one day we do gain a better picture of behavioural differences and there happens to turn out that there are a few, we should treat people as individuals and not according to their group norm as people always deviate from norms anyway. Science is great, but not something we should base our political vision on.
Perceived gender roles or behavioural norms.
(That is a heap of horseshit).
or , if you will:- a styling of self-hypnosis that is an off-shoot of some weird safety mechanism
wherein we look at our governments collusion in first world elitism and the war-machine and think that it has nothing to do with the way we live.
If the reader studies the language of equality: propounded within the Governments sites such as the 'road -map on gender proofing' indicated in the Dept of Justice's web-site, it is plainly obvious that the language of equality and inclusiveness is nothing at all to do with the real-world. It is a systemised language of 'partnership/progress/prosperity/mainstreaming etc
that has nothing to do with the reality of people in this city who are suffering from poverty and discrimination on a daily basis.
There is a stark difference between the people who accept the modes of safety indicated in the language or symbols of egalatarianism and those who fight for it and do not experience it.
The people who have climbed the ladder and accept that they are free and equal in Irish society
turn their eyes away from the poverty on their doorstep. They live in apartment blocks bristling with security devices and not within the community.
The simplicity of defining male/female roles in such a stark manner as planeterisation , or John Gray (who I am sure is very rich) denies diversity and what experience can bring to a movement.
As to enrichment - through equality:- recognising that dialogue and experience of different/
gender/experience/wisdom can bring different gifts to any movement is part of community and fraternity, it should be natural.
The hard question is: why is it not natural for the Irish left to admit of fraternity of Creed/sex/race?
It ties in with a comment on widening the perameters of conversation within protest.
This was related to the 1914 utterances of Rebecca West, to show that the issue
of gender is actually an old issue and comes into dialogue every generation. Tho'
a lot of feminsts wd claim that our ideas on equality in expression, press, protest are utilised
and then the old habits come back and things get stultified agin, They took the guns from
the British and Irish women and tied them to the kitchen sink (with catholicism) after one such war-
systemised abuse of languages, symbols and ideas: is something which narrows the perameters of any discussion, its like moving the goal posts (in reverse) so the discussion reaches a stasis. paralysis , if you will-
Horseshit is bloody excellent for roses and other flowering plants btw.
Chris, you have made some good points, but I think most people will find your use of language difficult to understand. For starters maybe you could clarify what you mean by this-
"why is it not natural for the Irish left to admit of fraternity of Creed/sex/race?"
I find it a bit baffling as well. Is English your first langfuage Chris? Your comments often read as if they have been put through an automatic translator.
The education I received (to the horror of my principal) was /is Irish.
Maybe I should employ a translator...
The fraternity thinh is this: The left in ireland, is dominated (in some areas)
by white, male christian activists.
I can hear the cries of protest- but I have seen the committees, the editorial boards and the dominance for myself.
We are diverse: Catholic, protestant, pantheist, pagan, buddhist, male , female, black , white, and some really good arab writers, who can't find an in.
to reflect that diversity, things have to open out and wisdoms accepted (btw-forgot age, two of best friends are in their nineties, one regularly calls the pope an arsehole and t'other smokes like the blazes and eats books)
the leadership of protest in this country needs to connect to this diversity.
that can only be achieved thru true co-operation and fraternity /(sisterhood)
one meeting I attended was completely dominated by guys, until it was pointed out to them, and one of the responiblities of women activists is to consistently point out the defecit.
apologies for the methodologies of communication.
well in fairness, being an "activist" type, (ie. having this hobby where you go off looking for struggles you can help/use to advance your set of political ideas) is a privilege. MOST non-white non-christians are relatively recent arrivals to this country.
recent arrivals:
a) generally do not have the opportunity/security to go off causing trouble
b) are often quite happy with their new country, as generally this means an improved standard of living
when such people are involved in struggles, the left provide support. i don't think it's our duty to go rounding up token comrades based on the colour of their skin.
re: gender, you're right, there generally is a major gender imbalance, everyone talks about this but i've never heard any good suggestions for how to tackle it. (incidentally, in galway at one stage the "activist" circles i was working in had an imbalance in favour of women. not sure why this was though, so i guess it's a useless anecdote...)
just to qualify that, i wasn't saying that everything's ok.
point a) would apply to many working class people regardless of skin colour. my comment was meant as a criticism of "activism", as something that is often only open to people with a certain amount of privilege
What happened at St Patricks Cathedral was not an ideological strruggle which involved the
left, it was a survival struggle which the left stood in solidarity with.
These people, all well-educated, wanting a better life reached a point of crisis
or extremis wherein they used their bodies to communicate what in terms of recognition
or fraternity- that we are failed as a community and as a culture.
This can be translated in terms of the dialogue with activism needing a certain re-adjustment across its many channels, including the one that voices it _ the free press/indymedia.
The men at St Pats are not writing for Indymedia, and they were obviously disafisfyed with the inhumanity of our State's treatment of their humanity. This can extend to victims of FGM, deportation,capitalist invasion of emergent democracies and it does. the thing is that sometimes
an activist struggle can become as static as the systemisation it confronts. The dialogue
therefore in the left has to expand into the community and become inclusive. The language and
systemisation within that activist movement can be static and actually can alienate people
who would contribute to it.
We now live in a meritocracy. There are laws to deal with discrimination. A driven individual can be whatever they want, and if they feel that they are discrimated against they can deal with it in a courtroom. Sure, people who are less driven may fall back into a traditional genderised role, but that is true of both sexes.
Sure there are a lot of similarites, but to say that the differences are not so important is a bit premature, given what those differences are. For example it is generally accepted that men possess a natural aptitude for spatial awareness...this is a pretty major deal when applied to roles such as engineering, architecture, object manipulation/visualisation of most degrees. It is also a biological "fact" that men are physically stronger and are generally more aggressive and that generally mothers develop stronger bonds with children. As well as the much documented "multi-tasking" abilities of women, or their lingustic aptitudes.
Of course nurture also plays its role.
But all of these differences are beside the point that we live in a country where women are denied NO avenue that they wish to persue.
I'd like to mention that it was a very well written article, although I found the anarchist group stuff out of place and quite alienating. You could have written the main articles and then a comment on how you felt this applied to your group (or whichever other group(s)).
We don't seem to be disagreeing with each other. As i said, my original post was meant as a criticism of "activism". I just feel that the nature of "activism" (in the Give up Activism sense of the word) is such that it will never be an option for most of those people who its supposed to be for (the oppressed/the working class)
I seem to be getting quite off the original topic, apologies. Nice article.
Surprised to see Deborah Tannen's work cited as if somehow it's part of the problem. She's a respected academic researcher who ascribes differences in conversational style between men and women, and between individuals belonging to different cultures, to specific biographical and social causes. Her work resonates because she presents examples from real life and offers interpretations and solutions that have practical application.
Is there a dictionary explanation for this systemisation?
Is is a reward system based on the boy-scout concept of badges
or is it another convenient phraseology designed to hypnotise the
masses to buy the bullshit extruded through the owned media
that we are all equal, despite race/gender/creed and use of language?
The issue of democracy is unresolved. There is no democracy in a country
wherein 50% of the electorate cannot be arsed voting.
Wherein the leaders of the other half choose to represent them are
too busy playing cards and dabbling with their cronies to give a fuck
about the concept of equality and where the only way to sustain the
lie that the specific nostalgia of a white catholic free-state (or 32 county
republic of freemen) can be sustained is through globalised war and
complicity in war-crime.
There is not a 'word' for everything, most important things like feelings
or fear, do not have a specific word ;and language debasement in the race to
the top mentality of Irish globalisation necessarily omits principles
of equality and fraternity in favour of made-up simplifications posing as
attitudes of being.
The issue of equality of access to education and health is unresolved.
The issue of women functioning within a paternalistic system of pseudo
democratic principle is unresolved.
Meritocracy is a term that fucks with principle.