“Patriarchy’s chief institution is the family.”
“I don’t know if there’s a real world in which Sheryl Sandberg is a feminist icon.”
“Just as to ensure elimination of economic classes requires the revolt of the underclass (the…”
Victoria Bateman on Feminism Losing Its Way
“#MeToo arises from the failure of empowerment feminism. Women have uncannily similar and all too…”
Why Women Aren’t C.E.O.s, According to Women Who Almost Were | Susan Chira
Because men:
When women act forcefully, research suggests, men are more likely to react badly. A Lean In/McKinsey & Company survey in 2016 of 132 companies and 34,000 employees found that women who negotiated for promotions were 30 percent more likely than men to be labeled intimidating, bossy or aggressive.
[…]
Sally Blount, dean of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern and the only woman to lead a top 10 business school, noted that data predicts that half or more of the women who earn an M.B.A. this year will drop out of the full-time work force within a decade. The reasons range from family conflicts to placing less inherent value on position or money. That accounts in part for the low number of women who do reach the very top job, because fewer remain in the pipeline. Yet even those women who stay and reach the C-suite are more likely than men to be overlooked, Ms. Blount said.
“Getting looked over is incredibly painful, particularly when you’re not sure why after all these years,” she said. “I used to love the word ‘gravitas.’ I now think it’s male code for ‘not like us’ at the highest levels.”
The parallels with politics are striking. Research in both fields, including some conducted after Mrs. Clinton’s loss, has shown it’s harder for assertive, ambitious women to be seen as likable, and easier to conclude they lack some intangible, ill-defined quality of leadership.
In a Korn Ferry survey in April of 786 male and female senior executives, 43 percent said they thought that continued bias against women as chief executives was the primary reason more women did not make it to the top in their own companies — and 33 percent thought women in their firms were not given sufficient opportunities to become leaders.
[…]
The Lean In survey shows a pervasive sense among women that they face structural disadvantages: They are less likely than men to believe they will be able to participate in meetings, receive challenging assignments or find their contributions valued. The bleakest perceptions are from minority women; only 29 percent of black women think the best opportunities at their companies go to the most deserving employees, compared with 47 percent of white women.
Yes, it is as bad as that.
“I know there’s pressure not to be a dorky, try-hard male feminist stereotype; there’s always a…”
- | Lindy West, Real Men Might Get Made Fun Of
viperslang: “Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and…
“Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you…it means that you do not treat your body as a commodity with which to purchase superficial intimacy or economic security; for our bodies to be treated as objects, our minds are in mortal danger. It means insisting that those to whom you give your friendship and love are able to respect your mind. It means being able to say, with Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre: “I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.
Responsibility to yourself means that you don’t fall for shallow and easy solutions–predigested books and ideas…marrying early as an escape from real decisions, getting pregnant as an evasion of already existing problems. It means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short…and this, in turn, means resisting the forces in society which say that women should be nice, play safe, have low professional expectations, drown in love and forget about work, live through others, and stay in the places assigned to us. It means that we insist on a life of meaningful work, insist that work be as meaningful as love and friendship in our lives. It means, therefore, the courage to be “different”…The difference between a life lived actively, and a life of passive drifting and dispersal of energies, is an immense difference. Once we begin to feel committed to our lives, responsible to ourselves, we can never again be satisfied with the old, passive way.”
― Adrienne Rich
“Women workers who are not feminists know that they receive unequal pay for equal work, but they may…”
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Sandra Lee Bartky, Toward a Phenomenology of Feminist Consciousness
Mary Jo Murphy, The Monster Sorority of Women Voters Sometimes…
Mary Jo Murphy, The Monster Sorority of Women Voters
Sometimes the gender gap has been yuge and sometimes more modestly endowed, but for months now men have remained pretty much for Donald J. Trump and women for Hillary Clinton. Last week’s debate, when Mrs. Clinton got a chance to bring up her opponent’s habit of calling women pigs, slobs and dogs, did nothing to narrow that divide.
But the danger of focusing, as we so often do, on the differences between men and women is that it assumes women themselves are all on the same page.
In fact, we are less a monolith and more a monster sorority, patched together from disparate viewpoints and dissimilar experiences. A New York Times/CBS News poll last month found instances of a sisterhood gap that in some ways is more revealing than the gender gap.
In addition to gauging views on the election, the poll asked women how they viewed their lives, their roles in society and society’s views about them. Along with the expected differences between Republicans and Democrats, the biggest differences were between black and white women and between younger and older women.
via Samatha Kim Attwood, From “Femin-ish” to Feminist, or How…
via Samatha Kim Attwood, From “Femin-ish” to Feminist, or How the Democratic Primary Has Turned Me into a Raging Feminist
Laurie Penny, Maybe you should just be single
Nothing frustrates me so much as watching young women at the start of their lives wasting years in succession on lacklustre, unappreciative, boring child-men who were only ever looking for a magic girl to show off to their friends, a girl who would in private be both surrogate mother and sex partner. I’ve been that girl. It’s no fun being that girl. That girl doesn’t get to have the kind of adventures you really ought to be having in your teens and twenties. It’s not that her dreams and plans don’t matter, but they always matter slightly less than the boy’s, because that’s what boys are taught to expect—that their girlfriend is there to play a supporting role in their life.
You see them everywhere—exhausted young women pouring all their spare energy into organising, encouraging and taking care of young men who resent them for doing it but resent them even harder when they don’t. You see them cringing for every crumb of affection before someone cracks and it all goes wrong and the grim cycle starts again. You can fritter away the whole of your youth that way. I know women who have.
What I’m trying to say is that there are a lot of things that are much worse than being single under modern patriarchy. The feminists of the late 20th century were often single by choice, and they’re mocked for it now by those who like to forget that they had good reason for it. It was better to be alone than to make the sort of grim bargains marriage or partnership required and still requires of heterosexual people who happened to be female.
It just wasn’t worth it. Sometimes it still isn’t worth it.
(via Rachel Weidinger)
“The frequency that Nicki works on is not the easiest frequency…
“The frequency that Nicki works on is not the easiest frequency for us to wrestle with, because it’s about autonomy, and who has it, and whether we can actually tell the difference between self-objectification and self-gratification,’’ says Treva B. Lindsey, an assistant professor of women’s, gender and sexuality studies at the Ohio State University, continuing: ‘‘Do we even know what an autonomous female looks like in pop culture? What does control even mean in such a corporatized mass-media space?”
Vanessa Grigoriadis, The Passion of Nicki Minaj
One Single Woman for Twitter’s Board, One Giant Step for Equality? – Kara Swisher – AllThingsD
Kara Swisher comments on Marjorie Scardino joining Twitter’s board, but notes that there’s still a huge underrepresentation of women in tech at all levels, and especially in leadership roles.
The tech industry — and, more specifically, Silicon Valley — continues to stumble forward in earnest about how few women are represented in its top ranks of management and on its boards. This, despite the enthusiastic embrace of tech products by many women.
This is not a new problem, of course, but one that rears its head periodically as it becomes clear that the ground gained by women in this perhaps most important sector of the economy — a sector more amenable than most to more tolerance and diversity, too — is being lost rather than gained.
Any gander at the variety of studies, and even a not-very-scientific look at the subject, will show that fewer women are starting companies, are being promoted at companies, are funded, are funders, are on boards, are being rewarded in the same way. At a high-profile party I attended last night, for example, the small handful of women in attendance all seemed to notice and comment on the massive sea of men, though the men appeared blissfully unaware of the imbalance.
“They have no idea at all,” one prominent woman said to me, recounting a story about her visit to an advisory meeting of a tech bank board, where she was the single woman in a room full of men. When she brought it up there — not an easy thing for her, since she was the only woman — she was met with a lot of genuine concern when the penny dropped, but few ideas for action.
• Moreover, given her [Sheryl Sandberg’s] positions first at Google and now at Facebook, it is hard not to notice that her narrative is what corporate America wants to hear. - Anne-Marie Slaughter •
The individualistic, libertarian-leaning Silicon Valley types have absorbed the credo that tech is a pure meritocracy, and if there is an imbalance in the number of women in the industry it is a flaw in society as a whole, education, or women’s ambitions. To some extent that is the message of Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, which characterizes the barriers to women’s advancement to senior roles as their unwillingness to ‘lean in’ — to be more ambitious, aggressive, and to take on more difficult work.
As Anne-Marie Slaughter put it in a review of Lean In,
Sandberg’s approach, as important as it is, is at best half a loaf. Moreover, given her positions first at Google and now at Facebook, it is hard not to notice that her narrative is what corporate America wants to hear. For both the women who have made it and the men who work with them, it is cheaper and more comfortable to believe that what they need to do is simply urge younger women to be more like them, to think differently and negotiate more effectively, rather than make major changes in the way their companies work.
[…]
So is the dearth of women in top jobs due to a lack of ambition or a lack of support? Both, as Sandberg herself grants, proposing that women should “wage battles on both fronts.” Yet she chooses to concentrate only on the “internal obstacles,” the ways in which women hold themselves back. This is unfortunate. As a feminist and a corporate leader, Sandberg seems ideally placed to ask the question that all too often gets lost amid the welter of talk about what women should do, what they should want and how they should behave. When it comes to ensuring that caregivers still have paths to the corner office, how can business lean in?
Let them eat cock
Suggestions that the way to end sexism and rape is to have a better, more ethical patriarchy is lamentably divorced from reality.
(A column I wrote arising from responses to the rape and murder of Anene Booysen)
So I’m sitting in a sauna in a gym in Pretoria (long story), and there’s this guy lying on the wooden slats idly playing with his penis, like a man patting his pet pit bull while slumped on the couch watching SuperSport. He strikes up a conversation, and it turns out we both went to Camps Bay High School, although in different centuries.
I nervously start extolling Camps Bay’s virtues – sun, sea, gorgeous surfers of both genders, general mellowness – and he interrupts me. “My mother forced me to go there for matric, I hated it. They didn’t even have woodwork! I was in a boys-only school beforehand, it was great. Boys shouldn’t have to go to school with girls.”
I’m a little dumbfounded, and obviously I don’t want to arouse the sleeping pit bull, but I have to venture. “Uh, but surely … I mean, girls and stuff?”
He’s adamant. “It’s the worse thing you can do, put boys with girls. I tell you bru, a boys-only school – it’s more spiritual, it’s about respect. Sure, in the first year they pick on you, smack you around a little, but after that …”
I was reminded of the sorely predictable, and tragically unconscious, sexism evinced in the tweets of one Lionel Adendorf. Adendorf is a government spokesperson for the department of agriculture, forestry and fisheries, who was “inspired” by the rape and murder of Anene Booysen to make this comment: “#StopRapeNow – Mothers should not refuse affection from fathers or partners in front of the kids #RIPAnene #AneneBooysen”.
Adendorf was challenged by many people, and you can read an account of his tweets in full, and a relatively positive communications trail between him and gender activist Michelle Solomon, on her blog. His response to his deserved evisceration might give you hope – in this sad world.
I’m paradoxically far more proud of Adendorf and his willingness to learn from his mistakes, however imperfectly understood, than I am of the hordes promoting the “real men don’t rape” fallacy. And Adendorf really doesn’t understand his mistakes in any meaningful sense. He ends his apology by saying: “Sometimes, when fast asleep, my son will feel my ears, kiss my cheeks and my forehead and even, when I am lucky, whisper that he loves me. That is what I wanna experience everyday but my wife, unfortunately, does not always like it when I kiss her when she is busy with her Cosmo or even the dishes.” Even the dishes. Indeed.
But his tweets reveal that much of male society (and certainly some of female society, but that is material for another column, and probably another writer) is desperately out of touch with the real world in which women live. In much the same way, Marie Antoinette was reputed to have been entirely out of touch with the conditions of starving peasants in pre-revolutionary France. We now know that this was made up, but the popularly-believed story is that, when told that there wasn’t enough bread to feed the poor, she said, “Let them eat cake.”
In the same way, attempts by people like Adendorf, to suggest that the way to end sexism and rape is to have a better, more ethical patriarchy, are as much out of touch. It’s a “let them eat cock” solution, if you will, and is lamentably divorced from reality. Religion and government cannot be reformed. There is no ideal state of being for those institutions that will stop the oppression of women. You can have as many women priests, pastors or imams as you want, they’ll still be advocating the worship of a male god. You can have as many women ministers as you want, they’ll still be spending a disproportionate amount of the budget on big guns.
While the call to teach your sons to be gentlemen (in one of Adendorf’s tweets, for example, he says, “Be careful about the language used when referring to women or mothers. Children form their attitudes based on it”), can come from an ostensibly good impulse, it’s inevitably still about perpetuating the stereotypes that allow men the existential freedom to rationalise rape. My acquaintance in the sauna believes that boys should be educated in a male only environment, because it keeps them authentically male, more certain of their place in the world.
But authentically male is the same as inauthentically human. Just as the aristocracy of France eventually lost their heads in a revolution that sprung from their sheer inability to comprehend the conditions of the people they ruled, patriarchy is going to have to undergo a violent revolution before its proponents can understand that their way of being in the world just doesn’t work. Cake won’t solve the problem, because cake IS the problem.
(First published on the Mail & Guardian, February 13 2013, under the title “Patriarchy: Let them eat cock”.)