14. The Marionette's Game
"Most of us would probably agree that if a feminist revolution is to succeed in making all of us truly human, we have to redefine success -- which means redefining the importance of the symbolism of money, and redefining power -- and not in the terms that a male society has set down for us...
Is a successful woman a woman who gets her share of the pie if the pie is
crawling with maggots?"
-- Barbara Grizzutti Harrison,
Unlearning the Lie: Sexism in School 1
* * *
What do you want to be when you grow up? Study hard, young fellow, and you will someday be able to render great services unto mankind. Only selfish people sit around doing nothing. You want to carry your share of the load, don't you? That will be your duty as a responsible adult man. Everyone will respect you for doing your part to keep the world running. Intelligence like yours shouldn't be wasted on mundane tasks, you can do things sorely needed in this world. You could become a scientist and invent or discover wonderful things to improve life and lessen suffering. You could become a doctor and save people's lives. You could become president and see to it that liberty and justice are kept safe from tyrants and dictators. People will be so grateful, they'll pay you lots of money, and you'll have a big house and a nice car and you'll be able to do almost anything you want. Apply yourself, young man, for it takes years of training and preparation to learn how to do great things. Of course, there's nothing wrong with emptying garbage cans and digging ditches, someone has to do that, too, and men who do those things are doing their share, but in your case it would be such a waste! You could do so much more! You will go far. Isn't it great to be a boy, with a future like that?
* * *
I want some more Hardy Boys books and I'm saving up to buy a fancy bank where the ghost comes out and gobbles up the money. I can't wait until Christmas, so here I am, mowing Mr. Jones' lawn. It's hot, but Mrs. Jones always brings me lemonade and tells me to take a break, so I don't mind.
They pay me four dollars and fifty cents. My sister's dumb. She babysits. She works four hours and only gets three dollars. Hell, she could mow lawns! She's not as strong as me, but little Bobby mows lawns, and if he can, she can. But that's my sister, she doesn't want to do anything that would make her tired and sweaty. How stupid! Just because it's boys' work. I could babysit if I wanted to, why does she think she can't mow lawns?
You know what's really dumb? She spends her money on clothes! She's got ten times more clothes than I do, and she spends all her money buying clothes! Daddy and Mama buy me all the clothes I need and lots of things I'd never wear, which aren't comfortable and make me look stupid. Why do girls think they need more clothes than enough so you don't run out before your Mom washes them? Girls are oh so nice and neat, squeaky-clean and icky- sweet, just like something good to eat...bleah! Why can't more of them be like Grace? But no, I get stuck with Miss Priss, who thinks girls are too good to mow lawns.
I know one thing, though. I'll be glad when I'm grown up and I can do indoor work with my head instead, and get lots and lots of money, like Daddy.
* * *
In our time and culture, the first regular job experience of a boy -- the real introduction to the world of employment - is likely to be the after-school or summer job of his teen years. Unless his situation is an unusual one, he is introduced at this time to that legendary entity, the boss.
On first contact, the boss stares coldly at the boy's clothing, hair, body stance...what makes you think you're worthy of employment with me? Before landing that first position, the boy will probably learn to stand respectfully expectant except when spoken to, to look earnest and be solemn for the momentous occasion, to say sir and not display any resentment at the unfriendly appraisal. When he gets the job, he learns from on-the-job training to take the tasks at hand very seriously, to treat it as a responsibility which leaves no room for other considerations: a hamburger rolled unevenly is cause for dismay; a shelf wrongly stacked should cause him to rend his garment and promise himself and the boss never to be so lax again; an overring on the cash register should make his hair turn white even as he rushes furiously to compensate.
He also learns that he has sold every moment of his paid time, and to stand idle is stealing from the boss: if there are no customers for twenty seconds, start dusting the shelves. Stay busy. Business is busy-ness. Never mind if what you're doing is totally unnecessary, at least you aren't getting away with any leisure. You dusted? You wiped down the grill already? Go clean out the bathrooms, then. You already did? Well, then, go outside into the parking lot and pick up litter. Sweep the sidewalks. Find something to do, damn, how many times do I have to tell you?
The employee with the "right attitude" is the one who lives in constant fear of not being good enough, of being fired.
In this way, the young boy begins to learn what the work-world is all about, but at the time, probably doesn't contemplate matters too much. The boss may be an ass, but he wants those kilodollars for a car and Friday night dates with his girlfriend, so he contents himself with a glare and a gesture under the counter as the boss departs, and as soon as he's gone, the boy relaxes as best he can.
* * *
At the level of unskilled labor, the man is likely to find the situation unchanged in any remarkable way from that of the schoolboy flipping hamburgers or running a cash register. Still, it is precisely here that exceptions may most often exist, since the simple laborer's employment situation primarily hinges around the expectations and attitudes of one person, his boss. Rare though it may be, it is possible to be employed in such a manner by a boss who relates on a first-name basis, who asks and expects you to do the necessary work to the best of your ability, but nothing else.
I have had such experiences myself, once as a janitor and clean-up boy in an auto shop, once as a furniture mover for the van lines.
As janitor, I did my routine work and whatever else was asked as it came up, drank beer with the boss and the mechanics after work, and was never expected to treat sweeping the floors as a deeply important project with moral and ethical ramifications. Complaints about my work were always in the tone of voice that casually acquainted coworkers use, aimed at getting me to do differently, not to make me fearful of the boss's displeasure.
As a furniture mover, I unloaded and stacked furniture when the van arrived, following or preceding which I sat in the office drinking coffee with the boss or even taking a nap (and getting paid for my time, I might add!); I worked when the work was there.
Unavoidably, though, there are the problems of unskilled labor in seeking job security; you have no special skills to easily secure a job, being no more and no less qualified than any other man (being male is, however, usually an advantage), and you have to beg for the chance of carrying your share of the load, for the most part, often with very little success. Also, the pay is rarely good.
Despite these negative aspects, I was drawn to the unskilled or semi-skilled labor market after graduation from high school, and for the next eight years attempted to secure and hold such jobs on a dependable, ongoing basis, and had I done so I might well have been content with it for a long time; for, although I had done well in school and was encouraged to think I could do anything I wanted, professionally speaking, I was not at all impressed with the option of offering more of my mind and creativity in the service of a sick society.
* * *
The epitome of middle-class manhood wakens to the buzz of the alarm clock, rises and observes the obligatory ritual of spraying cold shaving cream on his face and scraping away most if not all of his most visible secondary sex characteristic. He used to navigate his overweight, unexercised body to the breakfast table shortly after running a comb through the impersonally short hair on his innocuous head; nowdays, he may feel obliged to run a half-mile before breakfast in order to blend in with the new exective imagery.
He dons a fortrel-polyester uniform consisting of button-front collared "sports" shirt (it used to be white, but the dress code now indicates pastel), necktie, those horrible flappy pants that only fit at the waist, and a "sports" coat, one of those Sunday-school things that stay open to the bottom of the rib cage to display the shirt and tie, with two or three big metal buttons immediately below...and considers himself to be welll-dressed. He's wearing a uniform serving no function except to symbolize his conformity, his suppression of any sense of personality or physically distinct self.
His wife serves him breakfast and receives his uninvolved converstion as he follows the unvarying patterns that help to make his day interchangably and monotonously familiar and automatic. The same smile and questions to the children, a glance at the newspapers, a passionless kiss to the wife, and he's off.
Whether bureaucrat or administrator, his job is his identity, his answer to the question of who he is. Other considerations take a back seat. Unless his personal life actually disintegrates (a possibility that will not occur to him until it happens), only the job gets his energy, his passion, his worry, his sense of accomplishment. With meaningless cameraderie behind mutual walls of outward and inner conformity, he greets his coworkers and begins attending to his functions. This is what he does. This is who he is. This is his life.
Unless his position is such that doing so might advance his standing in the business, he will not question whether or not the methods of his company are the best for reaching the goals, nor shall he even then be likely to question whether or not achieving them in the first place would be a good thing. The realms in which he should worry and for which he should take responsibility are distinctively outlined. The only major concern in his life is whether or not he is doing the job for which he was hired to the satisfaction of those who define it, and demonstrating the obsessive drive to do so that will most likely earn him a promotion to a larger realm and higher income.
His mannerisms, appearance, sense of humor, and details of his private life are shaped so as to please, get acceptance and approval, and correspond to the total corporate image. His life has been sold for an annual salary.
* * *
In the glorified tradition of serious masculine competition and domination, the employees in the work-world are immersed in a sport that requires a form of teamwork that leaves little room for individuality of method or thought, while only too often eliminates the better portion of what might become true bonding and rapport by setting each team member to compete with his fellows for recognition, praise, and promotion.
The fellow in an ascendant position in society who dares to be satisfied with his present level of salary and clout and feels quite competent and unassailably proficient at what he does often attracts attention by his easygoing relaxation. He isn't ambitious, people will say. He isn't going anywhere. Where is his drive, his will to succeed? Not the proper attitude at all! Let's give his account to Jones. Let's give Smith control of his team. We can "promote" him to a position without any real responsibilities.
In olden times, we had sovereigns and vassals and serfs and slaves, and with conveniently selective blindness, we look at these historical ways of putting men above one another in a rigid class system and celebrate our modern enlightenment, pretending that today's hierarchies are better for teaching each worker to be dissatisfied with his status and to scrape and claw his way upwards until his sixty-fifth birthday, whereupon he is ceremoniously put out to pasture with that cut in salary and status called (of all things) Social Security.
NOTE -- A social critique of our modern hiererchical structure, especially if coming from a leftist analysis, might strongly criticize this notion that today's white-collar workers are expected -- with an almost coercive expectation --to work their way upward in the business hierarchy. One could point out that there are large white- collar "ghettos" in which the opportunities for promotion are virtually nonexistent, and where the person who "dares to be satisfied with his present level of salary and clout", as I put it, is displaying a realistic and quite "tolerated" attitude. The problem with this kind of critique is that it leaves intact the assumption that upward mobility and promotion is (or would be) a wonderful thing, and that the joys of masculine privilege in the work-world are enjoyed by the "winners" at the top -- a notion that serves to keep the competitive structure operating.
Meanwhile, those portions of the white-collar world of work that have come to resemble blue-collar and unskilled labor in their lack of promotional future are not the ones that I am discussing here; those dead-end fields are merely new forms of the unskilled and semi-skilled labor market that I have already talked about.
* * *
The symbol of the man who has made it has for some time now been the doctor. The romance novels written for girls and women make it plain that the doctor in modern America is the inheritor of the masculine legacy of the archduke or count of the old world.
With childhood instructions to strive and make of himself a citizen who does a wonderful thing for society, the boy seeking to become a doctor begins his undergraduate schooling with zeal. He must take a regimen of academic courses and bring high grades, for the competitition to enter medical school is very intense.
He quickly finds that the courses and the tests have been made unnecessarily difficult for the sole purpose of weeding out anyone who does not make success as a student their major obsession. The premedical requirements insist on a background in many technical areas that have virtually no bearing on his plans to minister unto people's physical health, while neglecting to include humanities courses that might help to shed light on the social elements of health. The academic load becomes so burdensome that his routine becomes Pavlovian, cramming in data long enough to regurgitate the response onto his test paper when the stimulus of question appears, often to forget it all two weeks after the test, requiring him to go back and re-cram for midterm examinations. If among the fortunate chosen, he will be required to learn vast quantities of information which he will forget within two years after completing his internship period unless his specialty actually causes him to rely on that knowledge in his practice.
The key work is discipline. To enter such fields, you must energetically apply yourself to memorizing an imposing mass of things which you know have nothing to do with your career except that it happens to be set up that way. The gifted potential anatomist must know psychiatric theory and the taxonomic description of the pseudomonas bacillus, or he will never get the chance to devote skill, time, and energy to unravelling the mysteries of human body structure. Once he enters the hospital as an intern, he will stagger through the professional initiation of twenty-hour shifts giving hauntingly inadequate care to hospital patients and doing hospital scutwork and paperwork, from which he learns virtually nothing except that entering the field is a privilege, not an act of noble good citizenship service.
Eventually, he will be a full-fledged doctor, and will be answerable only to omnipotent bureaucracies such as the American Medical Association, the insurance corporations, and the Joint Committee on the Accreditation of Hospitals on the one hand, and the perpetual threat of malpractice lawsuits on the other.
If idealism and a full consciousness of the entirety of what he, his hospital, and his field are really doing can survive all that, they have done something comparable to germ's survival of a bath in carbolic acid.
* * *
The President of the United States reflects worriedly upon the ramifications of the latest international trade cartel as his body reaches orgasm inside his supportive wife. The phone rings. Guess what such-and-such nation just did?
Soon, television makeup applied, bodyguards of the Secret Service at his elbow, he will issue his proclamations. If he skims the paper, a caricature of him will be shown jumping through a hoop marked "special interests"... or worse.
No matter what happens on the face of the Earth, it is his responsibility to do something about it. Amalgamated Tinfoil just crashed. Eleven members of the Manicurists Union were shot in California. The government of Leichtenstein just fell to the communist rebels. The Chairman of the People's Republic of Whatsit has just condemned America in front of the United Nations. Unemployment is up. The national debt is sky high. Six out of ten Americans want federal assistance. Six out of ten Americans want taxes cut. Some inventor designed a new labor-saving device, and now half of Pittsburgh's labor force is no longer needed to carry that share of the load. The Secret Society of Druids has notified the press that eight atomic bombs hidden in London will be detonated unless the Anglo-Saxon invaders of their native Celtic lands leave at once. Associated Press has a photograph of their Hiroshima-sized warning blast off the coast of Wales. Well, Mr. President, what are you going to do? Mr. President is going to issue a press release.
Mr. President goes on to meet with a Senator or two: will you vote for this bill? Will you introduce this one? Only if the politics of Mr. President meet with the approval of their faction.
The President of the United States got where he is today by doing things that enough powerful supporters, not to disinclude voters, wanted him to. He won a popularity contest. He can't ignore the wishes of his party's central committee. He can't ignore the wishes of Congress. He can't ignore the wishes of the American public. He can't ignore the wishes of the international community. To the best of his ability, he measures each issue on a balance scale of approval and disapproval, penalties for angering, rewards for pleasing. You can't please all of the people all of the time, but you can't afford to displease most of the people much of the time or you've blown it. If you displease some of the people all of the time, you only have to worry about being shot. The American nation is not a union, it's an intersection! Only what we have in common goes. Produce. Reproduce. Yeah.
The President of the United States lives in a goldfish bowl. His every act is an official act of the President of the United States. In the privacy of the presidential bedchambers, will he be able to show his true, vulnerable, human self to a wife who at best gets his full attention only at such times? Will the practice of being perpetually on a world-sized stage prevent him from dropping out of role? Will his wife be able to share with him all her thoughts and feelings in the same interlude? Perhaps...but they can't go forth spontaneously living and doing things as love partners might. A night of entertainment is scheduled into his calendar, and when the night comes, there is no question about what the evening's events may bring. Appointments with the wife are all on the agenda.
Every waking or sleeping moment may be interrupted by a crisis requiring his official attention. Nothing else can claim a higher priority. How can he help but make the concerns of his job his deepest and most profound involvement?
The legend is that our social stratification is designed for the "winners" at the top, that they enjoy the good life (even if it is thought unfair that they do so at the expense of those under them), and that they are in control and have real power (even if it is thought unfair that they obtain it by oppression of those below them)...but is this power? Is this the good life? I'm not impressed.
Of course, you could insist that I am still not dealing with the real "winners", and that I am not discussing the true "top" of the social pyramid. Okay,...
* * *
The fifty year old billionaire stares in the mirror at the reflection of a man who would have had to earn over one and a half million dollars a month since the day of his birth to reach the point he's at today. Without spending a penny of it.
Of course he didn't "earn" it! He knows quite well that the world is not set up fairly. The more power you have, the more effectively you can reach for more. He can hardly preserve any sense of innate equality, of two people happily enjoying the same state of individual freedom with no power over the other. Who do you suppose he trusts? How many people relate to him the person rather than him the billionaire? Who knows him for who he is rather than as the possessor of all that power? When was the last time? His first million? His first five hundred thousand? Male friends who simply enjoyed his company, relaxing with him, liking him and the times for what they were? How about women who loved him for himself, genuinely thinking his personality or even his body made him sexy? When was the last time he believed that? Could he even relate to a female billionare (yeah, go ahead, count them) without money occupying center stage? What opinion do you suppose he holds of human nature now? Of himself? Are you jealous? Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to say that poor folks should shut up and count their blessings, or that the fact that misery is spread so universally throughout the patriarchy means that no one has sufficient reason to complain...but would you want to be like him? Would you want to live his life?
But we do have this legend of a bunch of billionaires controlling the world behind the scenes. Power. I suppose such folks get together and share thoughts and dreams and plans for creatively molding our culture for all kinds of fascinating goals and desires? I seriously doubt it. With all that power, I doubt any one of them can do a great deal that doesn't coincide with the intersection of their common interests. "Power", indeed! What are they able to agree on as far as using it? Seeking more power. God, that's pathetic...
* * *
Did you ever get the feeling sort of like we're in a vehicle that's running out of control and about to crash? What would you say if I told you that no one is in the driver's seat?
* * *
We are us, the species human; that is the plural sense of self we share. And even if we may not be in full accord about them, there are certain objectives we want to accomplish because they are in our best interests, there are ongoing tasks we need to keep doing in order to maintain ourselves day to day and year to year, and there are even relatively unnecessary endeavors that we are interested in putting our creative and productive energies into because we find the results desirable. This is the load, the body of work we theoretically should be accomplishing, and that much is true regardless of how unfair the apportionment of jobs or how unequal the energies spent on them; it would be illogical for even a tyrant or an elitist to argue with that.
The economic system does not work that way. Under the dynamics of the competitive market, the reasons for doing or accomplishing something have little if anything to do with assessed need, and nearly everything to do with monetary greed. If it is a practice which looks like it will result in the accumulation of currency, it will probably take place, regardless of whether or not the other results are truly desirable, irrelevant to human purposes altogether, or completely detrimental to human interests.
For example, while in Athens, Georgia, I saw the desire for money result in a proposal for a paper mill to be built on the Savannah River over the noisy protestations of surrounding citizens. Was there a need for paper in excess of what can be produced by existing facilites? I doubt it. Is the construction of a paper mill and subsequent use likely to contribute to various types of pollution? Definitely. Is the possibility of recycling existing paper being practiced to the greatest reasonable degree to reduce both paper litter and the need for new paper? Not remotely close. Will it contribute to a scarcity of timber? Is our supply of trees shrinking? What do you think? Right. Will it make money? I'm afraid so. And, protests or no protests, I'm afraid they're going to build the damn thing.
If the Savannah River Paper Mill represents behavior we would not engage in (probably) outside of the dynamics of the economic system, an inverse corollary would be the cleaning up of litter, which is prevented to a major degree by the dynamics of the system. Do we, collectively, regard litter as an eyesore? Yes, I think so. Would we, collectively find among our number the available labor supply to pick it all up? Well, what if you could make a good profit from doing so? But you can't, so people don't. Yet we do things which bring forth less desirable results because they do bring a profit. Don't blame the pettiness of our greedy character: remember, we need money to pay rent, buy food, and so on. But if the economic system were eliminated from the picture, and all labor (and all products of other peoples' labor) were free, would we, collectively, regard picking up litter as being just as valid a contribution to the general welfare as anything else? Think about it.
The competitive market is a mass market. Despite the illusion of a wide range of choices among competing brand names, models, colors, and so on, the market economy always caters to the statistically average consumer and makes a minimum appeal to individual tastes and desires; the apparent diversity of products and product styles exists because advertising seeks to appeal or even create new needs and new markets; the new products do not appear in response to a need so much as a market is created, through advertising, for a new product. There is no reason in the world why we, as a society, could not attend to the myriad interests and tastes of the individuals that we are composed of, since we have the time and the energy to do so. Nor is there any justification outside of the dynamics of the economic system for built-in obsolescence, deliberately shoddy construction, or unnecessary impermanences that require constant re-buying and doing it all over and over again. Obviously, if we have the time and energy to waste on keeping up with the breakdowns that the "constant consumer" policy of the competitive market system inherently demands, we have the time and energy to be craftsworkers and to do it right the first time.
But because of the economic system, the goal becomes to sell as many as we can, not to create as many as we want; and, as a result, each product is designed to be acceptable to as many people as possible (majority rule again -- only what we have in common goes). The diverse garden of dichotomous tastes is ignored. Blandness rules.
With minds caught up in the thinking created by the economic system, many people will protest, "Sure, but there's the factor of time. You can't expect modern people to find the time to cater to individual nuances the way people could back when things were slower." Yet it is because of the economic system that the goal becomes to temporarily sate each consumer's need and maintain an ongoing buyer-seller relationship, not to fill and bring that need to an end. Inefficient patching over of problems thus becomes preferable to permanent, long-range solutions. I give you the example of the automobile: surely, you are aware that we, the human species, possess the technology to create cars that virtually never develop mechanical troubles, and which, as maintainable and operational vehicles, could outlast their owners...but think of what it would do to the economy if no one needed to buy a new car every four years! Planned obsolescence is a consumer of time as well as energy. That is efficient in economic terms, but not in human terms.
We have at our disposal a technology which could do us many good turns, not the least important of which lies with communication. We could use our beautiful communications technology so as to relay data and opinions and compare viewpoints, to assess our needs, wants, and available laborers, to make plans, and so forth, and thus a voluntary cooperative society could encompass more people by factors of thousands than any voluntary cooperative culture has ever done before. Instead, we use our communications hardware to hawk our merchandise.
* * *
Like a man-made mechanical monster out of a horror film, our economic system has long since been behaving according to its own values and priorities. It lives at the core of the patriarchal worhsip of quantity rather than quality, busy-ness rather than purpose, what rather than why. And it has recently become obsolete as well.
It evolved in a time when laborers were in short supply and the work-load was staggering, and there was simultaneously thought to be a need for incentives to work extra hard and a risk of lazy people consuming without pulling their share of the load.
It was a nasty monster from the start, bringing with it the pursuit of coin and forgetfulness of intrinsic purpose, theft on a grand new scale, corruption, extortion, and of course the dehumanized inability to assess where one's personal best interests lie, with the resulting distortion of codes and values that occur whenever patriarchal reward-and-punishment behavior modification begins to blur our concepts of the natural (especially social) results of our actions; institutionalized reward is merely the flip side of institutionalized punishment.
At this point, though, it is also a pathologically useless monster as well, because available laborers today are most certainly not in short supply, there isn't enough work-load to go around, even with the vast body of redundant, unnecessary jobs that were devised to deal with the "unemployment problem", even with labor unions and similar social pressures guarding against position-destroying technological moves toward even more efficiency, even with the existence of job training and rehabilitation programs that try to make more people employable. And still we are set up to compete for commodities to insure that no one will get away with sitting on their butts, never mind all the excess commodities we give away charitably, the market-saturating surpluses resulting from our modern technology, never mind that we could increase that productive efficiency still further by expanding automation and ditching the money system, never mind that a major economic concern today is the need to create new jobs to give unemployed people something to do.
Never mind that we now have the capacity to provide a human standard of living for all, that even the rich would benefit by being safer and potentially much happier and less alienated without even having to give up all their fineries, which for the most part could be custom produced for anyone who wanted them. In spite of this total lack of any need to fight over our plenty, or to provide mass incentives to fill what could be personally fulfilling and interesting positions, the monster careens on, out of control, with no one in the driver's seat.
We are us, but we are not running us; we are only running.
* * *
The primary victims of the reward side of the reward-and-punishment combination are women.
Just as men can be eliminated from the opportunity to prove themselves to be men in the political arena, thus prohibiting them from ever seeking power, they can also be eliminated from the competition for the monetary rewards that parallel overt vertical power. Women, meanwhile, have never been given the opportunity to prove their "manhood" in this fashion; and, while perhaps not suffering from lack of power over others and sometimes able to invalidate the actual use of a man's legal power over them, women have still been in need of the basic resources for which one must tender money in order to obtain them.
By keeping those elements on which women (like all people) are dependent for life and human levels of comfort in the hands of men, who alone could earn money in the traditionally male world of economic competition, the economic system more than anything else made the dependence of women on men a factual thing.
* * *
Women today have managed to enter the male's traditional realm of financially compensated labor, an accomplishment that has taken years of struggle to get the message of feminism across, to get people to take women and their employment seriously. Today we have women who are surgeons, senators, construction workers, coal miners, astronauts, and Supreme Court justices. But we have only a few.
Meanwhile, the bias against "working" women continues to operate, making it difficult for a woman to go as far in her field and keeping her wages substantially lower than those of her male colleague who performs equal work. Despite increased female participation in the male job markets, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that in 1985 white women still earned only 67 cents for each dollar paid to white men. As for entering wages
"A new study of census data shows that the wages of white women entering the job market were further behind the wages of comparable white men in 1980 than they were in 1970, despite the growth of affirmative action and education gains by women.
But the study said black men and to a lesser extent, black women reduced the disparity between their entering wages and the engering wages of white men over the decade...
-- Robert Pear, New York Times News Service 3
(italics added)
The battle for sexual equality in employment lags behind that for racial equity in attitudes as well as practices. Paula Kassell of New Directions for Women notes that a businesswoman may be excluded from businessmen's luncheon clubs in a manner that
"...is still widely accepted when it is directed against women, though now almost unthinkable against men from racial, religious, or ethical minorities...Those who man the barriers against women claim that the clubs are private, social, only for comraderie. But fellow-members are recommended for job openings over the lunch table, leadership ability [is assessed or observed there]...[and] the club's directories list the members' businesses because they are expected to purchase the others' goods and services. Where does that leave the young woman in management? On the lower rungs of the ladder." 4
Indeed, as long as society's attitudes towards the careers of women remain bogged in sexism, the best of Equal Opportunity bills can be twisted by the patriarchal lawyer-judges who enforce and interpret them, or gutted through the efforts of the antifeminist "New Right" as it works diligently to resurrect the worst of the Old Wrongs.
Educational opportunities in many fields are still slanted towards men when it comes to the attitudes of schools and schoolteachers, even if laws now insist that no federally funded program may bar somone on the basis of sex...and, as of this writing, the scope of that legislation has already been reduced to include only the portions of the programs which directly receive federal monies.
Of course, there are financially compensated fields where women are assumed to be the more natural employee, the "pink-collar" realms such as nursing, elementary school teaching, and so forth. These help to disguise the fact that sexism still works to prevent women from earning their own money and thereby becoming autonomous, but the truth is obvious when you compare the wages and benefits in the "female" work-realms to those in the "male". Women are still placed at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to competition in the work-world.
With the mask torn from the myth of the joys of masculine privilege, is it correct to say the work-world is an inhuman morass which is simply a little worse for women? No, it is not. For, while that statement is true, it misses the point.
* * *
"The courting and dating scenario still depends upon the man's ability to provide a functioning automobile with gasoline in its tank, pick up the check at the restaurant, pay for the night's entertainment, including drinks, and that's the minimum. Ideally, he should be able to do better than the Greasy Spoon and a movie.
True, today's woman may be more often inclined to pay her own way, but he will rarely know in advance, and he should at least demonstrate enough financial solvency to pay his way into places with her that he might have no interest in attending alone. 'Let's go out together' translates into 'Let's go do something that costs money.' If her tastes in entertainment are beyond his resources, she's not likely to hold him in high regard. Nor are the days of the guys picking up the entire tab, week after week, by any means behind us. She can say she'll pay hers as the check comes up, but her initial suggestion to 'let's get a drink, hmm?' doesn't imply that she will. And he shouldn't ask. Our society makes achievement in the work-world a masculine imperative by charging men an admission price to the expressions of sexuality."
-- me, from a leaflet titled "The Admission Price"
(Athens Coalition for the War on Sexism, 1982)
Even more to the point, our society tends especially to charge adolescent boys that admission price (there are more nonsexist options for men as they grow older), and I'm convinced that it is the tie between having money and being able to express sexuality, perceived early on by males in this society, that causes them to accept so readily the conditions of employment in the work-world. In our cultural imagery, this has not changed much. Every time I turn on the TV or glance at a magazine, I seem to be getting the message that what women find sexy in men is power, and that what power means is, for the most part, financial clout. Make no mistake about it, sexuality is still sold as a female commodity to a male market.
There is an old debate both within and outside of feminist circles about whether the economic system gave rise to sexual subject-object dynamics, or if inequality between the genders in sexing gave rise to the economic system. It is a bit of a chicken-or-egg sort of argument, yet it does ask where the root of the problem lies, and the necessary goal of radical feminism is to get to the root and uproot it.
Could the patriarchy go coed, retaining all its masculinized institutions and modes and forms, but letting women participate as equals? If economics is not at the root, is there any serious danger of economic-reform "liberal" feminism coopting women (and radical feminism)?
I tend to think not, unless such reformist feminism stops short of its goal of true economic parity. The fundamental institutions of patriarchy are maintained and supported by a set of irrational beliefs which all tie together in a sexist Gordian knot:
Women are sexy. They are attractive to men. Men want sex from women. Women must therefore be owned by men if men are to have sex with them, because sex is inflicted on women. Sex is men taking advantage of women. Women in a position of being able to avoid sex without paying a price to do so, would. Women are the goodies; men are the ones with the appetite.
Sex is all women will have to bargain with if men have the only easy access to money (and with it, the ability to buy food, housing, the niceties of life, etc.). Women, then, have to give the men access to their bodies or have a rough time fending for themselves. Sex or a life of desperately trying to survive comfortably without men.
Now, if those danm feminists were to succeed, what would they need with men? How could men get women into bed if women could earn money and survive comfortably without them? Women wouldn't need men at all! Then they could dictate the terms to men, couldn't they? Men would have to bargain, because men need sex so bad.
The women would own us, the men worry; they could tell men what to do and we would have to do it, or no sex. God, keep them in their place! But suppose the feminists do succeed and women do gain the upper hand? What will they make the men do? What will they charge men for their favors?
Probably all the work, while they sit nice and comfortable. You men want sex? Okay, do this. Do that. Men will have to become slaves for life, or no sex. And any woman who stupidly gave it away for free would be ostracized and punished. Women, who just don't bond the way men do, would of course compete with each other in a vicious power struggle. The winners would keep the best luxuries and do no work at all, while the losers would be made slaves of their men and rendered powerless.
Yeah, anyone can see they've always been in control, ever since they tamed men and civilized them. What we need to do is put them in their place like they used to be back when men were real men. Women didn't go out taking away men's jobs back then, by God...
As ridiculous as it sounds, I've heard this entire line of thought --contradictions and begged-questions and all -offered to me by a couple of men explaining to me why they were "old-fashioned" and therefore opposed to feminism. At no time in the discussion did they notice any discrepancies in their thinking, and both of them nodded in vigorous approval to all of the statements and conjectures printed above. Nor was it a particularly unusual male conversation.
I don't think that feminism can eliminate sexism in the work-world without dealing with the entire package of patriarchal ways and concepts. "Less-than-radical-feminism" that would allegedly settle for its share of a maggoty pie will not succeed alone. Meanwhile, I think it contributes by dealing with an aspect of the whole, just as other elements of feminism deal with certain aspects of the problem more than others. It all unties together, too.
I do think, however, that the core or root lies in the common beliefs that form the sole support for these irrational systems. Since these beliefs, the psychosexual core of patriarchy, are also irrational, they must be approached as a madness, as what the field of psychiatry (were it not a patriarchal construct itself) would label a psychosis. In my next two chapters, therefore, I will be taking a look at how psychiatry and therapy and the ideas involved there constitute both part of the problem and a key component of the solution.
* * *
We tend to take it for granted. As if money really did grow on trees, the individuals within our culture tend to think of money as a natural and inevitable part of human existence, something we evolved as a species and are stuck with, for good or bad. Yet even as we do this, we criticize and condemn human behavior based on the economic system's values and norms, insisting that we should be kinder, more caring and giving and hospitable, that we should share and not be so selfish and competitive.
In this, we miss the point twice! We say these things and somehow don't seem to notice that we are players in the game of economic competition, which by itself makes it almost unavoidably necessary to be greedily acquisitive and competitive and uncharitable, whether it is part of our inborn nature or not. And then it somehow escapes us that it is meaningful and significant that we do preserve a sense of how things should be which is not based on the mechanics of the money system and its ways. Our innate nature seems to be at odds with money!
Our economic system is not humanly universal. In anthropology, a culture's economic system can be categorized as being competitive-market, which is what we have; redistributive, which is where all products go to a central headquarters, whereupon the leaders redistrubute it back out to the members; and cooperative, which includes voluntary cooperative.
Cooperative societies basically work through reciprocity, which can be specific (barter; "I'll do this if you'll do that; I'll give you this if you'll give me that") or general. General reciprocity is the anthropological term for the economic dynamic wherein everyone voluntarily contributes labor and shares commodities without keeping track of debts and credits. It depends on the maxim that "what goes around, comes around". Yes, it does exist. Cultural sanctions are built on the pervasive power of approval and disapproval in a society where each person needs the voluntary cooperation of others. That, plus being raised with the idea and the accompanying values, makes general reciprocity practical.
In the voluntary cooperative societies, social reputation is a commodity not to be squandered. It takes the place of capital. In large cooperatives, a person can move onwards to escape a bad reputation, but to receive any real social effectiveness and status, one has to establish a good reputation as a cooperative coworker with good community spirit.
Competition is not nonexistent, but exists on a personal-relationships level; that is, it contains elements of the kind of competition that high school girls are famous for: popularity, reputation, emotional interactions, and so forth. In fact, many facets of the voluntary cooperative mode are reflected in (or survive in the form of) what our culture designates as feminine modes. You can see the cooperative mode in women's traditional labor roles where some form of general reciprocity rather than direct monetary compensation defines the economic relationship. Another remnant of voluntary cooperative dynamics lies imbedded in the use of the withdrawal of social approval rather than punishment as we know it (refer back to chapter two in "Sissyhood"; keep in mind, of course, that these feminine relics of voluntary cooperation in our own culture are colonized or coopted to the service of the patriarchal socioeconomic system).
In criticizing existing voluntary cooperatives, observers claim a tendency towards cultural complacency verging on stagnation, at least when compared with the rapid pace of change in our own society. Yet this is true partly because the most coherent stable voluntary cooperative cultures are small and do not contain a population large enough to generate new discoveries very often. The "stagnation" that western-civilization critics refer to is usually technological and scientific ("hard" sciences), anyway, which displays our bias in values. A large modern culture transforming to voluntary cooperative cultural and economic patterns would presumably still operate centers of higher learning and research, and if the rate of technological change slowed down, it wouldn't hurt us to catch up psychologically and spiritually as a people. I fear we are way way short of the maturity our modern toys require, as it is.
Is it ridiculous or unrealistic to talk in terms of transforming in this manner? Yes, it would require individuals to control certain aspects of their behavior with a disciplining which they do not practice here, of a different form, but that is not the same as saying that living in a voluntary cooperative requires more self-discipline of its members than living in our present culture does. In truth, every individual in our own society is severely repressed, denied a far greater range of personal expression than are members of a voluntary cooperative society, and that would be true of ours were ours to change over towards a voluntary cooperative mode. Ours is the unnatural order that breeds cancer and ulcers, not some kind of lax and loose society of undisciplined spontaneity.
Then, when I'm not being told that "it'll never happen", I'm hearing that this transformation will take a thousand, or ten thousand, or a million years. I suppose it does seem that the very foundations of our 9000-plus year-old patriarchy is not likely to change in a hurry...until you take a second look. Patriarchy remained stable for its ten-millennium duration while we lived nearly universally as agrarians, in agricultural civilization. If you had come to visit the same regions at 1000-year intervals since the dawn of patriarchy, you would have noticed only the slowest and most gradual of changes...until, all of a sudden, on your last visit, everything's different! Hey, what are these agrarian patriarchs doing on the moon? So you check back to see when everything started changing and what do you see? Most of the changes that you found so striking are less than a hundred years old. And that includes, though just barely, the wildfire spread and effect of worldwide radical feminism. *
Cultures change. There is a notion that people are set in their ways, and that nothing is going to budge them, for the most part (sort of like "you can't teach an old dog new tricks"), and yet even apparently stable cultures can change quite rapidly, even within the lifespan of those living before the changes began. In a Margaret Mead film ("Reflections") 5, we are shown a tribe in recent years living with the rest of the modern world, sending children off to college, making use of technological accomplishments, and farming in ways that make use of the most up-to-date agricultural know-how; the voice of Mead, narrating, informs us that in her first visit, these people had been pursuing stone age lifestyles undifferentiated from that of a million years ago; and adults now using electrical equipment and other devices of the modern world recall those years.
Look around you, at the people who comprise this society. Perhaps they will witness and participate in the transformation of the decrepit western market economy into something that makes more sense. Like their grandparents who saw the first automobiles and the first manned space flights, they may know what it is like to grow up and live in very interesting times. And so might you.
* * *
Much of the criticism I have made of the competitive market economic system sounds similar to those voiced by the political element which is called the "left". In a similar way, some of the generalized solutions I have proposed have a lot in common with Marxist visions, especially at first glance. However, I do not consider my line of thought to be Marxist, per se; do not be misled. Marx and company did not propose eliminating currency, or wages, and there are some fundamental differences between the system of things I've spoken of and those postulated by the "leftists". This is especially true where (alleged) practice of socialism and communism are concerned. The economic realities I've been speaking of are not unique to any nation or system, applying to the patriarchal governments calling themselves communism and socialism as well as to those called capitalism or representative "democracy", or for that matter, nazi-ism, pharaoism, monarchy, oligarchy, and so forth.
There have been a few anti-market theories (especially religious ones) which seem to propose that the evils of mankind and the economic system could be eliminated by making everything communally owned.
That is not what I am proposing, although I do think that land, for example, not being a replenishable product, should not be owned any more than the air or the sunshine.
* I am assuming you are familiar with the international phenomenon of radical feminism that occurred in the period beginning just prior to the turn of the century. If such is not the case, you have some reading to do. Ask your librarian. In a world of totally free people, I could, if I so chose, lay claim to certain particular items which happened to appeal to my own unique tastes and specifications. I can think of one right now: my beloved old bomb of a 1965 Pontiac Bonneville, the only car I've ever owned or wanted to own. Why should I have to give that up in an ideal world? If, among we the free people, there were a lot of folks who wanted 1965 Pontiacs like mine, then we the species still have the knowledge and ability to make as many of them as we want.
On the other hand, I would love to be able to leave behind vast gobs of my material possessions in New York, head for Seattle, and be able to go to the appropriate warehouses and furnish my new residency with similar items (no money involved).
Private possessions can be nice, when it's a choice. When you must own everything you need occasional access to, though, its combined weight can be a millstone around your neck. It should be a choice.
Table of Contents
Forward to Next Section