"Hurrah for women's lib, eh?"
"The lib?" Impatiently she leans forward and tugs the serape straight. "Oh, that's doomed."
The apocalyptic word jars my attention.
"What do you mean, doomed? ... Come on, why doomed? Didn't they get that equal rights bill?"
Long hesitation. When she speaks again her voice is different.
"Women have no rights, Don, except what men allow us. Men are more aggressive and powerful, and they run the world. When the next real crisis upsets them, our so-called rights will vanish like—like that smoke. We'll be back where we always were: property. And whatever has gone wrong will be blamed on our freedom, like the fall of Rome was. You'll see."
Now all this is delivered in a gray tone of total conviction. The last time I heard that tone, the speaker was explaining why he had to keep his file drawers full of dead pigeons.
"Oh, come on. You and your friends are the backbone of the system; if you quit, the country would come to a screeching halt before lunch."
No answering smile.
"That's fantasy." Her voice is still quiet. "Women don't work that way. We're a—a toothless world." She looks around as if she wanted to stop talking. "What women do is survive. We live by ones and twos in the chinks of your world-machine."
~ from "The Women Men Don't See" by James Triptree Jr.
After hammering away for a while at the brick wall of feminism, and femininity, and gender roles, and patriarchy, and all that jazz, I do have a handful of conclusions. This seems as good a place as any to start, as I recently ran across Triptree again, for the first time in several years.
I first came across her short story story sometime in high school, I believe in this sf anthology . I've probably run into additional, and perhaps better, articulations of her position at some point, but this one's been good enough to stick with me for quite some time. It was enough, 11th or 12th grade, at least, to make me question the inevitability and permanence of many recent developments in western civilization.
Anyone who's been at Hillsdale long enough will have probably been disabused by some professor or another of any confidence in "progress." (Or maybe just students who run into Dr. Stewart, who seems to make such disabusement a point of his courses). Many professors DO at least give the Enlightenment a pretty bad rap, and see its innovations (in large part) as detrimental to any true historical development. Far from seeing the Enlightenment as the "wave the future," they interpret it as a (mostly) dead end. As many of the recent developments in western civilization, including feminism, are deeply tied up in the Enlightenment, and as the Enlightenment influenced many of our narratives of human progress, introduction to the Hillsdale perspective probably counts as a "disabuse of any confidence in progress."
I probably need to define terms better. No one's going to deny that we've made advances -- "progress" -- in understanding of cause and effect in the material universe, and in applying these discoveries to make better tools. What is up for debate is whether we've made any advances in how we understand the human soul, or in the way we structure society, or in our framework of moral actions toward one another.
It is a kind of a frightening thought, the first time it sticks around long enough to be taken seriously. Wondering if democracy, republicanism, egalitarianism, libertarianism...all the things we've come to associate with modern western civilization, whether for good or ill, actually are inevitable and permanent. Things to which the rest of the world will come on board eventually, and we'll keep persevering from there.
So I do wonder, sometimes, if instead the 21st century will come and go, and people in the future will look at us like we were crazy, and wonder where we got our whacked ideas and ways of life. Including opening so many occupations and areas of life and influence to women. I wonder if our era IS just a fluke, and we aren't really pressing forward into anything new, just messing around for a couple hundred years until reality bites us from behind, and things go back to the way they always were.
It's a toggling of perspectives. Just like wondering if church history has 100,000 more years to go (instead of...say...100 - 5000, like most people seem to operate).
Maybe I just have a weakness for dystopian literature and falls of empires. :-P But sometimes I do wonder if one day a comparably "primitive" -- but more-true-to-human-nature's-deepest-motivations -- culture and society will overthrow a modern western society that's lost its chest.
Concrete example for those who like such things: I look at Islam creeping over Europe, and wonder if something parallel to that is what awaits the whole western world.
Some sort of drastic calamity probably WOULD do the trick... making brute survival the priority, and wiping out a lot of our technological infrastructure. Going back to the feminism issue...wealth, education, mobility, liberty, security, and lots of leisure all seem tied to the push for gender equality. WHAM some cataclysm into the mix, and all that could very well go down the drain.
I do think women are different than men, and tend to have different strengths (and vv)...but, yikes. It's oh so easy for this to tip over into "and what they are strong in isn't as important as what men are strong in" or "what they are strong in is properly applied only to this very limited sphere."
Probably because of inherent differences, sexism seems a nastily rooted thing. I don't want to use a word like "sexism," because it's very loaded. But reading Aristotle, talking about how the essence "woman" is inherently less perfect than the essence of "man," I think I'm somewhat justified. Or reading opposition to some of the early feminists, talking about how women's minds are lesser and weaker than men (just look at the poor dears!), and therefore shouldn't be permitted to engage in politics and higher learning and whatnot. Without the constant evidence that women CAN go toe to toe with men, and make accomplishments just as worthy in areas previously relegated to the male sex alone -- I can't see what's to stop a reversion to old ways of thinking.
Those are the bad days, though. On more hopeful days, I think that the change is pretty darn permanent, and that no calamity would actually send things back to ground zero. But we do a darn good job of forgetting and reinterpreting history when it's not to our liking. And, yeah. I have seen the fall of Rome blamed on relaxed gender roles.
::grins:: And the rambling nature of this entry proves my inherent irrationality and intellectual inferiority, no doubt. :) Though I'd prefer you chalk up any confusion to the fact that...
a) I think here ARE difference between men and women, and that historical gender roles (and occupations) aren't some grand conspiracy, but in a part arise out of these different tendencies. (Hence the "more-true-to-human-nature" comments)
b) But I'm bloody glad a lot of those roles got shattered, because by them women were confined and limited in their range of vocation and action far more than men. I hope that during the next 300 years we can learn what it's like to be womanly professors, womanly musicians, womanly businessman, womanly leaders, womanly journalists, womanly academics, womanly theologians...because, dagnabbit, I think there is such a thing as a valid and womanly way to embrace these occupations, and we've never really had a chance to try it.
An endnote: Apparently "The Women Men Don't See" is Triptree's most famous story. So I suppose it has a lot going for it, even though I don't really care for the thing as a whole (I just like a passage or two here and there). I personally like "Love is the Plan the Plan is Death" better. Definitely won't appeal to everyone, but it's one of the most successful attempts I've seen of an author writing from the perspective of an alien consciousness.
No comments:
Post a Comment