Any reference to patriarchy in any of
our articles is based on the dictionary definition of patriarchy–essentially a societal norm of awarding authority roles to men. EqualityAgnostic.com
does not support the second-wave or RadFem definition of patriarchy as a cruel,
oppressive male societal construct.
Take a look at the following headline and make your own assumptions.
Which gender do you think the teacher is?
‘Sixth-Grade Teacher Charged with Rape of 13 year old boy…’
(actual
article here)
At the start of the female revolution, feminists famously
led a controversial argument, ‘Maybe god is a woman’. It caused a lot of people to look long and
hard at a patriarchal bias to promote power-roles as male, to recognise male
achievement and to promote awareness of the male contribution to society. Unfortunately, feminism did not follow that
argument through to the next logical conclusion: ‘If god is a woman, then in
all likelihood, so is the devil.’
When it comes to societal perception of gender, we are still
living with the hangover of this unfortunate norm, a focus on female light and male shadow (—Warren Farrell).
Modern western culture promotes a strong push for the
positive recognition of women and a decline in the positive recognition of
men. The reasoning behind this is the belief that women need to be empowered to be
equal to men and that further positive reinforcement of men as a group only
broadens what feminism has defined as a gender power gap. If you’re unsure if this is accurate, type
“empowering women” and “empowering men” (use the quote marks for an exact
search) into google and see the vast difference in the number of results and
the tone of those pages.
Feminism’s push to create choice as to whether women adhere to female gender role (mother/nurterer) combined with a
societal norm of continuing to propagate the enforcement of, and obligations attached to, male gender role (protector/provider)—a role that teaches men it is their duty to
protect women—creates four powerful media norms in western culture:
- The female good news story.
- The no-gender good news story.
- The male bad news story.
- The no-gender bad news story.
There is an argument that this norm is the failing of the
male-gender centricity inherent in all language. There is some merit to this, but take a look
at that list again and note the times that gender is deliberately added or
omitted. That isn't just male centric language. This is made worse by the fact that societally
we preference bad news over good news, leading to more frequent publicising of bad
news stories.
These things combined mean that the headline you are most
likely to read when you pick up a paper or search a news site is (see exact search matches at end of article):
‘Gunman slays ten’ 1 rather than ‘Fireman saves ten’.2
On the occasion a good news story appears, you are most
likely to see female achievement stories such as ‘First woman arrives at space station.’3
When the story champion is female, we declare sex. When the story
perpetrator is male, we declare sex.
When the story champion is male, we have a preference of declaring gender neutrality:
‘Firefighter saves ten…’4
When the story perpetrator is female we declare gender
neutrality:
‘Teacher rapes student…’5
![]() |
Please note that the only reason the female news story is the focus of this image, is that this is the article I clicked on after a google search, a search which displayed title only. |
On the rare occasion that gender neutrality does not occur
for the male good news story, we declare an individual, not the male gender:
‘Robert Johnson, the voice for change.’ 6
The outcome of this is a public perception message that ‘a good
man’ is the exception and that ‘bad
men’ are the norm. Take a look at the statistics at the end of this article and you will get some small insight into why this norm is completely backwards.
This norm influences societal perception of men at the macro
and the micro level, and that perception heavily impacts all levels of gender
debate and all traction for men’s equality (eg family law) and gender
issues. How? Consider some of the
following:
- Do you feel the statement “You’re just a girl,” is damaging to women?
- Do you feel the statement, “Be a man,” is damaging to men?
- Do you feel a lack of equal representation in high power jobs is damaging to women?
- Do you feel a lack of equal representation in low power jobs is damaging to men?
- Do you feel female circumcision is damaging to women?
- Do you feel male circumcision is damaging to men?
- Do you feel that 4/5 of rape victims being female, is damaging to women?
- Do you feel that 4/5 of murder victims being male, is damaging to men?
- Do you feel hate crimes like “acid attacks” on women in extremist countries, is damaging to women?
- Do you feel that in those same countries, the fact that sons and fathers are selling their internal organs to fulfil their male gender role of provider, is damaging to men?
The most common reaction is to have no idea
at all of the male counterpart as an issue, and if you do, to assign severity to those issues and to
downplay them, rather than merely accept that the only thing the above list
signifies is that both genders experience issues which must be addressed. If you think that last statement might represent you, I'd ask you to take just one of those items—a position that is often deemed to be completely acceptable:
Do you feel male circumcision is damaging to men?
I challenge you to put together any group of uncircumcised men at all, and ask them which of them is in favor of having the end of their penis cut off. See if you can get any takers.
As for severity? I personally don’t debate severity. A debate in severity ends in the emotional
validation of one person, and no advancement of anyone’s equality or gender
issues.
A
fight for female equal rights and the removal of female gender role was only
the first step towards gender equality. Until concerted effort is made to end the enforcement
of both gender roles, to create equal rights for both genders, to remove both
male and female privilege,
and to end the negative societal perceptions attached to gender—gender equality will
remain an unachievable reality.
Food for thought:
1 Google search on ‘gunman’ news articles: 47,000 results
2 Google search for ‘fireman saves’
news articles: 331 results
3 Google search on ‘woman achieve’ news articles: 41,800 results
4 Google search for ‘firefighter saves’ = 5,610 results
5 ‘Teacher rapes’ articles: there are over 4000 results for this, but whether they are about a female teacher raping someone you can only tell by going through each article, one at a time. Regardless, the heading gives no indication of gender, the outcome is when a man rapes we name men and ‘men’ are seen as perpetrators, when we neutralise female gender bad news stories the assumption is men are responsible for those acts too because women don’t commit rape. Take a look at the picture of the included article that has the aforementioned ‘teacher rapes story,’ notice the column on the right?...
3 Google search on ‘woman achieve’ news articles: 41,800 results
4 Google search for ‘firefighter saves’ = 5,610 results
5 ‘Teacher rapes’ articles: there are over 4000 results for this, but whether they are about a female teacher raping someone you can only tell by going through each article, one at a time. Regardless, the heading gives no indication of gender, the outcome is when a man rapes we name men and ‘men’ are seen as perpetrators, when we neutralise female gender bad news stories the assumption is men are responsible for those acts too because women don’t commit rape. Take a look at the picture of the included article that has the aforementioned ‘teacher rapes story,’ notice the column on the right?...
6 Individual good male articles: Basically
impossible to show numbers on as it requires searching one individual male at a
time and even then the credit goes to ‘a man’ not to ‘men’.
Ich werde sicherstellen, dass Ihr Blog mehr gelesen wird. Du hast einen guten Punkt gemacht, aber ich frage mich, was ist mit der anderen Seite? VIELEN DANK!
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