This book has focused on the way masculine and feminine identities are
constituted and reconstituted, developed and resisted in the day to day
life of adolescent boys and girls. Through the analysis of the terms in
which girls and boys talk about their lives, I have shown how they live
in very different social worlds. The construction of masculinity and
femininity that I have examined, as portrayed to me by what girls and
boys have to say about their friendships, schooling, their views of
marriage and the future, their attitudes to violence and fighting,
their views of sexuality, indicate that girls day to day experience is
still subordinate though many girls have found ways of resisting. I
have shown the irrelevance of viewing female adolescence as the
development of autonomy and indicated the importance of examining
gender relations in order to understand how identities are constituted
and reconstituted. I have shown that masculinity and femininity are
only meaningful in relation to each other. In order to develop a
masculine identity a boy needs to dissociate himself from all that is
feminine. He needs to denigrate girls in order to dominate them.
In the introduction I criticised previous models of socialisation which
had presented an over deterministic view of how we develop identities.
I suggested that the way masculinity and femininity is constituted
changes in different historical periods. A little over a hundred years
ago women had no right to education, no right to the custody of their
children, no right to keep their earnings if they were married, no
right to the vote and few legal rights. Virginia Woolf describes in 'A
Room of One's Own', published in the 1930's, her indignation on
discovering that she could not enter the Oxford University library
without an escort. This is still the case in many men's clubs, both
working men's and professional clubs. Nor has sexism disappeared at
Oxford University. On a recent visit some female students showed me a
college rag that had on its front page a league table with girls names
numerating their sexual contacts. The girls named were devastated.
Though young women to-day may not be aware of the resistance the fight
for basic human rights aroused from men, they can not be unaware of the
inequality they still face.
Transformations in the economy and in the political structure are
disrupting traditional notions of masculinity and femininity: masculine
identity of working class men has been threatened by new technology.
The decline in heavy industry and shift to a service economy and
widespread unemployment may have had some effect. Change does not mean
that the basic misogyny of the culture as a whole will change. It may
even become more entrenched.
Femininity is changing, girls are less romantic and more realistic
about what lies in store for them, mocking boys who boast about their
sexual prowess. They are critical of the way boys talk about sex, go on
about how many times they have had it in a day for example. They are
more aware of the double standard, resisting doing all the housework
and by and large doing well at school, better than many of the boys.
They have more awareness of inequality and the strength of female
friendship is gradually gaining recognition. Girls are contesting a
passive view of femininity and are increasingly joining the labour
force and taking part in public life.
On the other hand, the constitution of masculinity has changed little.
A few boys I spoke to are aware of issues of equality but the majority
may not be overtly sexist but do little to oppose the sexism around
them. Calling girls 'slags' is a way of objectifying them, not
recognizing them as people of equal worth. It is also an effective way
of controlling female sexuality. The disgust of the female body unless
as an object of their desire, epitomized by their views of
menstruation, is another form of distancing themselves from everything
female. They cannot see the benefits of feminism as their identities
have been constituted in opposition to femininity. Sexism should not
therefore just be seen as chauvinism. It is deeply ingrained in
identity formation, continually endorsed and celebrated by the dominant
culture. The influence of the mass media, the daily press, the
pornographic magazines and videos all reinforce the objectifying of
women's bodies and celebrate a form of macho aggressive masculinity.
Violence against women is condoned, and the fear of violence constricts
all women's lives of all social and ethnic groups.
Jessica Benjamin, an American psychoanalyst, develops Hegel's idea of
the master slave relationship in order to explain relationships of
domination and subordination. Domination, she argues, begins with the
denial of dependency, from the denial of recognition. In seeking to
dominate, the master objectifies the slave but by so doing is unable to
communicate with him. Arthur Brittain describes the potentiality of
this position for freedom:
The master as subject receives no
'recognition' from the objectified slave. Ironically, therein lies the
possibility of the slave's freedom. The slave begins to 'recognise'
that it is his or her labour that transforms the world. The object
talks back, rebels and overthrows the objectifier. The slave becomes
the subject of history. In simpler language the master knows that the
slave can never really be absolutely objectified. He has an intuition
of the slave's potential to resist. He fears the slave's resentment and
knows that the only way to hold on to what he possesses is constantly
to be on his guard. (Brittain 1989: 170)
It is the slave who is in touch with
reality. The master is living an illusion so he can never be free. He
does not have access to the knowledge that the slave has so he distrust
the slave. Only the slave can free the master. This Hegelian dialectic
can equally be applied to the way boys dominate girls. Girls are in
touch with reality, with housework, with caring, with the material
world. Boys indulge in illusions, they could be said to live in an
unrealistic dream world. In Anne Stafford's research the girls talked
about relationships. The boys 'mouth', or make up stories of sexual
conquests, they boast about their prowess, their bravery. Boys with
their toys, toys that can be lethal. A young unemployed British
teenager on his way to be a mercenary in the war in Serbia for pittance
pay when interviewed on TV said he wanted to find out what it was like
to kill as many people as the Yorkshire Ripper legitimately. Films and
videos encourage this macho form of masculinity. The ideology os
sexuality is dislodged from reality (See Barrett 19 ).
A crucial aspect of the function of verbal sexual abuse is the denial
of dependency. Real communication involves recognizing the other, as
existing for herself or himself and not just for oneself. Otherwise the
person may be unable to see that he is separate from the other. He
fails to confront his own dependency. A boy who calls a girl a 'slag'
or describes her in terms of her body parts, big tits, ginger minge or
in terms of food, tasty, sweetie, or as a dog, a cow or a slag is
denying intersubjectivity and denying his dependence. She is no more
than an object in his eyes, he is not dependent on her. The way that
heterosexuality is constructed just does not allow for the conception
of female subjectivity, which is why a boy in one of my discussions had
not ever considered whether a girl enjoys sex. It is natural for boys
to enjoy sex, but not for a girl to. Any girl is always available to
the designation slag in any number of ways. The construction of female
sexuality involves the construction of a difference between slags and
drags: sexuality, presumed to be promiscuous in nature, is not natural
for all girls/women but only resides in the slag. A girl who enjoys sex
is potentially therefore a slag. It is rarely possible for a woman to
be treated as a man's equal intellectually and to be feminine. Men talk
of not understanding women, for to understand them would be to reduce
their domination, to stop seeing them in terms of their sexuality, as
sex objects but to recognise them as human beings.
Domination therefore, denies interrelationships and dependence, not
merely in personal relationships but on a world scale. The difficulty
of studying autonomy and its related concepts of independence, is
exacerbated by the present structure of western language. The structure
of language is masculine and it distances social realities. The
stereotype of woman is very different from the rational autonomous man,
the figure who stands for the normal human being. One way forward is to
redefine the whole concept of dependence, independence and
interdependence.
In making close relationships, dependency is embraced. Vulnerability
and need cannot be eliminated. In every close relationship
interdependence exists. The conception of the 'dependent' wife and the
'independent' husband is fallacious.(See Griffiths 1992) Dependents are
not taken to be men and children dependent on a woman for housework and
emotional support but women who are dependent on the male wage. Even
now when this is necessarily the case, dependents are usually seen as
women. The danger of men denying this dependency, is that men no longer
recognise their humanity or the humanity of others.
The lack of recognition of female subjectivity, has implications far
beyond the realm of personal relationships. It has political and
cultural implications. Masculine identity is constituted in opposition
to everything feminine. It involves a denial of dependency. This leads
to the subordination of all aspects of life to the instrumental
principles of the public world. The values of private life, the
maternal aspects of recognition, nurturance (the recognition of need)
and attunement (the recognition of feeling), are seen as threatening.
The destruction of these values is a result of the ascendence of male
rationality. This conception of 'independence' rests on the depiction
of all that is other and alien is the sole guarantee of the subject's
freedom.
These constructions of masculinity are endemic to the processes of
thought and educational values which inform our educational
institutions. Feminist philosophers have linked constructions of
masculinity and femininity with processes of thought, and argued that
the concept of the individual is really a concept of the male subject
(See Gould 1983). Equally the rationality that reduces the social world
to objects of exchange, calculation and control is in effect a male
rationality. It is also the rationality that is predominant in the
educational system and in the military. It involves a psychic
repudiation of femininity, which includes the negation of dependency
and mutual recognition, similar to the social banishment of nurturance
and intersubjective relatedness to the private world of women and
children.
The toll placed on men to live up to these values in the public sphere
means that the family is needed as 'a haven in a heartless world',
where qualities of emotional support, caring and love are emphasized
and where men can recover. Woman took on 'expressive ' role, male the
'instrumental'. Talcott Parsons, an American sociologist, recognised
that a modern capitalist society posed problems for stability which is
why the family has been regarded as crucial to maintaining this social
stability. This is perhaps why politicians blame the increase in
violence among young men on the breakdown of the family and in
particular on the increase in the proportion of one parent families and
the absence of male authority. They do not consider that the alienation
of these young men who are encouraged to behave in the very way that is
deplored by the way masculinity is constituted and culturally endorsed
and to ignore the work of human reproduction and to assume that women
will carry on doing this work just as they have always done.
Feminists propose an alternative moral vision that would question the
condoning of violence both in the personal and public sphere. To return
to Virginia Woolf and the way our educational institutions are geared
towards militarism and war. She argued that her male contemporaries
were acting as if Mussolini's and Hitler's ideas about how society
should be ordered had nothing to do with similar views expressed by
clerics in the Church of England or Oxford dons. The same could be said
of the rhetoric about Saddam Hussein in the Gulf war. Education is not
immune to the creation of a society that invests more in high tech
weaponry than in the skills of negotiation. She wrote:
'Education ..... does not teach
people to hate force, but to use it... far from teaching the educated
generosity and magnanimity, it makes them on the contrary so anxious to
keep their possessions, that 'grandeur and power' of which the poet
speaks, in their own hands that they use not force but much subtler
methods than force and possessiveness very closely connected with war (
Woolf 1938:35)
This construction of sexuality which
denies women subjectivity and relegates dependence and need to the
private sphere of the family has consequences far beyond the
interrelationships between men and women.
The implications of gender inequality and the objectification of women, are therefore of concern as much to men as to women.
Brittain (1989) draws attention to the almost exclusive preponderance
of men in the military and nuclear establishments, the universities,
the multinational corporations, and how they benefit as much as ever
from women's reproductive labour. He pessimistically adds that 'Given
enough time it is more than likely that our generals, politicians and
nuclear scientists will end up destroying us all.' (Brittain 1989: 198)
Among the major Western countries the US and the UK spend the highest
proportion of their national income on the military and have the two
slowest growing economies. Carol Kohn described how when working for
the American nuclear establishment, she became aware that the
scientists talked in a technical language which was loaded with sexist
meaning. It was impossible, she writes, not to notice the ubiquitous
weight of gender, both in social relations and in the language of war
and militarism, which reflects and shapes the nature of American
nuclear strategic project. By the elaborate use of abstraction and
euphemism, the appalling reality of war is forgotten. The talk is of
'clean' bombs and 'clean' language, counterveiling attacks rather than
incinerating cities, collateral damage rather than human death. The
Airforce does not target people, it targets factories and missile
bases. Feminists have argued that missile envy, is one factor behind
the build up of nuclear power. American military dependence was
explained as 'irresistible because you get more bang for the buck'.
Another lecturer solemnly and scientifically announced 'to disarm is to
get rid of all your stuff'. Talk is about erector launchers, soft lay
downs, deep penetration, and 'releasing 70 to 80% of our megatonnage in
one orgasmic whump'(according to military adviser to National Security
council). One Professor spoke of India's explosion of the nuclear bomb
as 'losing her virginity'. Initiation into nuclear world involves
'being deflowered', losing one's innocence, knowing sin, all wrapped
into one. New Zealand's refusal to allow nuclear armed or nuclear
powered warships into its ports prompted similar reflections on
virginity The air force Magazine's adverts for new weapons, rivals
Playboy as a catalogue of men's sexual anxieties and fantasies as Smith
illustrated in her description of an Airforce base at Heywards Heath in
Britain. (Smith 1990)
Though some boys in my sample are certainly less openly sexist than
others (several talked about the need 'to keep their head down' if they
wanted to avoid engaging in sexist banter and the danger of being
called a 'wimp' or a 'poof'), the dominance of sexist attitudes so
pervasive throughout the culture, make it hard for them not to be
affected by such constructions.
In this book l have emphasized the role of language in the construction
and perpetuation of women's oppression. The repression of sexuality to
the conventional pattern of marriage means that female sexuality has
little autonomous expression but is constrained by social station and
its duties. The woman becomes the housewife and her virtue comes to
consist of the correct performance of the duties of the marital
relationship, being a good wife and mother, in which sexual expression
is allowed only to the extent of meeting her husband's 'legitimate'
sexual needs. If in the private sphere, it is woman's duty to keep
quiet and be a good wife, in the public sphere her inability to achieve
subjectivity closely follows from the way she is defined in terms of
her sexuality. She is also seen as responsible for meeting male sexual
needs and controlling male violence. Because the male 'rational man' is
only possible where his sexual and irrational behaviour can be
attributed to 'woman trouble' or other feminine influence, it is
obviously impossible, under present circumstances, for men and women to
co- exist as equals.
But women are resisting and increasingly leaving unhappy marriage,
returning to education and developing subversive strategies. Their
economic situation though unequal in all sorts of ways, is
significantly different than it was twenty years ago. Boys anxiety and
confusion expresses itself in ugly terms. Not are they encouraged to
develop alternative subjectivities by the wider culture. But culture is
not an unchanging entity. Men and women make their own culture, in the
sense that they are constantly adapting to new circumstances. And it is
in men's interests to change and to take on responsibility for, and
integrate their sexuality into their public behaviour. It would mean
taking on domestic and child care responsibilities. It would mean
treating women in the public sphere as equals rather than as their on
sufferance. The challenging of male and female behaviour may be the
source of unhappiness but also opens up possibilities for
transformation.
Girls see through boys boasting. They know that boys 'mouth'. They are
developing a vocabulary to put men down. They are more realistic. A few
are even opposing marriage. As Sandra said:
I tell them I don't want a husband. They're no good. They never think what's ahead of them.
Girls are down to earth. When I asked Anna whether she ever day dreamed about falling in love she replied
Not unless I've got a boyfriend'
And some are determined to be equals with
men. Various explanations have been put forward by feminist writers to
explain misogyny. Dinnerstein argued that men's denigration of women
arose from the feelings of vulnerability emanating from the power
mothers had over them in early childhood. Concurring with this
position, Chodorow stipulated that only when men took part in child
care would change ensue. But to change the constructions of masculinity
and femininity would involve a far more radical change than merely
altering the distribution of child care. It would mean a fundamental
shift in our conceptions of masculinity and femininity and their
relation to dominant conceptions of rationality and morality.
References
Benjamin, J. 1990 The Bonds of Love, Virago Press
Brittain, A. 1989 Masculinity and Power, Basil Blackwell
Freire, P. Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Herder & Herder 1970
Gould, C. ed 1983 Beyond domination; new perspectives on Women and Philosophy, Rowman & Littlefield, USA
Griffiths, M. 1992 'Autonomy and the Fear of Dependence' Women's Studies Int Forum Vol 15, No 3 pp 351-362
Woolf, V. 1938 The Three Guineas, Penguin
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