Guest post: The biggest blow patriarchy has dealt to women
Guest post by Josh Slocum.
The biggest blow patriarchy has dealt to women has been successfully convincing women that the domains of reason, logic, and analysis are oppression. That these are not faculties of women. That they are not reliable ways of navigating the world.
This is how patriarchy—as a system with women as active collaborators along with men—has stolen power from women in recent history. Removing from women the natural, objective ability to see the truth, speak it, and to be treated as one who has spoken the truth.
Many women take it and run, retreating into mysticism and renouncing the notions of logic, cause and effect, and objectivity as “male violence” imposed from the outside. Many speak of “my truth” instead of “the truth.” Why? Because the idea is that there is no such thing as truth. That the way to power is to have “your truth,” (your personal, only-you, point of view) “respected.”
What do we remove from someone when we remove the ability to rely on reason and logic?
–We remove the power of the rule of law; nothing can be adjudicated
–We remove the power of careful observation; it’s only what you think appeared to happen, so no action can be taken
–We remove the ability to accurately assess danger, and retrain the mind to consider danger tells as “bigotry” or a lack of “personal growth and security.”
Tell me how this is good for women, or anyone in an oppressed position?
Excellent post, Josh. I’ve observed that phenomenon in too many places. It is also frequently seen as “white” oppression of non-white individuals, leading some of my black friends to believe that all scientific truth is “white truth” and therefore the enemy.
Very well diagnosed and described.
This has been around for decades. I saw some supposed feminist show about 30 years ago which talked about the “Ice -palace of reason”, reason being male, while for women it was all feelings and intuition. For the Greenham Common women, reason and logic produced nuclear weapons – not the arguments and policies against them. They would defeat them with “love”.
Of course, this idea isn’t original to me. Feminists have been saying it forever, and it was Ophelia’s writing way back when that got me thinking about it.
What remarkable staying power it has; I see no evidence it’s losing any of its narrative power.
And my writing way back when of course was the offspring of writing by Janet Radcliffe Richards, Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge, Norman Levitt and Paul Gross, Susan Haack, to name just a few.
There are some sources here.
‘Woo’ in all its forms, is still not recognized for what it is: deeply reactionary, fatalist, and deferential to power.
Ronald Reagan was our first ‘New Age’ president. Trump our most complete ‘New Thought,’ ‘Positive Thinking’ one.
When I first started my MFA program, I was assigned a book about Women in Theatre. Most of the book was great – biographies of groundbreaking actors, director, playwrights, and other theatre professionals who put woman’s foot in the door (we still are only in to our knee, but we’ve made progress).
There was one section of the book that made me wince, cringe, and curse with nearly every word. It was a section on “feminist theory of the theatre”. It was all about how women need a “different” theatre than men, a “loving” theatre, a “nurturing” theatre, a theatre focused on mother, on the goddess, and on the collective sisterhood. The theatre the authors described in this section sounded more like religion, with goddess worship, worship of sisterhood and motherhood, and lots of ritual. Somehow this was supposed to be more “authentically female”.
Sorry for all the sneer quotes, but some ideas deserve a sneer.
Interestingly, a buddy of mine said he encountered more of this back when we were in college (80s/90s) than now–instead, the attitude that science is ‘just your opinion, man’, and that education and reason are antithetical to their identity has been co-opted by rural whites. Meanwhile, virtually any black family he encounters is hard-core about trying to get their kids the best education they can.
I”ve been trying to get my brain around why normal people might reject a rational approach to the universe. I think many times and in many ways the dominant culture or class uses ‘logic and reason’ to justify their oppressing others. Think early race studies, the concept that smaller brains always means lesser mental capacity and gaslighting in general.
I think if’s very difficult to combat these things with reason and logic, especially when people are using quesitonable ‘facts’ against you and you have no access to evidence to counter that.