Devil's Advocacy: Matriarchy and Male Privilege
This is a Devil's advocacy column: one written deliberately to embrace a
position opposite the general pre-conceptions. It is not meant to seriously
present the position in question, but to foster discussion about the established
beliefs.
As I was re-reading Kate Bornstein's Gender Outlaw recently, I was
reminded of another book, Your Brain is Not Your Own/a> by one Rich Zubaty,
whose only claim to fame is that he was on tour with the Grateful Dead at
some point in the past. Zubaty's book is a peculiar cultural artifact, rambling
and incohernet, but it was fun and had some interesting speculations about the
meaning of male and female, living and non-living, sentient and (supposedly)
non-sentient. One major theme of the book, however, was the difference between
male and female as a matter of goals: that the goal of the Female is
to protect, to create, and most of all to preserve - an essentially
reactionary role, that is - while the purpose of the mutant Male was to
explore, to break rules, and cause change, and most of all, to piss off the
Female.
OK, so this is a bit weirdly essentialist, but it came along with another
speculation that is far more interesting: that human societies are all,
inherently and invariably, and in the strictest sense Matriarchal
in structure, and that Male Privilege was the proof of this.
Essentially, the arugment goes like this: Male Privilege exists not as a
consequence of male domination, but to prevent males from noticing that their
'power' is nothing more than smoke and mirrors, and that such power they
actually have only really extends to the younger women. It is a small
number of older women, literal Matriarchs, who hold the real power - but
it's held indirectly, with males acting as the Matriarchs' catspaws, and only
applies to those who are in their immediate sway - mothers, wives, and so forth.
Real power is decentralized and personal; all other power is an illusion, part
of the male (self-)deception of Control.
Men, in this view, are everything that the old Victorian view held women to be:
emotionally weak, fickle, easily confused or excited, illogical, and hormonally
constrained. However, these traits often come in a physically stronger, larger
and more aggressive body than for most women. The solution? Give them what they
want - or at least what they think they want - while manipulating them from
the sidelines. Zubaty's Essential Female is a manipulator par excellance,
so good at it that even she doesn't realize that she's the one in charge.
(This stands in contrast to the simple physical fact that - evolutionarily
speaking - males, in the sense of producers-of-sperm, exist primarily as a
response to the contradictory forces of the drive to reproduce as widely and as
frequently possible, and the high energy cost of producing fully-formed gametes.
Heterogametes appear to have evolved because it was too expensive for both
partners to generate equally formed iso-gametes. Masculinity, in this sense, is
basically just a cost-cutting move, and a bit of a premature optimization on
the part of our ancestors. But I digress, doubly so since Zubaty expressly
rejects natural selection in favor of a kind of Lamarkian solution.)
He's also very specific in claiming that most of the oppression of women is not
a matter of men oppressing women, but of older women oppressing younger women.
The majority of women are kept out of real power - which again, means familial
power, not to be confused with the seeming political or economic power which
only exists as a kind of apophenia - until any disruptive elements have been
weeded out, cut off, left for dead.
Well, now, this is some very heavy stuff, and not at all easy to swallow.
However, it occurred to me that if it were right - the essential batshit
craziness of such things as the Conspiracy of Corn and the Mineral Takeover
aside - it would explain some things which conventional theories about
Patriarchy have trouble with, such as why gay men and MTF transsexuals are both
more visible and more visibly oppressed than lesbians and FTM transsexuals.
Here, it is not giving up Male Privilege that threatens; it is encroaching on
the real, secret power of the Matriarchy that is the threat, one which
could topple the whole regime if it let the secret out.
Now, I am not seriously arguing this to be the case; I doubt even Zubaty, who
I think wrote YBINYO as much as a parody of both political correctness
and conspiracy theories as anything, really takes it seriously. But I do think
that he's kidding on the square when it comes to men's roles: much of male
'privilege' does seem to come from a kind of flattery towards men by
women, rather than as a simple outgrowth of male authority, and to the extent
that this is true, men really do seem to fall for it. More seriously, I think
that there's a disturbing amount of truth in the assertion that women are the
primary oppressors of other women, and that any attempt to end sexism has to
address this.
I'm not sure where I'm going with this any more. I guess what I'm asking is,
what can we get out of this perspective? Is there anything useful to draw from
this idea?
position opposite the general pre-conceptions. It is not meant to seriously
present the position in question, but to foster discussion about the established
beliefs.
As I was re-reading Kate Bornstein's Gender Outlaw recently, I was
reminded of another book, Your Brain is Not Your Own/a> by one Rich Zubaty,
whose only claim to fame is that he was on tour with the Grateful Dead at
some point in the past. Zubaty's book is a peculiar cultural artifact, rambling
and incohernet, but it was fun and had some interesting speculations about the
meaning of male and female, living and non-living, sentient and (supposedly)
non-sentient. One major theme of the book, however, was the difference between
male and female as a matter of goals: that the goal of the Female is
to protect, to create, and most of all to preserve - an essentially
reactionary role, that is - while the purpose of the mutant Male was to
explore, to break rules, and cause change, and most of all, to piss off the
Female.
OK, so this is a bit weirdly essentialist, but it came along with another
speculation that is far more interesting: that human societies are all,
inherently and invariably, and in the strictest sense Matriarchal
in structure, and that Male Privilege was the proof of this.
Essentially, the arugment goes like this: Male Privilege exists not as a
consequence of male domination, but to prevent males from noticing that their
'power' is nothing more than smoke and mirrors, and that such power they
actually have only really extends to the younger women. It is a small
number of older women, literal Matriarchs, who hold the real power - but
it's held indirectly, with males acting as the Matriarchs' catspaws, and only
applies to those who are in their immediate sway - mothers, wives, and so forth.
Real power is decentralized and personal; all other power is an illusion, part
of the male (self-)deception of Control.
Men, in this view, are everything that the old Victorian view held women to be:
emotionally weak, fickle, easily confused or excited, illogical, and hormonally
constrained. However, these traits often come in a physically stronger, larger
and more aggressive body than for most women. The solution? Give them what they
want - or at least what they think they want - while manipulating them from
the sidelines. Zubaty's Essential Female is a manipulator par excellance,
so good at it that even she doesn't realize that she's the one in charge.
(This stands in contrast to the simple physical fact that - evolutionarily
speaking - males, in the sense of producers-of-sperm, exist primarily as a
response to the contradictory forces of the drive to reproduce as widely and as
frequently possible, and the high energy cost of producing fully-formed gametes.
Heterogametes appear to have evolved because it was too expensive for both
partners to generate equally formed iso-gametes. Masculinity, in this sense, is
basically just a cost-cutting move, and a bit of a premature optimization on
the part of our ancestors. But I digress, doubly so since Zubaty expressly
rejects natural selection in favor of a kind of Lamarkian solution.)
He's also very specific in claiming that most of the oppression of women is not
a matter of men oppressing women, but of older women oppressing younger women.
The majority of women are kept out of real power - which again, means familial
power, not to be confused with the seeming political or economic power which
only exists as a kind of apophenia - until any disruptive elements have been
weeded out, cut off, left for dead.
Well, now, this is some very heavy stuff, and not at all easy to swallow.
However, it occurred to me that if it were right - the essential batshit
craziness of such things as the Conspiracy of Corn and the Mineral Takeover
aside - it would explain some things which conventional theories about
Patriarchy have trouble with, such as why gay men and MTF transsexuals are both
more visible and more visibly oppressed than lesbians and FTM transsexuals.
Here, it is not giving up Male Privilege that threatens; it is encroaching on
the real, secret power of the Matriarchy that is the threat, one which
could topple the whole regime if it let the secret out.
Now, I am not seriously arguing this to be the case; I doubt even Zubaty, who
I think wrote YBINYO as much as a parody of both political correctness
and conspiracy theories as anything, really takes it seriously. But I do think
that he's kidding on the square when it comes to men's roles: much of male
'privilege' does seem to come from a kind of flattery towards men by
women, rather than as a simple outgrowth of male authority, and to the extent
that this is true, men really do seem to fall for it. More seriously, I think
that there's a disturbing amount of truth in the assertion that women are the
primary oppressors of other women, and that any attempt to end sexism has to
address this.
I'm not sure where I'm going with this any more. I guess what I'm asking is,
what can we get out of this perspective? Is there anything useful to draw from
this idea?