Even in our every day conversation, male pronouns dominate
our vocabulary and our ideas. Every dog
we see is a 'he', every stick figure a 'he', even humans thought of as
'mankind'. The only exceptions are
boats, cars, bikes and ships - which are (not surprisingly) 'she' - because
they are objects and possessions of men.
Even when we're shown cases of male violence and sexual
abuse, we look at it from the man's point of view: "He must have been
provoked", "He was a nice guy that just snapped", "She must
have confused him with her signals", "I bet he was falsely accused,
it's horrible he has to go to jail now."
We victim blame, we spit out rape/violence apologist comments, and
through it all we start to see that as a society we only look through men's
eyes.
Remarkably, even in defense of women we tell society to look
at women as objects. Even when we speak
out against violence against women we see people telling others to imagine her
as "somebody's wife, somebody's mother, somebody's daughter, or somebody's
sister," As if it never occurs to us that maybe... JUST MAYBE... that
woman is also a "somebody".
Movies and Television
I really shouldn't need to point out how we objectify and
scrutinize and marginalize women in our movies and television. But for the sake of consistency, I will. I do want to start by saying Objectification
doesn't necessarily mean women dolled up in varying degrees of undress purely
for men's eyes. Sexual objectification
is certainly its own problem, but that is simply one part of the problem.
Women are reduced to the sum of their body parts,
Photoshopped to fit an ever-narrowing standard of female beauty, and put on
display as pieces of property to be owned.
This grabs our attention, and most if not all of us recognize the issue
with this imagery.
Yet only focusing on the 'sexual' aspect can obscure the
much bigger issue of real 'objectification' which goes on in our society. The big problem is the difference between
subject status and object status. A subject
is, by definition, active - with agency, while an object is passive - being
acted upon. For example, "Fiona
stroked the cat" - we can see that 'Fiona' has subject status, while 'the
cat' has object status. Ideally, we
would each find ourselves cast as either subject or object at different times
in conversation and representation, because that's normal vocabulary. However, in our society, the dominant verbage
used is heavily gendered, with men granted the status of subject and women
severely objectified.
These messages start at a remarkably young age in our
culture. Janice McCabe did a study that
showed male characters in children's books outnumber female ones, and even when
characters are gender neutral (like animals), parents often read them as male
to their kids (Guardian). This also happens in children's shows, where
only a third of lead roles are female (The
Independent). It's referred to as
the Smurfette Principle, where only one female character is present on an entire
cast of male ones. 'Female' has become a
characteristic all its own.
Our entire visual entertainment culture revolves around boys
and men. The majority of films produced
tell stories about men, with women cast as girlfriends, wives, mothers or other
periphery roles (LA
Times). In any given year, only
about 12-15% of top grossing Hollywood movies focus on women and their stories
(Motion Picture Association of
America). And those are degradingly
referred to as chick flicks and are
almost always focused on women looking for a man to 'complete' them, 'save'
them, or 'redeem' them in some way.
Video Games
There were about 17.4 million gamers in the US in 2012 (NPD).
This number means a significant part of
our culture exists online in games, which also makes it a medium we simply
can't ignore. Just hearing a female
voice used over voice-chat in online games is enough to illicit a negative
reaction toward females in games.
Researchers from Ohio University ran an experiment within
Halo 3 which looked to determine whether gamers reacted differently to male and
female voices within the online game.
The experiment was run with two accounts, one male and one female who
were not aware they were a part of the study.
For each account, identical phrases that were designed not to illicit a
negative response were recorded by both the man and the woman, and were played
through an iPod during live play. The
two accounts only varied in two ways - their nickname and gender
representation. 245 games were recorded
and played live, and 163 of those included verbal communication and were later
analyzed.
The result - the female received nearly three times as many
directly negative comments as the male.
The phrase "hi everybody" alone was enough to
spark reactions ranging from "shut up you whore" to "so whatever
that voice was, are you a hooker or are you a dude?" When the female
wasn't receiving derogatory gendered language, she was asked out (New Media and
Society).
Workplace
Women still only make 77 cents for every dollar a man
makes. That's a difference of $10,000 a
year (Gender
Wage Gap).
This gap starts as early as college in North America, where
women make an average of 82% of what men make (AAUW). In the first year of their careers, men
typically make $7,600 more than women (Bureau
of Labor Statistics).
Women, on average, make up only slightly more than 10% of
chief financial officers (Bloomberg). More than 1/3 of North American companies
have zero women employed in senior management positions at all (Catalyst).
Of the companies that did have women at
the top in 2010 - they only made up 6.2% of those top earning positions (Catalyst).
On top of the statistical barriers that hold women back,
there's the psychological roadblocks in our culture that aim to keep women in a
position lower than men. Women face a
variety of stereotypes in the workplace like: They don't need more money
because they're not the primary breadwinner, they can't do certain jobs that are
considered men's work, they're
supposed to act a certain kind of feminine
in the workplace, they're not as committed to their jobs because they're the
primary caregiver of their kids. Office
culture is the longest-standing gender biased area of our society, and the
norms there are grossly dominated by men (Forbes).
Why I'm a Feminist
I wrote a brief piece yesterday about some of the verbal attacks I've received in different situations, and attacks I've witnessed on friends.
The post got two responses:
abuse wise on average, more than three women and one man are murdered by their intimate partners in this country every day. In 2000, 1,247 women were killed by an intimate partner. The same year, 440 men were killed by an intimate partner. Intimate partner homicides accounted for 30% of the murders of women and 5% percent of the murders of men.(Bureau of Justice Statistics Crime Data Brief, Intimate Partner Violence, 1993-2001, February 2003. Bureau of Justice Statistics, Intimate Partner Violence in the U.S. 1993-2004, 2006.)
More people die from aids, car accidents, smoking, heart disease, cancer, diabetes and hippopotamuses. With only 20% women experiencing domestic violence in their LIFETIME. I fail to see how this abuse is an out of control problem unless you mean, "someone said something mean to me" and we should "stand against this abuse" of mean words. Sounds like you ran into a jerk and they come in all races/genders. So maybe you not talk to those people anymore instead of making a call to arms on the internet.
And this gem:
Feminists are retarded. This article is proof.
You see, even within 5 hours of posting I was already receiving confusion, discouragement, and abuse. THIS is why I'm a feminist. Our patriarchal society is so overarching that we don't even think twice about slamming women when they speak out against injustice, and even go so far as to cite statistics as to why we should 'not talk to those people' anymore.
Why hadn't I thought of that?!
*Starts packing for the shack in the woods*
