The Nature of the Problem

So I'm a law student. And one of the people I sit next to in one class is one of the main bloggers at feministe (Hi Jill). She often says what I'm thinking with an eloquence and vividness that I wish I had. Sometimes, of course, we disagree. But she usually gets me thinking. And one of her recent comments reminded me that "the project" has at least two real problems.

The first is that many of our societal norms are simply sexist. These are obvious things, like the ability of men to walk around topless in situations where women can't. Or the availability of toilet facilities relative to the average amount of time it takes a man or a woman to use said facility. And speaking of toilets and bathrooms: the fact that many more women's rooms have baby-changing facilities than do men's rooms. And then we have things like pay disparities, and society's support for professional athletics, etc etc. This is not meant to be a litany of sexist practices :-)

Then there's the notion, I'll go so far as to call it a fact (but maybe that's open to dispute), that so many of our societal norms are sexist that our society is self-perpetuatingly sexist. Consider a non-sexist meme. By presumption, it's non-sexist, so it's not going to rely on stereotyped differences between men and women. Thus, some would argue, it can't affect the current balance of power between and societal conceits about men and women. On the other hand, the fact that it isn't sexist may reinforce the more general meme that non-sexism is good, and that may lead to change, but on the balance I'm going to say that it's a minor plus in the world.

But this meme is going to have to survive in a hostile environment. Power structures are made by the powerful to protect themselves, and we live in a structure that's gotten pretty sophisticated over thousands of years. Think of spousal abuse, or domestic violence, or whatever you want to call it. In the 1700's, and who knows how much earlier, husbands had the right to discipline their wives. To beat them, basically. Over the course of the next two hundred years, we slowly developed norms against that, and it's generally considered deplorable to beat your wife.

But.

Statistics show that battery laws are enforced more often and more vigorously against immigrants, minorities, and economically less well off people. The people that aren't in power. Police and prosecutors exhibit a lot of hesitation to make public crimes out of 'domestic violence'. Husbands can win the sympathy of judges and juries with stories of how the wife cheated on them, or how they simply didn't trust her, or how it was actually a fit of rage and not a coldly calculating power play. Women receive relatively little support from police, are often unsuccessful in citing a history of abuse or philandering by a husband, and generally have a much tougher row to hoe if they, god forbid, should take action to stop the abuse.

This is just one illustrative example. Yes, the meme that spousal abuse is bad has taken hold. But along with it have come memes that enable us to rationalize that abuse, to blame the victim, and to compartmentalize the problem of abuse as one that is confined to 'others'.

So that's the problem we have to deal with -- the fact that society is filled with sexist memes, and the fact that society seems to have an immune system that defends an overall sexist tendency. Another way of saying this is that there's an inertia behind power, a momentum. There may be some friction slowing down that momentum, but those with power tend to stay in power.

How can we make this different?