What has happened — and what Rihanna and Chris have to do with Gloria and us — is that by inventing oppression where there is none and remaking woman in man’s image, as the sexual and feminist revolutions have done, we’ve confused everyone. The reaction those kids had was unnatural. It’s natural for us to expect men to protect women, and for women to expect some level of physical protection. But in post-modern America, those natural gender roles have been beaten by academics and political rhetoric and the occasional modern woman being offended by having a door opened for her. The result is confusion.
I'm not sure what work "natural" is doing here (or "post-modern", for that matter, but that's a common theme in conservative writing), but there doesn't seem to be any warrant for why "women are equal" should correspond to "blame women for being beaten." We "expect" men to protect women? What does that even mean? Historically, it means putting women "not on a pedestal but in a cage", as Justice Brennan put it. Historical masculine "protection" of women meant protecting their own exclusive rights to women, which, quite often, included their exclusive right to act violently against them -- through deprivation, through beatings, and through rape. What history is K-Lo reading where this traditional masculine paradigm didn't manifest itself in horrific violence towards women, particular in the home? And always this violence was justified either as the "natural" right of man to "his" woman's body, or as the proper response to "his" woman's obstinacy. Always.
Via Feministing.
Historical masculine "protection" of women meant protecting their own exclusive rights to women, which, quite often, included their exclusive right to act violently against them -- through deprivation, through beatings, and through rape.
ReplyDeleteExactly. If Rihanna had been getting menaced by another man and her boyfriend or husband had failed to stand up for her, the dynamic K.Lo's talking about (feminism has challenged the old idea that men are supposed to fight their women's battles against the outside world for them) might have some relevance. When Chris Brown is beating "his" woman, though, it's the old idea in play. K.Lo's apparently ignorant of the Feminism 101 idea that in a violent and patriarchal world, women make the rational choice to submit to one man instead of being prey to the depradations of all of them, and that the only way for this not to be a rational choice is for the world to be less violent and patriarchal.
Also, K.Lo's confusion of biological sex and sexual gender roles in her mini-disquisition on the O article is unsurprisingly but nonetheless dismaying.