The greatest challenge to survival under a patriarchal system is combating its distortion of communication at the most fundamental level.
Nothing could be more fundamental to humanity than the way the psyche registers pleasure or pain. One communicates, for instance, about one's health and well-being as a means of expressing communality. However, if you are female, this kind of communication may not be considered to be a genuine form of communication, if the message is in any way a negative one (and particularly if a male was involved). You are first sent back to the scribbling board to revise.
Systematic incredulity: you are told that what happened didn't happen, and what you saw, you didn't in fact see.
To persist in asserting that what happened really took place only gets you into more grief with the patriarchy. A mere assertion even slightly implicating a male is considered arrogance enough on the part of one gendered female.
Nothing could be more fundamental to humanity than the way the psyche registers pleasure or pain. One communicates, for instance, about one's health and well-being as a means of expressing communality. However, if you are female, this kind of communication may not be considered to be a genuine form of communication, if the message is in any way a negative one (and particularly if a male was involved). You are first sent back to the scribbling board to revise.
A patriarch over there did WHAT?But patriarchs are always kind, full of wisdom and benevolent -- by definition!
Systematic incredulity: you are told that what happened didn't happen, and what you saw, you didn't in fact see.
To persist in asserting that what happened really took place only gets you into more grief with the patriarchy. A mere assertion even slightly implicating a male is considered arrogance enough on the part of one gendered female.
To make the situation worse, you can go so far as to provide empirical evidence for your claims of patriarchal injury: "Here is the evidence of the patriarchal impact -- on my body!"
Hysteria! The patriarchal construct of the "wandering womb"!
Reference to the material world is misused, according to the dictates of patriarchal reason, as evidence of constitutional unfitness to speak.
Henceforth, the more the "witch" endeavours to be free from the oppression of ongoing misconstrued communication, social censure and condemnation, the more the web of patriarchal meanings wrap her tightly.
Nowadays, a victim of patriarchal wrath might can often escape her ultimate demise by burning/drowning.
This reprieve is granted at the point the woman disavows her reason: she must first renounce everything she has ever heard, or seen or thought -- especially and above all her ever-growing knowledge of the workings of patriarchy.
5 comments:
It is hard but it is true. I find that it is possible to generalise the insights - chaning "female/patrarch" to "boss/worker or "black/white" can be done with few changes necessary to keep the meaning. Even more sadly "child/adult" or even, more than occasionally "child/parent" can be substituted in the same way
well observed jennifer. the problem renders itself at the level of difference and belonging. Thus women in a patriachal society are outsiders although the system rationalises that outsidedness and difference as being inside nonetheless and trivialises it as nothing that could in the end disenfranchise them. The hurt and injustices that they experience can not be understood by the patriarch because he perceives it as not meriting his glance. Even the medium of communication itself is not value-free and friendly, language need to be debugged because what women are probably trying to recount and bring for discourse with the patriarch, He does not derive the same meaning.
Yes, good post, helpful.
Yes, good post, helpful.
It's to do with the conceptualisation of a division between the public and the private realms. At least, that is how I think some of this prejudicial thinking started. At least in Western society. In more traditional societies, I think it is a problem of patriarchal values pure and simple. But in Western culture, much of women's speech is deemed to be merely "personal" -- ie. it is seen to to relate to anything that takes place where serious actions take place. Serious actions happen only in the public realm. That realm is defined however by the state of being a man.
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