Professor Zero has asked me to elaborate on what often happens to women in the workplace. They are pressured to play a role that is in principle self-contradictory -- that is, they are tasked with performing femininity.
The psycho-dynamics that permit certain workplaces from engaging in this kind of hostage taking are of course hidden from view from those who are not being pressured to perform femininity. They are the ones who are, for reasons of gender and social status freed from this imperative:
Just knuckle down and perform femininity and stop being a cry-baby, seems to be the basic response. In other words, “be butter in our hands, and stop resisting. Start being a cry-baby, and at the same time stop being one, on command! We need you weaker than you are — but also for you not to show it that to the public, only to us.
The one who is being pressured to perform femininity is alone in her predicament of facing contradictory imperatives in order to fit in. The contradictory nature of these external expectations about her attitudes, postures and general behaviour will eventually turn her into a complete nervous wreck -- thus confirming patriarchal prejudices that women are in fact, in general, cry-babies, and tend to mess up wonderful opportunities to get ahead, even after they are given so many chances to do so.
Cause and effect are thus reversed in the minds of onlookers, and victims of workplace hostage taking are blamed for being victims.
It is for due to this ideological invention of femininity that women regularly face different issues, in terms of self defence, than males do.
I read last night, with interest, one man's very well considered views of what is and what is not "self defence" in everyday life. He is very clear that only the defence of one's physical being is to be considered self defence. Emotional states have nothing to do with self defence, but confuse the issue, according to him.
The problem he doesn't recognize is that when women are taken hostage, they are trapped into a dire situation by being put in emotional contradiction with themselves. To state it slightly differently, her emotional integrity is attacked as a way of putting her in self-contradiction with her stated aims -- i.e. to get ahead. She is supposed to get ahead only by accepting criticism and condemnation of her integrity. Thus she is trapped into a self-defeating posture, which for all the world looks like something merely of her own making (although, quite patently, it isn't. She has rather become the victim of patriarchal imperatives imposed systematically on women, especially those considered to be of low socioeconomic status).
A woman who would defend herself against the contradictory demands of femininity is not going to be defending her physical body so much as the integrity of her mind -- and, in a sense, her "emotions".
Since it is her emotional integrity that has been violated by patriarchal imperatives, she must count her emotional integrity as something that needs to be defended in the future.
What if she did as she was pressured into doing, and gave up her emotional integrity, casting it to the winds in blind trust that "everything will work out in the end"?
At that point of trust (resignation) she loses her primary buffer against hostile forces, and her body then becomes easily available for rape and abuse.
Women's first line of defence is the first line of patriarchal assault. She must defend her own emotional integrity as if it's something that matters -- for assuredly there are material consequences if she doesn't do so: In short, it matters.
1 comment:
Actually, I think this applies to men as well. The point of physical violence is to bring emotional violence home. Women seem to get emotional violence as a first line of attack, and men perhaps get physical violence first, but in the end the point is to make both physical and emotional violence possible, and to get the victims to perpetrate these upon themselves as much as possible.
My colleague the Blackguard has this theorized as "the use of infrared light in war." He says he tries to shine "infrared light" on other people, so that they cook while he stays cool. That way, he says, he appears to be an innocent bystander while his victims, or enemies, appear to have ignited themselves.
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