Patriarchy: The Big Lie

From reading for Feminist Legal Theory:

Patriarchy is grounded in a Great Lie that the answer to life's needs is disconnection and control rather than connection, sharing, and cooperation. The Great Lie separates men from what they need most by encouraging them to be autonomous and disconnected when in fact human existence is fundamentally relational. . . . Who are we if not our ties to other people—“I am . . . a father, a husband, a worker, a friend, a son, a brother”? But patriarchal magic turns the truth inside out, and “self-made man” goes from oxymoron to cultural ideal. And somewhere between the need for human connection and the imperative to control, the two merge, and a sense of control becomes the closest many men ever come to feeling connected with anything, including themselves. (134)

Allan Johnson, In the Gender Knot: Unraveling Our Patriarchal Legacy, 26, 31-41 (Temple University Press 1997) (quoted in Becker, Bowman, & Torrey, Feminist Jurisprudence, 2nd ed. 2001. I believe almost nothing could be more true. I would add that the “big lie” also includes the urge you probably have to dismiss or scorn anyone who uses the word “patriarchy” and or any writing that discusses it. Patriarchy is an ideology, and ideology (“our imaginary relationship to our real conditions of existence”) works constantly to make itself invisible so that if someone tries to point it out to you, your first reaction likely to be something like “whatevah, freak.” I suppose Johnson's description of patriarchy could be another way of saying that the Enlightenment was largely a fancy gloss on patriarchy, but that brings in a lot of baggage that may not be necessary to get the point that our so called “independent” lives (“our” meaning men, primarily, but women, too, to a lesser extent) are really a great big fantasy. I'm thinking this has everything to do with a world of gears and girders (see Cecilia Tichi, e.g. here), and long before that Kant (see also here). Today we see it writ large in cuts to welfare, attempts to dismantle social security, and Wal-Mart as the largest private employer on the planet (or at least in the U.S.). Control. Fear. Autonomous. Disconnected. Keywords of oppression. Things like Energy Spatula's recent post about self-image and relationships with men and social expectations may also fit into this matrix, both as examples of the way men attempt to control women (and their world generally) because of their own fear, but also as an example of how the Enlightenment ideas of independence and autonomy encourage people to feel alone in their lives and the problems they face, when really the source of those problems is social and we all experience them to one degree or another. If this sounds like babbling, it's not. I promise. I may make a paper out of it somehow in the next ten weeks. Or maybe I'll write about contingent foundations and related things such as those I mentioned here last fall.

Posted January 31, 2005 07:03 AM |