Gender roles and the Patriarchy

I've spent the last few days looking over my list of topics, trying to find a place to begin. It's been a tough process, to be honest with you. Do I want to start off with something light, so we can begin at a gentle stroll? Do I want to start with one mother of a topic, to really get things going? Or do I opt for something more in the middle – something to get people's attention, but probably unlikely to cause anyone offence.

Not an easy decision to make, I'm sure you can imagine. And as hour upon hour ticked by, with a self-imposed deadline of putting something – anything – up tonight, I started looking for something to give me a kick-start. Then I came upon Pelle Billing's latest post, and I made my decision:

Start out with a big one.

Gender roles and the Patriarchy. Even by just typing it I can feel people sharpening their knives behind my back, waiting for me to put one foot out of line...

This is a huge topic, and I'm aware you don't want to read a dissertation from me, so I'm going to keep this brief, and really just skim over it. Apologies if it feels rushed as a result, but if you want more there is a lot to be found on the sites linked on the right, and no doubt this will be returned to in future.

Here's the MRM interpretation of the Patriarchy in a nutshell:

Males and females evolved very differently. We know this. Males evolved to be physically strong and physically tough, with honed spatial-awareness and practical skills needed in order to successfully build tools and hunt prey. Females, meanwhile, evolved the interaction and nurturing skills necessary to work together in successfully raising young. These physical characteristics evolved hand-in-hand with behavioural characteristics – put simply, males head off to provide and protect, females stay to look after home and child.

Skip forward a few thousand years, and we have developed societies. We have towns, cities, countries. We have complex economies. We have complex social constructs. But we are still behaving in our gender roles: men are going out and working, and going to war, women staying at home and looking after the children, and waiting for the men to return.

And this is where feminism and the men's rights movement begin to part ideological ways.

The commonly accepted consequence of these roles is that women came out oppressed. They were not allowed to work, not given the vote, treated like property moving from father to husband and so on. Men held the power.

Well, the MRM has this to say: that is only half the story. Men were oppressed too.

Here's how it works. When we look at 'men' within the Patriarchy, we very often place all men together. 'Men' had power. 'Men' had the vote. 'Men' ruled everything. This is true, and cannot be argued with – depending on how you are using the word 'men'.

The simple and inescapable truth is that the vast, vast majority of men did not have any power. They did not have the vote. They did not have choice in their lives. They were ruled over by those same few men who ruled over women, and were not given any special privilege for being male. In fact, the lives they were forced into by their gender role could easily be considered a lot worse. Forced military conscription. Back-breaking, dangerous, labour-intensive jobs in mines, fields and factories, jobs which even if they did not kill you directly, would massively reduce your life expectancy. Being removed from your family the majority of the day, and having no choice in the matter: if you didn't go work, you would all starve, or you would be imprisoned for debt. This was the lot of the common man, one which seems to be often forgotten by those who will quickly and loudly shout “Patriarchy!” as an excuse or reason for some pretty unpleasant attitudes and behaviours. 'Men' did not hold power. A very few men did, and wielded it universally.

The big one that people like to pull out all the time is suffrage. Women didn't have the right to vote in the same way men did. Well, yes, this is true. But it is a difficult issue to talk about, and people will tend to talk about it in generalisations – I've even spoken to a few people who were under the impression that ALL men had the vote since, well, pretty much forever. However, this was not the case. The voting franchise was male, yes, but also incredibly exclusive, pertaining to land, class, property and so forth. Universal suffrage for men aged 21 and above in the UK was achieved in 1918.

You may recognise that date in relation to suffrage for a different reason: this was the same year that propertied women over the age of 30 were granted the vote. Ten years later universal suffrage for all women aged 21 and above was achieved.

Ten years difference, from when the common man was granted the vote, to when the common woman was. Yes, before that women did not have the vote, but then neither did most men. Voting up until then was a class and property issue, not a gender one. I am not going to claim that the issue of the vote is not one to remember at all, and yes there was that ten year disparity, but I think it is important that we keep in mind quite how complex it is in comparison to the 'men had vote, women did not' statements we hear repeated without thought. 'Men' did not – they were stuck doing what they had to do, without choice, as their gender role dictated.

So having made a point in my introduction of not using history as an excuse for actions in the present, why have I just gone through that? Because the history of the Patriarchy is far more complicated than we commonly make it out to be, and it is a result of gender roles.

Then things began to change. Feminism has done a marvellous job of deconstructing the female gender role. Women no longer have to follow their traditional gender role if they don't wish to. If they do, they can, but the choices they have laid before them in the western world are manifold, and are essentially only limited by what they want to do. Whatever choices a woman makes in her life (save those that are illegal, of course), they are choices that will generally be accepted by society at large – and rightly so. It is, after all, her choice.

Men, on the other hand, are still expected to follow their traditional gender role to the letter. We have to be protectors and providers, and if not, we are deemed weak, losers, deadbeat, worthless. Men in the US still have to sign up to the draft, facing a $250,000 penalty and 5 years in Federal Prison if they fail to do so. Stay-at-home dads, whilst becoming more acceptable, are still looked upon oddly by a great many people (I have read many accounts of fathers being shunned by all the mothers waiting on the playground for their kids to come out of school). We are still expected to follow the codes of chivalry; codes which, when thought about, reduce women to the level of a child in their perceived weakness.

And so here I find myself at a crossroads, wondering which way to go. You see, that last paragraph may make it sound like I don't want to work, that I'm just whining that I can't get away without doing it. It may sound like I just don't want to do things for other people – particularly women. Neither of these are true. I just think it's about time the male gender role was deconstructed in the same way the female has been. In a world that is changing rapidly, we seem to be standing still, watching it all fly by and leave us behind with a confused look on our collective face. And in particular, I am struck by a thought: chivalry (that is, the act of doing something for a woman, possibly to your own detriment, specifically because she is female) is surely antithetical to the idea of female emancipation and equality, isn't it? So what to do?

Well, I don't have the answers, and I'd love to hear other people's thoughts. As for myself, I'm wondering if it's time to start exercising true equality in inter-gender discourse (no doubt a notion which will crop up again and again) – not doing something for a woman specifically because she is a woman and I 'should', but because I believe it is the right thing to do. And sometimes, perhaps that right thing may be to not automatically do something for her. As I said in the comment I left on the aforementioned post:

“Seems to be that, if women are not going to act in a traditional gender role, there’s no reason that I should – and to do so would be limiting myself. The thinking process I’m going through on my day-to-day life in these interactions is ‘if she were a he, would I be doing this?’.”

I'm sure this idea is going to ruffle a few people's feathers, and if it does, please do let me know, and explain why.

Thanks for reading!