At this writing, I can only imagine who in the celebrity world will be next exposed as a sexual predator. These revelations are coming with such frequency, I wonder if Ted Koppel needs to revive his daily tally on the bottom of the TV screen, as he had at the start of the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979. Recall, this nightly spotlight ticking off the days, weeks, and months the US embassy staff was held was the birth of Koppel's long-running program, "Nightline", and furthered his television career.
Koppel did not free a single hostage, but it is said that his nightly spotlight of the hostage crisis, and the meticulous tally of the elapsing days - which went into the 300's - was one nail among several in the coffin of Jimmy Carter's one-term presidency, and it paved the way for last century's right-wing buffoon, the Acting President and FBI snitch, Ronald Reagan.
Could a sage female journalist, like Barbara Walters, Charlayne Hunter-Gault, or Connie Chung, do a nightly news program, tallying the latest sexual assault, delving deep into the power/lack-of-power dynamic between men and women in our advanced societies?
Could a tally bring down patriarchy?
Not likely. But if it ever did it would have to go back 500+ years to the European conquest and genocide of First Nations and Native peoples; it would have to document the voices of countless African girls kidnapped from their homelands and communities to work in the forced-labor camps that we quaintly call plantations. It would have to excavate quite a few unsavory roots to the phenomenon of the oppression of women.
The Dilemma
Dismantling patriarchy would demand a lot of work. And yet, in the wake of these present and ongoing revelations how these men acted upon women, men, girls, and boys, we're not doing the Work.
What we are barraged with are women encouraged to tell their stories.
We are admonished to believe them.
We are asked, what is to be done with these perpetrators?
Should he resign? Is a week of therapy enough? Should his series be cancelled?
What have more than one dozen testimonies done to the current US president, who boasted not only sexually assaulting women, he sexualized his daughter, and suggested he could commit murder in New York City?
These oral histories from the victims could be conducted by the late, great reporter Studs Terkel, we could wear "I believe you" buttons, flood social media with "Me Too" hashtags, and indictments could be filed and jail sentences imposed, and none of these things would address what must be done when it comes to patriarchy.
These public confessionals, with the invariable close-up of the traumatized woman being made to relive her trauma on national television is the bread and circuses of the elites. Elites do not want to talk about power, so instead we focus on victims or on who attorney Gloria Allred will defend next for a close-up and how sordid and debauch was the behavior.
If it is testimonials you really want, how many immigrant women working as agricultural laborers have been abused by their employers, and why don't we hear about the Black women working as domestic laborers, not only in the South, who faced sexual assault from their male bosses? I wonder why Gloria Allred won't seek them out to defend in a class-action suit.
Testimonials just scratch the surface to understanding how power works. They do prove there is in fact a problem, but they do not deal with the problem. Like the convening of a committee by a municipal body, they are often meant as a distraction rather than promote real restructuring.
Purging is not a cure for bulimia.
Because while women - and particularly women of color - have faced and do face enormous challenges and exploitation under capitalism, like sexual assault of various kinds from their workplace superiors, like wage theft through legal pay disparities, and like sex trafficking, the structure of this oppression finds its source in our authoritarian workplaces and nuclear families. This is where we nurture our children to comply with these powerful structures, supposedly for their long-term benefit, we teach them to suffer in silence, and to labor out of fear that one's very livelihood can be extinguished in a moment by one's employer.
This is where patriarchy finds its most eager accomplices among some women, who have been taught the path to their liberation is through being the equal of men.
Equality under Patriarchy
Koppel did not free a single hostage, but it is said that his nightly spotlight of the hostage crisis, and the meticulous tally of the elapsing days - which went into the 300's - was one nail among several in the coffin of Jimmy Carter's one-term presidency, and it paved the way for last century's right-wing buffoon, the Acting President and FBI snitch, Ronald Reagan.
Could a sage female journalist, like Barbara Walters, Charlayne Hunter-Gault, or Connie Chung, do a nightly news program, tallying the latest sexual assault, delving deep into the power/lack-of-power dynamic between men and women in our advanced societies?
Could a tally bring down patriarchy?
Not likely. But if it ever did it would have to go back 500+ years to the European conquest and genocide of First Nations and Native peoples; it would have to document the voices of countless African girls kidnapped from their homelands and communities to work in the forced-labor camps that we quaintly call plantations. It would have to excavate quite a few unsavory roots to the phenomenon of the oppression of women.
The Dilemma
Dismantling patriarchy would demand a lot of work. And yet, in the wake of these present and ongoing revelations how these men acted upon women, men, girls, and boys, we're not doing the Work.
What we are barraged with are women encouraged to tell their stories.
We are admonished to believe them.
We are asked, what is to be done with these perpetrators?
Should he resign? Is a week of therapy enough? Should his series be cancelled?
What have more than one dozen testimonies done to the current US president, who boasted not only sexually assaulting women, he sexualized his daughter, and suggested he could commit murder in New York City?
These oral histories from the victims could be conducted by the late, great reporter Studs Terkel, we could wear "I believe you" buttons, flood social media with "Me Too" hashtags, and indictments could be filed and jail sentences imposed, and none of these things would address what must be done when it comes to patriarchy.
These public confessionals, with the invariable close-up of the traumatized woman being made to relive her trauma on national television is the bread and circuses of the elites. Elites do not want to talk about power, so instead we focus on victims or on who attorney Gloria Allred will defend next for a close-up and how sordid and debauch was the behavior.
If it is testimonials you really want, how many immigrant women working as agricultural laborers have been abused by their employers, and why don't we hear about the Black women working as domestic laborers, not only in the South, who faced sexual assault from their male bosses? I wonder why Gloria Allred won't seek them out to defend in a class-action suit.
Testimonials just scratch the surface to understanding how power works. They do prove there is in fact a problem, but they do not deal with the problem. Like the convening of a committee by a municipal body, they are often meant as a distraction rather than promote real restructuring.
Purging is not a cure for bulimia.
Because while women - and particularly women of color - have faced and do face enormous challenges and exploitation under capitalism, like sexual assault of various kinds from their workplace superiors, like wage theft through legal pay disparities, and like sex trafficking, the structure of this oppression finds its source in our authoritarian workplaces and nuclear families. This is where we nurture our children to comply with these powerful structures, supposedly for their long-term benefit, we teach them to suffer in silence, and to labor out of fear that one's very livelihood can be extinguished in a moment by one's employer.
This is where patriarchy finds its most eager accomplices among some women, who have been taught the path to their liberation is through being the equal of men.
Equality under Patriarchy
Germaine Greer
Sylvia Federici
Audre Lorde
The equality battle risks being a pillar upholding patriarchy. This is where focusing on increasing the presence of women in local police forces or imperialist militaries, or corporate boardrooms, is to cosign the very authoritarian regimes that demand not only the silence of women, teach all the wrong social lessons to them, and subject them to assault, but these authoritarian regimes subject all workers to these antisocial lessons of staying silent for fear of one's future.
Radical, second-wave feminist, Germaine Greer, said in 2010:
"I never wanted equality. It's a meaningless idea. A nonsensical idea. I certainly don't want the life of an 'organization man' or a corporate lawyer or a bond trader or a diplomat or even a parliamentarian because you're simply recycling the same injustice and misery. What I look forward to is a complete reversal of priorities so that the things we take for granted as trifling, like housekeeping,... become major. For example, we need to housekeep this planet. We need to really bring in principles of domestic economy so we're not behaving in a way that is depleting the resources of the planet, reducing its biodiversity, which is our real inheritance. Everything else is nonsense: all the 'great houses' and silliness. Even the works of art are nothing compared to biodiversity. But in order for that to become so important that people will accept a fall in their standard of living and live in a more frugal and austere way, we've really got to have completely different mindset. Consumerism has got to be as no-no as drinking and driving."
Further, we nurture young girls and encourage women to offer their labors for free within all domestic contexts (marriage, motherhood, children, and house work), and not to complain when offered less in the public arena.
In a 2015 interview, Marxist radical feminist, Sylvia Federici, undermines concepts of "women's work" in her critiques of capitalism:
"When women fight for the wage for domestic work, they are also fighting against this work, as domestic work can continue as such so long as and when it is not paid. It is like slavery. The demand for a domestic wage denaturalized female slavery. Thus, the wage is not the ultimate goal, but an instrument, a strategy, to achieve a change in the power relations between women and capital. The aim of our struggle was to convert exploitative slave labor that was naturalized because of its unpaid character into socially recognized work; it was to subvert a sexual division of labor based on the power of the masculine wage to command the reproductive labor of women, which in Caliban and the Witch I call 'the patriarchy of the wage'."
The Dilemma: the Workplace and Work
Dismantling patriarchy has to include how we are all our collectively complicit in sustaining it. It must note the gross hypocrisy in eliciting women's testimony in tearful public displays, telling them "we believe you," while making their suffering in silence for low wages noble, and discouraging their complaints, litigious and otherwise.
Newer revelations and hearing testimonies about what we should already know and feigning shock will not advance the demise of the authoritarian culture that patriarchy thrives in, especially if we keep pushing our daughters and encouraging our sisters to succeed from within it.
The "organization man" that Greer alluded to is a watched, reviewed, and vetted man. He does not go from one promotion to the next without proving, like any good Mafioso, his loyalty to the system. And loyalty to the system is not the liberation of other women, especially not of women of color.
Recall when in 1979 the late Black lesbian poet, Audre Lorde, admonished a conference of mostly white feminists, white feminists who had empaneled mostly white women:
"If white American feminist theory need not deal with the differences between us, and the resulting difference in our oppressions, then how do you deal with the fact that the women who clear your houses and tend your children while you attend conferences on feminist theory are, for the most part, poor women and women of color?"
As we still commemorate the centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, we must also commemorate the social institutions created and inspired from it for the benefit and radicalizing of working people - to nourish a democratic mentality. Workplace councils, though not always perfect, became the norm, as were neighborhood councils. But the point isn't their imperfections: these gave workers and their communities contexts to imagine and actualize better conditions.
This tradition stands in marked contrast to what can only be called the authoritarian workplaces in our so-called leading democracies, the military command structures, the write-ups, arbitrary firings, union-bashing, and, yes, sexual predators among upper management. These things go hand in hand.
For us, workers collectivizing informally as in grassroots committees, or formally, as in unionizing, are direct threats to our management-centered culture. It was the strength of the union movement that, not ironically, narrowed the gender pay gap; and so, predictably, as unions are allowed to whither under Republican and Democratic indifference, that gap widens. Given that so much of our lives are spent having to work, the persistence of these authoritarian workplaces would bely our boast of being a global democratic leader if actual, meaningful discussions were to be had. The goal of these social institutions is not to become partners with management, cannot be to "share the wealth" with Wall Street. These social institutions must, in the final analysis, dismantle the authoritarian regimes and empower workers to control their communities and their workplaces. This is democratic.
Radical, second-wave feminist, Germaine Greer, said in 2010:
"I never wanted equality. It's a meaningless idea. A nonsensical idea. I certainly don't want the life of an 'organization man' or a corporate lawyer or a bond trader or a diplomat or even a parliamentarian because you're simply recycling the same injustice and misery. What I look forward to is a complete reversal of priorities so that the things we take for granted as trifling, like housekeeping,... become major. For example, we need to housekeep this planet. We need to really bring in principles of domestic economy so we're not behaving in a way that is depleting the resources of the planet, reducing its biodiversity, which is our real inheritance. Everything else is nonsense: all the 'great houses' and silliness. Even the works of art are nothing compared to biodiversity. But in order for that to become so important that people will accept a fall in their standard of living and live in a more frugal and austere way, we've really got to have completely different mindset. Consumerism has got to be as no-no as drinking and driving."
Further, we nurture young girls and encourage women to offer their labors for free within all domestic contexts (marriage, motherhood, children, and house work), and not to complain when offered less in the public arena.
In a 2015 interview, Marxist radical feminist, Sylvia Federici, undermines concepts of "women's work" in her critiques of capitalism:
"When women fight for the wage for domestic work, they are also fighting against this work, as domestic work can continue as such so long as and when it is not paid. It is like slavery. The demand for a domestic wage denaturalized female slavery. Thus, the wage is not the ultimate goal, but an instrument, a strategy, to achieve a change in the power relations between women and capital. The aim of our struggle was to convert exploitative slave labor that was naturalized because of its unpaid character into socially recognized work; it was to subvert a sexual division of labor based on the power of the masculine wage to command the reproductive labor of women, which in Caliban and the Witch I call 'the patriarchy of the wage'."
The Dilemma: the Workplace and Work
Dismantling patriarchy has to include how we are all our collectively complicit in sustaining it. It must note the gross hypocrisy in eliciting women's testimony in tearful public displays, telling them "we believe you," while making their suffering in silence for low wages noble, and discouraging their complaints, litigious and otherwise.
Newer revelations and hearing testimonies about what we should already know and feigning shock will not advance the demise of the authoritarian culture that patriarchy thrives in, especially if we keep pushing our daughters and encouraging our sisters to succeed from within it.
The "organization man" that Greer alluded to is a watched, reviewed, and vetted man. He does not go from one promotion to the next without proving, like any good Mafioso, his loyalty to the system. And loyalty to the system is not the liberation of other women, especially not of women of color.
Recall when in 1979 the late Black lesbian poet, Audre Lorde, admonished a conference of mostly white feminists, white feminists who had empaneled mostly white women:
"If white American feminist theory need not deal with the differences between us, and the resulting difference in our oppressions, then how do you deal with the fact that the women who clear your houses and tend your children while you attend conferences on feminist theory are, for the most part, poor women and women of color?"
As we still commemorate the centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, we must also commemorate the social institutions created and inspired from it for the benefit and radicalizing of working people - to nourish a democratic mentality. Workplace councils, though not always perfect, became the norm, as were neighborhood councils. But the point isn't their imperfections: these gave workers and their communities contexts to imagine and actualize better conditions.
This tradition stands in marked contrast to what can only be called the authoritarian workplaces in our so-called leading democracies, the military command structures, the write-ups, arbitrary firings, union-bashing, and, yes, sexual predators among upper management. These things go hand in hand.
For us, workers collectivizing informally as in grassroots committees, or formally, as in unionizing, are direct threats to our management-centered culture. It was the strength of the union movement that, not ironically, narrowed the gender pay gap; and so, predictably, as unions are allowed to whither under Republican and Democratic indifference, that gap widens. Given that so much of our lives are spent having to work, the persistence of these authoritarian workplaces would bely our boast of being a global democratic leader if actual, meaningful discussions were to be had. The goal of these social institutions is not to become partners with management, cannot be to "share the wealth" with Wall Street. These social institutions must, in the final analysis, dismantle the authoritarian regimes and empower workers to control their communities and their workplaces. This is democratic.
