Power and powerlessness both lay at the heart of our ongoing cultural discussion of equality among the sexes. Too often we perceive this as a somewhat binary distinction—one group as the oppressor, the other as the oppressed—and thus one gender’s power tends to be defined by another group’s powerlessness. Typical of this line of thought is the claim that men have held the majority of the power for millennia, which has made women powerless by default. However, this oversimplification of sex and gender can be counterproductive in many important ways. Considering women to have been at the brunt end of oppression for all these years is actually both insulting and demeaning to the female gender. While there are certainly many genuine cases of both men and women being violently oppressed throughout history, we must avoid the temptation to think of either gender’s history as merely one of oppression. History is not a story of men oppressing women for thousands of years, and then collectively waking up to the folly of our ways. Men and women were both being oppressed—by each other, and more importantly, by the challenge of survival in a mysterious and hostile world. Read the rest of this entry
It is amazing to consider how much has changed in the past five decades in regard to sexual liberation and empowerment. The woman’s role in today’s society is almost unrecognizable compared to the early 20th century, and would be wholly unimaginable in the centuries prior. In America, attitudes toward sexuality and gender began to dramatically shift with the Boomer generation (and the newly emerging pluralistic values they brought with them), as birth control, free love, and several new schools of “second wave” feminism began to challenge the traditional attitudes that defined preceding generations. Since the early sixties, there has been a tremendous amount of movement toward redefining ourselves as men and women—some forward, some backward, and plenty of treadmills with no discernible movement at all. In the ensuing decades, we have witnessed the masculinization of women, the feminization of men, the neutralization of both genders, the roles of helpless victim set upon women, the witch hunts of fallacious prosecution set against men, genuine transformation of attitudes and behaviors of both sexes, the movement to procure equal rights for homosexuals, the advent of sex-change surgery, the rise of pornography as a multi-billion dollar industry, and the capitalization of just about every kink, fetish, and fixation imaginable. And through it all, not surprisingly, men and women in the 21st century still seem to look at each other with the same bewilderment they did 20,000 years ago.