The girls are on the street. You just have to pick them up. An evergreen of feminist discourse is the idea of an objectification of women, meaning anything that degrades women to be less than human and come to be viewed as mere things to be possessed and used. The biggest problem of this feminist buzzword is not so much its lack of accuracy in depicting a real phenomenon, but in that it implies women had a status as humans in modern society to begin with, that they were anything but things. Bear with me. Modern gender relations have a long and conflicting history, but there are some general trends that can be identified. One is its close relationship to the developement of production. As wage labor and industrial production - capitalism - developed, society split into two spheres: public and private. One sphere for the generation of surplus value, one for the regeneration of its source: human labor. This split was mirrored in the relationship between man and woman. Indeed, the developement of capitalism would have been impossible without banishing women from the public sphere into a subservent role of housewives and mothers. Not just for the sake of exploiting them to do any work that could not have the same productive rationality applied to it as industrial production, e.g. the raising of children, but also to exorcise those aspects of human life from the male gender, which would be obstructive to their lifes of factory workers, enterpreneurs or soldiers: love, compassion, weakness... As beings of the public life and the productive process, man became not just the dominant gender, it became humanity itself. Civilization as a whole was considered a male achievement, only men were considered to have the status of subjects and in possession of a rational mind - women were nature; irrational and wholly controlled by instincts. This is the reason why the grand endeavour of enlightenment came hand in hand with the most disturbing oppression of women. This is the reason why Olympe de Gouges was sent to the guillotine for demanding the rights the French Revolution fought for to be applied to women as well. And it is also the reason why public space is not safe for women, why harassment is common place. If women are nature, then they are wild game to be hunted down. They are things to be picked up by any man with the will and the power to do so, as long as they are not the possession of another man. Of course, this position of women as beings of nature without rights, without status as subjects, is changing. But the echo of it is omnipresent. The objectification of women is not a degradation of women, it has been the status quo for most of the capitalist period. youtube/watch?v=b1XGPvbWn0A
Posted on: Wed, 29 Oct 2014 19:18:17 +0000
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