Oppression and Systemic Patriarchy - Main Post for 9/21/2010

In Marilyn Frye's article about oppression, she makes a compelling argument about how the position of women is oppressive on both sides using a birdcage. She asserts that that oppression is from the word press, which connotes "something caught between or among forces and barriers which are so related to each other that jointly they restrain, restrict or prevent the thing's motion or mobility." She claims that women are in such a double bind position in multiple aspects of life and identity such as work and economic stresses, family and marriage, sexual orientation, culture, country of origin and residence, politics, dress, but especially in sexual experience since "neither sexual activity nor sexual inactivity is all right." If a woman has had a lot of sexual experience, society labels her as a whore who does not deserve respect and who needs to stop having sexual encounters; if a woman has little sexual experience, society calls her a cold, uptight prude that needs to stop being so straitlaced, meaning that she should have some sexual encounters very soon. Since these barriers are intricately woven into virtually all aspects of life and identity, Frye declares that these barriers are unavoidable - if you run from one of them, you will inevitably encounter another one. These barriers are each one wire that forms a cage that successfully keeps women from being free, but you can only see this cage if you look at the big picture. By focusing on only one barrier, people do not see how women are caged in because all the other barriers are ignored, making it seem as if they don't exist; if they stepped back and looked at all the barriers simultaneously, people will then see how women are indeed oppressed on all sides.

In Johnson's article about patriarchy, she defines patriarchy as a system that is more than the sum of its individuals to help us understand ways in which to overthrow it. She first addresses how individuals skirt around confronting "the system" because it is just easier to blame it for everything, but not take it into account when thinking about how to rework it; she also asserts that the age-old idea that systems equals the individuals in it is false because the system is more than just the individuals. To first understand where these social systems come from, she lays out a process where systems and individuals define each other: people develop their own personal identity from how they interact and relate to other people (i.e., society) and thus make their choices based on the path of least resistance (meaning what choice would cause the least backlash), but these choices then reinforce the system of values in place. Since people can affect their choices, they also can affect the system, which Johnson touts as humans' greatest potential to enact change - by choosing paths of more resistance (for example, standing up against someone who made a racist or sexist joke instead of ignoring it) as their choices, the paths of least resistance change (sexist jokes shift from being the norm to being strange and unaccepted) and thus the systems will change.