Friday, February 22, 2008
Blame It On Feminism
I thought Faludi's "Blame It On Feminism" presented a number of very interesting arguments. However, like many other people who have already posted blogs, I had trouble taking her argument too seriously due to the way she threw in stats and quotes with no citation or any evidence to prove her validity. To go back to my rhetoric 101 class, it is important to establish credibility while making an argument, and that is not necessarily done in this article in a few places. (I know this isn't a speech, but some of the same ideas apply) This is almost too bad because I think this essay is very well written and formulated, and a few of her ideas caught my attention. One of these things was her idea on backlash, and how it is quietly, almostly secretly, working out of men's fear of women becoming equal. Though I will agree that equality between men and women is still a problem, especially in the work force, I don't know how seriously I can take her argument that there is an actual concentrated effort on the part of men to keep women down.
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I think she argues that the concentrated effort is in response to the possibility of women moving outside men's (society's) box of cultural "norms," and that the response is due to the inability of men to want to hand off to women the power that they (we) have enjoyed for the past few centuries+. Men wouldn't know they were living in a sexist culture unless they were victimized by the sexist culture--being the benifitors of this culture, and it having existed for so long--for the feminists to point this out, and to maintain that the culture is, from this, extremely flawed, is to challenge the men's perception of reality and destabilize what men have assumed to have been building their lives--and from history, we know that those in power do not like change. What I'm trying to say, and what i think FALUDI was arguing was that the drastic response from men was a sort of natural (psychological) reaction to the man's value or position of himself in the society and inevitably, the male insecurity. Realizing that perhaps his position in society is defined, or greatly secured, by the women's submission in society, the man strikes back at unsubmissive women. Therefor we get the anti-abortion rhetoric, the anti-feminist propaganda, negative images of working single women on TV (which is still prevalent), etc. And we get these attacks from these racist-sexist institutions such as fundamentalist politicians, Hollywood execs, CEO's, etc. I don't think men can afford to see women on top and out of the "home."
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