It is no secret that some segments of society have more power than others. Whites, males and the wealthy have more power than do minorities and women.
There are many aspects of power, and a full discussion is obviously beyond the scope of this blog. But one important aspect of power is the ability to create the assumptive framework that undergirds a culture. This is the ability to establish values and priorities, i.e., to say what is of greater or lesser importance and to assign high prestige to some roles and to devalue others.
We often tend to treat this assumptive framework as a given, often forgetting that it is biased in favor of the powerful and against those with less power.
Here's an example. In most cultures, men hold more power over women, and so define the culture's values. Values and norms are androcentric. Margaret Mead did a cross-cultural study of what activities were generally done by males and what activities were generally done by females. She found wide variation among cultures in terms of what men tended to do and what women tended to do. But one thing was consistent: What men did was more highly valued than what women did.
Take this to our own culture, and you can see why force is more highly regarded than nurturance, why football is more prestigious than cooking, and, more generally, why masculinity is seen as better than femininity. In college, in fact, I read a book by a major Spanish philospher in which he shamelessly said that women were not fully human.
These days, people may not say overtly that women are inferior. Or at least not publicly. But this tendency to devalue women has other means of expression. Women may be seen as "other". Or women may be seen as deviant. These views, of course, presuppose that the definitive human being is male.
Moreover, gender differences, legitimate or not, are interpreted so that men appear superior.
For example, if a woman is less practical than a man, she is seen as frivolous and irresponsibile. If a woman is more practical than a man, then she fails to understand male idealism
No, that issue of not understanding male idealism is not a parody. I actually read it somewhere, and it was written in all seriousness!
On the surface, these attitudes appear to be changing. But scratch the surface, and those old assumptions become visible, even in the supposedly enlightened West. It is certainly true in more traditional and conservative cultures.
I saw the film "Bhutto" last weekend. It's a documentary about the late Benazir Bhutto, the former Prime Minister of Pakistan. The film was very rich on many levels, but one scene really stood out in the context of this topic. The army asked her husband to be Prime Minister instead of her, because they did not want to salute a woman.
Many of the films of the Festival are about women achieving goals in such hostile, devaluing cultural contexts. This is what makes the Women's Film Festival so special.
So what is the take-away point of all this? It is that cultural values about gender are not value-free. They are not definitive. They came from somewhere. And that somewhere is male power -which accrues from male forcefulness and violence - and the resulting male entitlement to define women in ways that serve their own interests.
This means that these assumptions are not to be taken as axiomatic or definitive! They are to be confronted, with their assumptions and implications questioned.
