Men rule. · 2 October 2008
Could there be any more tension today? In every overheard conversation on campus, a dozen facebook updates, to say nothing of the places online where I round up my news. We’re doing this mass anticipatory schadenfreude, eager for Sarah Palin bite it tonight. Even the Christians are ready for her to get fed to the lions like a good old-time martyr (not kidding—they love it too).
Tease it out: where is about anger that such an incompetent could be put up as a leader? And where is it about latent patriarchy in us? I’m not kidding.
I’ve been thinking about what I’d say to Biden. Basically: DON’T DO ANYTHING, JOE. There’s no soundbite, no smackdown no coup de grace you can issue that’s better than the self-undoings she can issue herself. You’re a cipher for patriarchy, man; just stand there and emit no personality. I don’t care that this is the high point of the noble work you’ve done all your life to get here. Just become nobody, bubble under all the “You, Sarah, are no Hillary Clinton” lines. If you must, emit subtle condescention. Don’t do anything so overtly fatherly that someone can point to it later—just stand there above her inadequacy and don’t do her the compliment of really speaking back to it.
Sometimes I scare myself. I didn't know my own inner sexist shadow was that long. But yes: the winning strategy is pure patriarchy. And we (or, rather, I) want to see this. We want to see how unassailable patriarchy really is. What's not to like about this vision of Sarah standing up against patriarchy and revealing she’s just a little girl from beauty contests?
Fine. Ok. I want her to expose McCain as a corrupt, condescending player—as a man who has no standards for or expectations of women. But it is pretty messed up that to the degree that Biden comes down off the patriarchial pedestal, her loss will diminish. If he actually speaks as a person, rather than standing there and representing male domination, she gets points. If he addresses her as an equal (taking a subject-to-subject stance), she sort of wins because she's garnered some legitimacy. Gut-wrenching illustration of just how much a background of daddy-power is in our politics.
A post-patriarchical strategy is this: nobody gets to rely only on implicit cultural biases about what men and women are supposed to be--the supposed strengths and weakness that patriarchy says follow from genitalia. Biden has to beat her one-to-one. They have to engage each other as subjects, not objects bearing cute little sets of limitations and entitlements.
That's actually a much harder debate for the Dems.
Speaking of standards for women and the limitations of patriarchy, what if there were two tendencies—two patterns in the way we do everything—that make it impossible for the culture of yoga to enable genuinely nondual practice?
What if one of those tendencies were patriarchy? How does patriarchy manifest in individual practice and in styles of practice? How does it keep people away from their own immediate experience? How does it get reproduced? How do women in particular fight against its finally ending? Why are the most patriarchy-addicted women I know yoga practitioners? How are we still addicted to it? How does patriarchy prevent real intimacy between men and women partners? What will it look like when it is gone?
Today for the second time a teacher I respect immensely—the second time a man, because for now it still has to be—told me that the next generation of spiritual—especially yoga—practice has to be led by women or we are fucked. Krishnamurthi said this too. Apparently they also see that subconscious patriarchy is totally in the way of yoga or intimacy with your own experience or intimacy with others.
P.S. I've heard that what I tossed up here this morning was confusing, so I added a few paragraphs. Maybe this makes more sense. I wasn't ranting so much as raising delicate questions in an exasperated way. There's a difference, see? Maybe...
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Does the fact that we’re all rooting for her to fail make ups a bunch of meanies?????
Posted by: LI Ashtangini · Oct 2, 10:03 AM · #
I don’t know…
I want her to fail spectacularly!
But this is why I said tease it out, between when it’s anger at her ignorance and when it’s the patriarchy in me that wants this.
When I realized just now that what I want Biden to do is stand there stone cold and reduce her to a little girl, I got really unnerved. That’s relying on patriarchy to crush her. Is it just me that would enjoy this on some level???
Rationally, when I work through my shadows on this, I’d so much rather she fail on her own merits. “Man-to-man.” Liberated failure.
But then again, going back… I realize Biden’s stronger if he does patriarchy-to-woman instead of man-to-man. She loses way more spectacularly that way. And Biden himself doesn't have to do anything. He just represents the impossibility of her taking control. Any person with a penis could stand in for the job, and in a way this is reassuring because I don't want to have to depend on Biden as a subject or autonomous human right now. It's easier to depend on him as a man.
Ugh… See the difference?
Posted by: (0v0) · Oct 2, 10:09 AM · #
This looks like troublesome territory but I’ll chime in anyway. If I find I’ve gotten myself in too deep then I’ll radio for helicopter extraction.
How is any of the Obama-Biden campaign demonstrative of patriarchy? The two are working to a non-patriarchal rulebook, which is to say they’re presenting a dynamic look at the way things work, rather than the old, “tried and true” formulaic methods. They’re saying ‘let’s go to a place we haven’t been in the last 40 years’ and that excludes the typical bashing inspired by the Republicans and the twits of news media (this is the one thing Rush and I agree upon — most news people are twits when they speak of politics).
Obama and Biden obviously understand that they are speaking to a different group of people than McCain and Palin address. These guys are smart enough to lead the nation into a warmer, more peaceful era and they connect with the people they need to connect to. They understand this; progressive-minded voters understand this; it’s all good. The debates are not about convincing people to change sides — they’re about convincing more people to vote for the sides they sympathize with. The support networks for Obama and Biden are doing a killer job. I find myself wanting to get out and convince more people on “our side” to vote though. I dislike waiting and wondering.
Posted by: Carl · Oct 2, 11:28 AM · #
How is any of the Obama-Biden campaign demonstrative of patriarchy?
Did you even read what I wrote, Carl?
Srsly.
I’m not talking about patriarchy as a noun. Entire campaigns don’t embody it usually. Patriarchy is a way of thinking, of feeling, of aspiring, of organizing one’s actions and of organizing groups. It comes and goes. And it shows up starkly when I think about Biden-Palin—shows up in the feelings, thoughts and ways of organizing social interaction that immediately come to mind.
The thoughts, feelings, aspirations and ideas of social organization that come up when our whole society deals with Biden-Palin is a great way to observe the subtler ways in which we are still in thrall of man-rule.
I can’t believe you sometimes my friend. Sheesh.
Discrimination isn’t a campaign. It’s a habit of being.
Posted by: (0v0) · Oct 2, 11:36 AM · #
Hmmm… You paste Joe Biden into the paternal role and you wonder why I don’t get it. I just don’t see it that way. I’d rather not have Presidents and Vice Presidents but since we must have them I’d rather have the sensible pair, and not the pair that try to sell us their charisma as their qualifications.
Have you noticed that the right-hand side of the country have tended to elect leaders who are mostly just charismatic and not much else? Sarah Palin is compared to Ronald Reagan and though I know that doesn’t really mean anything, it scares the shit out of me. Presently, I think it’s more about charisma than about patriarchy but I’ll think about it.
Posted by: Carl · Oct 2, 01:53 PM · #
Yes Joe should have grace like Atticus Finch. He may sometimes smack himself and say in a soft bewildered way, ‘did you just say that’? But he shouldn’t roll his eyes EVER. And he should only pick his moments of direct sarcasm, maybe only once, just make it worthwhile so we can get for her a smack for her audacity. She doesn’t need flayed, that’s just all our projection.
She doesn’t know how unconscious she is. She doesn’t know how to step-up, or step-down, she’s living in a dream.
The patriarchy is all around, we have a lot of work to do. I wonder if these are all hinged on our idea of incentive? Which is all Ego in this case?
I think all politicians need analysis, like a driver needs a driving licence…
Posted by: Gregor · Oct 2, 02:13 PM · #
Carl, I guess I need to find more ways of bringing out how patriarchy is all around us. It can be invisible, yes. And it is wiley. Hard to put a finger on. Let’s both think about it…
To begin, a provisional definition:
Patriarchy is the organization of social and interior life according to the notion that men should dominate women.
Initially, this was primarily an economic relationship rooted in the dowry system and (especially) the denial of education to women. As women became somewhat educated and formal patriarchy became grossly inefficient, patriarchy’s cultural residue still manifested as social organizations to preserve the fiction that women were subordinate. Thus the quaint, regressive practices of women pretending not to be better than their partners at any enterprise, and men pretending to be economic providers. As women become more educated, patriarchy diminishes—but it remains strong in cultural backwaters where sexism is relatively less inefficient. (Some spiritual subcultures, including parts of yoga, are backwaters in this sense.) The present semi-patriarchial organization overwhelmingly favors women, who exploit the last vestiges of the system to get men to give them things and to avoid taking responsibility for their own full self-expression. That said, it’s hard for those same women to find a partner strong enough to accept a fully realized woman. Patriarchy will last until men are strong enough as individuals to let it go and until women are ready to stop exploiting men. Until then, both men and women will be emotionally stunted and our shadows will manifest as beliefs that men are supposed to dominate women (both physically, and by metaphorical extention, economically) and that women should not be stronger than men (physically or economically).
Posted by: (0v0) · Oct 2, 02:37 PM · #
All politicians needs analysis. :) This is what Karen and I say about all yoga teachers as well…
Kathy G, who writes The G Spot, said this about Sarah Palin yesterday: “...I found myself fascinated by Palin… by her strange, reactionary notions; her weird family life; and the dramatic contrast between the hugeness of her ambition and the stark limits of her skill set. Above all, I’m astonished by the enormous contradictions between her retrograde views about gender and her own overwhelming will to power.”
An analyst would definitely take it there, but I suppose it’s left to bloggers to analyse her from afar. Fair game.
Posted by: (0v0) · Oct 2, 02:38 PM · #
Oh, do you have a list of these realised women? I have run out! I have to say that I will beat them at arm-wrestling though, but I am sure I won’t have to do that.
Fair game indeed, we cannot let her become our vice-projection or vice-president! Maybe Joe should arm-wrestle her? :)
Posted by: Gregor · Oct 2, 03:03 PM · #
:)
All I know is I’m glad the Editor is not a patriarch because otherwise I’d have spent the last 11 years worrying about not being too good at anything I do (wouldn’t want to intimidate my man) and being really pretty (hello, boring). And he’d have spent the last 11 years making sure to earn a bunch of money instead of realizing himself as a human. We’d have been so busy fulfilling social roles that we’d have done nothing creative.
Here’s the subversive point in all this:
How intimate can two people be in a power-asymmetric relationship that’s all about building up the man’s ego and putting the woman in situations where she pretends to be vulnerable? I would not know, but I’ve been listening to some teachers who say this is the main reason patriarchy prevents intimacy.
I guess their much more important point is that patriarchy prevents non-dual practice (prevents yoga) because if you have to put a lot of energy in to reproducing the power relationship (elevating the father-guru) you’re not deeply in your own experience.
What’s the most patriarchical yoga culture? (Maybe the one where female children are overlooked and males crowned as “the future guru”? Maybe the one in which men are the most respected teachers and women their helpers? Maybe the one whose advanced series turn women in to men if they’re not careful?)
Can ashtanga be non-patriarchial?
I hope the bigwigs don’t see that I’ve written all this subversive stuff. :) :) No, actually. I don't.
xoxoxoxoxoxo
Posted by: (0v0) · Oct 2, 03:37 PM · #
Ouch! Our respective ‘patriarchy’ definitions are slightly mismatched. I see why these kinds of contests rankle you. Your def matches the dictionaries but I look at it a little more broadly. I define it as society structured to be governed by authoritive figures who fulfill elite criteria. Patriarchy is more than just division of sexes. It’s about presumption of superiority of a selected minority over a majority. The sex of the figurehead isn’t really that relevant and the opposite of patriarchy isn’t a female-governed society.
Women fulfill authoritarian roles exactly the ways that men do. Electing women to executive offices doesn’t alleviate the patriarchy, it merely vests the elite authority roles in women. I see no net gain in switching to female executives, leaders, family heads, whatever.
This reminds me of that Michael Douglas movie wherein he’s a rogue arms dealer and he shows his weapon-filled lair to his proscpective son-in-law. When future son-in-law balks, the Michael Douglas character says: “You only want to see the guns.”
You only want to see male domination. But females also are overbearing in execution of their ideals. ‘Masculine’ is not synonymous with ‘male’ and ‘feminine’ is not synonymous with ‘female.’
The opposite of patriarchy isn’t a female-governed society — the opposite of patriarchy is individual self-governance.
This passage…
The present semi-patriarchal organization overwhelmingly favors women, who exploit the last vestiges of the system to get men to give them things and to avoid taking responsibility for their own full self-expression.
... I don’t understand. But it would seem you think it’s possible to analyze a society with men and women as separable variables. I think that doesn’t work. Is there no Newton’s Third Law equivalent for Sociologists?
Posted by: Carl · Oct 2, 03:51 PM · #
... a power-asymmetric relationship that’s all about building up the man’s ego and putting the woman in situations where she pretends to be vulnerable…
Ah ha! Our society is not constructed around a ‘power-asymmetric’ relationship. The present state of the society is such that men and women balance each other and it is stable. You just aren’t considering assertions of feminine forces by females!
Posted by: Carl · Oct 2, 03:56 PM · #
Carl, patriarchy is masculine domination.
You can pretend that it’s just an organizing principle and that men and women play natural social roles that “balance each other.”
That’s your unconscious patriarchy talking. Srsly. I worry that sometimes you get so caught up in funcionalist systems thinking--which is inherently conservative--that you lose yourself completely in abstraction. I'm talking about relationships. Not some fictional, megasized "social organism."
Meantime women criticize their female friends if they make more money than their partners, think it's a man's job to earn way more than them, and think their main relationship responsibility is to be pretty. This is not harmonious "balance." It's vapid and unsophisticated. So for the moment, I don’t care about instituting egalitarianism so much as being honest about masculine domination (and the ways women reproduce it). It's in our politics, relationships, aspirations and inner lives. But many people in the world of yoga don't understand this. Until we do, we'll continue to have low, old-school standards for intimacy and relationship.
Also, the Editor kicks my ass in wrestling and I like that. We took a logic class together 10 years ago and I kicked his ass. It was pretty sexy that he liked that.
Posted by: (0v0) · Oct 2, 04:31 PM · #
The men and women of societies do balance each other. Were societies not balanced and stable, they would not be societies. This stability is evidenced by how difficult it is to affect change in the way our society works. Stability comes by way of a natural balance of influences, and not by artifice.
You assume by the predominance of men in authority roles that men assert some kind of unilateral control. And you harp on me for simplistic conclusions! Women fulfill the roles they choose. Men fulfill the roles they choose. Everybody plays the part (s)he selects.
I don’t say that men are naturally superior for authority roles. I don’t know why men have predominately occupied authoritive offices and women have been a small minority in these roles. But I can say with absolute certainty that the society occupies a state of great stability. It is stable for a reason. To affect change in the undesirable condition, it’s necessary to view the variables with proper respect to the reference axes. Stating that men dominate our society just because they want to doesn’t get anybody anywhere.
What’s needed is a new frame of reference, which cannot come about by way of these discussions of “patriarchy” and how women are dominated, repressed, etc. This stuff all comes out of the same old-school thinking that you consider male-centric. It takes us nowhere.
Posted by: Carl · Oct 2, 05:02 PM · #
Carl, sorry lad, but what you just said was pretty simplistic. Maybe a new frame of reference would help. Howabout anthropology and the male ape? Its in our genes to dominate, our growth to consciousness is the only thing we have to get us away from doing so. Desmond Morris has some great books like The Human Zoo. As far as people choosing roles, um, people don’t choose, they are given by umpteen factors before adolescence – they spend their adult life figuring out who they really are – if they are lucky. IMH (non-dominating) 0
Posted by: Gregor · Oct 2, 06:10 PM · #
Wow (0V0) and Gregor, good luck arguing with the functionalist,
he’s so happy fullfilling his role in this stable society, he cannot realise he’s mistaken.
Posted by: Fatou · Oct 2, 10:07 PM · #
Oh Carl, REALLY??????
Palin was so well scripted and coached that she actually did better than I thought she would last night. How sad that that is the only standard we are holding her to now…...as in ‘wow, she didn’t fall on her face so she did well’.
Posted by: LI Ashtangini · Oct 3, 04:59 AM · #
Yes, I thought the exact same Sonya. Wow. Biden’s passion, especially just the “just because I’m a man doesn’t mean I don’t understand” moment, kind of moved me. I’m not going to spend time with the spin on this one because it’ll be a lot of what old GWB called “the tyranny of low expectations.” Part of me is happy she didn’t make a fool out of herself, but LBH. It was a humiliating loss for the GOP campaign. Thankfully insta-polling might keep the pundits sort of reigned in to that reality.
Posted by: (0v0) · Oct 3, 05:23 AM · #
About apes… :)
Reproducing domination works for apes and racist and nationalist “systems.” Yes, it is epochally stable. For that matter, rule by America as financial metropole (and by the dollar) was stable from 1971 or sooner until two Mondays ago (and before that for Britain, and before that for Venice etc etc etc). But locked-in domination is ultimately unstable.
And I want to bring it back to what I’m really suggesting here. Something that I don’t think I can see fully but that wiser people do and I’m beginning to trace.
Nondual practice and intimacy are totally undermined by patriarchy. Patriarchical yoga is a joke, whether or not we can see it.
Imagine white people teaching spiritual practice to black people in a slave state, and white people and black people doing intimate relationship in that context. That’s extreme and inaccurate in important ways, but I don’t know how else to bring this up out of the subconsciousness where it’s living for all of us. And what’s nice about this example is that we know that racial domination is economically efficient in some scenarios, but that efficiency only hold as long as ultimately inefficient economies prevail. And that it’s also an unnecessary accident of history.
Posted by: (0v0) · Oct 3, 05:25 AM · #
The only wisdom(?) I have been able to grasp along the way is this:
1. If we do not have a solution – hold the tension of the opposites
2. Follow your feelings – but not your reactions
3. When you think you cannot take anymore, breathe
4. The darkest moment comes before the dawn
These are the non-dominating ways to our potential. They have worked for me, though I do not know how. Surrender? Realising we are not in control? No-one really knows. But it changes us, and how we interact, and therefor spread the potential…
We cannot think our way out of our box. Our relationship to our unconscious is the only way. This doesn’t mean we stop thinking of course, just that we attempt to suspend our fixed attachment to the conclusions our thoughts pimp us with.
Posted by: Gregor · Oct 3, 08:46 AM · #
It’s creepy when SP winks at me during debates.
:)
Posted by: cody · Oct 3, 09:50 AM · #
Not that anyone asked for more complication, but patriarchy is not distributed evenly either by biological gender (that is, by genitalia) or by relationship. For example, my classroom relationships when I’m teaching are, I think, more patriarchal than my intimate relationship, simply because the agreed-upon power dynamic so permits it and in the intimate setting, there is more interaction with the power dynamic (and no pre-fab “contract” that I can see, unlike in an academic classroom) provided that the people involved have the self-knowledge and/or reflection to have such interaction.
Similarly, yoga rooms will have more or less patriarchal dynamics, and all of that is influenced by the teacher as well as each individual student, and perhaps, for all I know, also by the decor or the music and so on and so forth.
For further really complicated business, consider the whole idea of “feminist porn.” I could go on but I’ll quit rambling here.
Posted by: patrick · Oct 3, 10:17 AM · #
Oh please Gregor, you just took that “breathe” thing from ASHTANGA YOGA. Still, I like the follow your feelings but not your reactions thing. Good way to make intuition experiential.
CP: SHE WAS WINKING AT YOU?? WHAT WAS THAT ABOUT???
Carl and Patrick are right, I think, that women can fill patriarchal dominance-nodes as much as men. Again, sexism is a property of consciousness and organization.
I’m arguing the problem with it is not that it creates un-PC inequalities that don’t mesh with my enlightenment ideals (this I guess the main political problem with patriarchy, but it’s not why I’m writing here). I’m suggesting patriarchy, like any systematic domination that’s mostly relegated to the unconscious, really fucks up “yoga.” Insofar as yoga is a practice, not a lineage-based historical tradition.
Can there be systematic practice and transmitted lineage (two super useful things) without patriarchy?
How can you learn to get really intimate with your own experience when you’re taught in a patriarchal manner?
Why effing bother with patriarchy anymore for godsakes?
Ok, calling it a night here. Yes, I am at my CPU at 10 on a Friday. Whatev.
Posted by: (0v0) · Oct 3, 08:21 PM · #
Gregor, call me simplistic if you like but overcomplicated descriptions of the ways things function don’t bring any benefit — they merely obfuscate matters. I see lots of people wave their hands in the air and tick off lots of points to consider but in the end, they usually fail to attain a workable perspective. If you can’t pull your ideas together such that you can use them to describe a subject coherently and cohesively then your efforts are all for nought.
The present political situation isn’t as complicated as the jabberings that are coming from all directions. It’s not about racism and it’s not about patriarchy. These things are descriptions for outward facets of the social system and don’t actually go anywhere near the roots. Racism and patriarchy and whatever other notions you wish to toss about are all symptomatic and are not ‘causative,’ as the social sciences people like to say.
Societal function is as simple as a bipolar division between a regressive side and a progressive side — if you try to spruce it up with overly sophisticated thinking then you merely make it all opaque to yourself. It’s symmetric for the individual and all the way up through social bodies as large as you’d like to consider.
Posted by: Carl · Oct 3, 09:34 PM · #
I am with you there Carl.
And you know Einstein brought home that point too by saying we needed to simplify the complex but not make it simple. I try and do that too, and so ‘in real life’ it becomes contextual with who is talking to who.
I believe though in my progressive way, that consciousness and the ability to objectify what was subjective is a complex undertaking, and it is individual. But I don’t know how to simplify that: I will probably spend the rest of my life trying to do just that.
Posted by: Gregor · Oct 4, 04:19 AM · #
That’s amazing, Carl!
If I weren’t about to begin a day of doing social science—which is the study of patterns of human action in history, and where causative is not a word (I had to look in the dictionry to see if indeed it was)—I’d respond. That response would mention the subtle outrageous delights of human existence, which is not simply a machine one understands with phony-objective detachment, but a realm in which subjectivities and outside-views, plus interprtation and analysis, interact to create pictures of ourselves more warm and complex than Rube Goldberg machines.
We act based on our self-understandings and social conceptions. Some people settle for patriarchy, some go one step further to the still mystified, functionalist Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus model, some have more curiosity and openness to critical thought. Fine with me. :)
For those who believe patriarchy is a social pattern, why would masculine domination be a problem in your yoga? I’m thinking both principles (goal oriented-ness, emphasis on exhale) and politics (who gets power, who has to pretend to be needy).
Posted by: (0v0) · Oct 4, 06:30 AM · #
We act based on our self-understandings and social conceptions.
Some act based on self-understandings and social conceptions and some do otherwise. Not everybody does as you do.
Posted by: Carl · Oct 4, 08:01 AM · #
Probably not the best time for a snarky yoga smackdown. I’ll let that go. :)
But going back up the thread…. What’s the word for the view that subjective, interpretive, meaning-focused understanding of society is BS because society is objectively a well-oiled machine?
Also, the idea that patriarchy is “all in your head” is patriarchal. :)
Posted by: (0v0) · Oct 4, 10:39 AM · #