Critical Essay of Gender Differences and Studies of Rape in Tribal Societies
Baumgardner and Richards “A Day Without Feminism” asked the question of what our society would be like today if the women’s movement had not fought for the freedoms women enjoy today. The description was bleak, with women treated as objects and inferior women in need of man’s protection. I agreed with the point of the article which was that the women’s movement was both important, and still needs to continue it’s fight, because though many of the parallels drawn from the 1970’s may no longer be socially acceptable, it does not mean they are no longer present in our society. Though it is clear that women were subject to a male dominated society which restricted the freedom of women in their pursuit of happiness, it cannot be denied that this restrictiveness was also present elsewhere in American society, which may be a reflection of a conservative societal attitude at the time. Gender was just one aspect of life that was restricted by a social climate based on concrete boundaries. Besides the fear of losing power, the inflexibility of society in the 1970’s was a result of the Patriarchy’s fear of the unknown, which has been the case during many of America’s struggles. Why should women need to vote? The country works fine the way it is, or so white males in power say. And what they say is what the country says. Women in the workplace completely shifts the way society works, because who will take care of the children? No one knows if this will make society worse or better, so people don’t want to find out in case it’s for the worst. What makes the women’s movement an especially hard fight, is that they’re fighting a society that thinks the inequalities are actually protection for women against a harsh real world. They think that women are incapable of handling the responsibility of life without the aid of man. That women need men as a crutch, a life support system for making their way from birth to death. It is hard to change this way of thought, because humans usually don’t like being told to stop when they’re trying to help.
One point that I did not wholly agree with put forth by Baumgardner and Richards was the argument that there is a lack of representation of the feminism movement in American history. I do not refute that this is true, the women’s suffrage movement was undermined by the abolition movement for quite some time, and it is true that some of its pioneer’s accomplishments have been outshone by their advocacy for racial equality. But this is not something that only plagues the women’s movement. American history is extremely selective in what it celebrates and what it leaves vastly under detailed. The genocide of the people in the Philippines is an extremely delicate topic, one that most historians would deny ever happened. The numbers are irrefutable, but they can be hidden from the casual historian. Women are often portrayed as have been “given” the right to vote, and their tenacity can be downplayed by a government willing to bend to the voice of the people. However, they are hardly being solely targeted. America exploits many groups, such as blacks, Asians, Hispanics, and also third-world countries.
Baumgardner and Richards also tried to make the inference that in the 1970’s, “âÂ?¦women are fired if they exceed the age or weight deemed sexy” (Baumgardner and Richards p. 7). I’m don’t deny in the time leading up to the women’s movement that this was very true, but I have to wonder if this doesn’t apply to men both then and now in a way as well. Both my mother and father are in their early 50’s, as are much of my relatives. They tell me all the time about how the job market is poor for a person of their age. It does not make much sense in the business world to hire someone in their 50’s when they could hire someone half that age with equal qualifications. Both women and men get old, so they both suffer from becoming less and less appealing in the job market. If more men are in the workforce, then the competition among them is fiercer, so an older man would have to face more equally skilled men of younger age than a woman would. This would have been the case in the 1970’s as well, if not to a worse extent, since fewer women were in the workplace at that time.
Deciding to take a much broader look at the way genders interact, Peggy Reeves Sanday studies a sample of 156 tribal societies spanning from North America to Sub-Saharan Africa. She elaborated on the theory that sexual assault is not a universal characteristic of tribal societies, and that rape varies cross-culturally. Her studies found that societies fit one of two subgroups. Those that are “rape prone”, where incidences of rape are high; and “rape free”, where rape is infrequent or does not occur at all. In “rape prone” societies, there was little or no respect for women, and there was a lot of group and interpersonal violence. They were aggressive societies which often spent much of it’s time in war, or raiding nearby villages. “Rape free” societies, which made up 47% of the sample in Sanday’s study, rape were curbed by the fear of punishment. Punishment was severe because in these tribes, women were treated with a lot more respect than in “rape prone” societies. Their importance for the continuation of the tribe was acknowledged, and often the division of labor was less divided.
She concluded her study by examining how the four existing theories on the socio-cultural correlates of rape. The study did not support the idea that sexual repression of a male will inevitably lead to sexual violence towards women. It assumes men do not have control, and are sexual animals. Parent-child relations were not strongly supported, but it was found that poor dad’s was related somewhat, mothers on the other hand were not.
Rape as an expression of male dominance is an idea expanded upon by Susan Brownmiller. She thought that rape was a tool used by men to intimidate women, and keep them oppressed. Sanday’s study showed that this sexual display of male dominance was evident in tribal societies, though it probably doesn’t correlate to modern societies. It makes sense that a war faring tribe would use violence as a way to force sex.
“In societies where males are trained to be dominant and interpersonal relations are marked by outbreaks of violence, one can predict that females may become the victims in the playing out of the male ideology of power and control” (Sanday p. 66).
The idea that rapists in a large modern society such as America do so as a means to keep women in line is probably giving too much credit to the rapist. The reasons for a man to commit rape are much more personal, to satisfy sexual and violent tendencies. A rapist in America is very private, because the punishment is very severe. In tribal societies where rape displayed male dominance, it was often culturally allowable or overlooked on the most part.
The previous three theories were not the focus of Sanday’s study. She contended that it was socio-cultural factors that led to the number of incidences of rape in tribal societies, “Rape is not an integral part of human nature, but the means by which men programmed for violence express their sexual selves” (Sanday pg. 71).
A question that was in my mind while reading this article was how the women felt in a lot of the “rape prone” tribes? In the Gusii tribe, rape was a ceremonial act, and often the resistance put up by women is so they don’t seem easy. Is it really rape then? It is violent yes, but is there true resistance? All over the world, there are people who are sexually aroused by pain. It should be of no surprise that a tribal violent society will translate their aggression sexually, and since pain is delivered from the stronger to the weak, the man will take the role of distributor of pain. In a much more civilized society, people indulge in their pain through BDSM, which often has the women in absolute power, a role reversal. When looking at something like arranged marriages, the opinion of the bride is ignored. One would think that women often are unhappy and resist this system, but it is not that way. Many women accept this as the established system, and it has been seen that divorce rates in arranged marriage societies can be lower than in free choice societies. I think of that and compare it to the Gusii, and I wonder what the women would say about the experience. Would they see it as rape? Or would they see it as the established tradition. Even in America, some women accept the role of housewife and don’t see society as unequal, but appropriately skewed for the differences and responsibilities of men and women. What might be seen as rape to us might not be rape at all; women may be unwilling, but are fulfilling their tribal traditions, and therefore accept their role in the ceremony.
When using Sanday’s theory that rape is perpetuated through socio-culture, and not psychologically or inherently, we see that a lot of inequalities in our society are perpetuated the same way. Racism is so deeply rooted in our culture, that equality has been a slow and limited success. Even when the government does give blacks rights, it takes generations for its citizens to recognize them. The same goes for women’s suffrage. As I said before, it is hard to fight for rights that people are denying you because they believe you can’t handle the responsibility. The patriarchy sees it more as protection than oppression. The people with the privileges often do not see the problem that is obvious to the minority without them. The best friend and ally to the women’s movement has been the creeping liberalism that has spread over American culture. Slowly, we are becoming less and less stubborn about what is accepted and what is not. Women, gays, blacks, and Hispanics all want rights, to oppress them all takes more energy than most are willing to exert. There are people with power at the top of the patriarchy who are willing to try and keep it this way, but others are more interested in remaining rich and at the top, which means they have to keep society happy. And if giving these minorities rights quiets them and keeps them consuming, then it is better than them disturbing the order of things with mass protests, which only stir up the passive majority. America’s diversity is its worst enemy, since most rich white males with government kickbacks would like to keep the elite as small as possible. This does not mean giving women rights, and taking away the glass ceiling. In order to maintain a Catholic America, women have to remain in the workplace and not shift the nuclear family.
At the end of Baumgardner and Richards’s article, there is a quote which sums up the situation as I see it, “âÂ?¦the world we inhabit barely resembles the world we were born into. And there’s still a lot left to do” (Baumgardner p. 7). Since the 1970’s, American society has changed in many more ways than solely women’s suffrage. Gays are still not a social norm, but they are not feared as they were when AIDS was a new epidemic, and it was not known how it was spread. Blacks are still plagued by poverty and lack of education, but the climate is better than it has been, and slow change is better than no change. With all the changes happening, one can never be satisfied. Just because one battle was won, it does not mean the war is over. The Bill of Rights meant nothing for more than half a century, because no one tried to enforce it. Women need to constantly fight against the inequalities that face them, because the right morals need to be instilled in generations, so that it is learned by future generations through the past. Racism is hard to ignore, because our history is riddled with it for almost its entire length. The same goes for women’s suffrage. Until all the myths are dispelled, they will always be present.
