When I was a little girl, my mother would cart me and my sister along with her to her various activities around town. We would go to the bank, we would go to the doctor, we would go to the grocery store. We would go on marches and to protests. We would go to Feast. We would also go to black churches and community centers for the anti-racism work my mother dedicated herself to. Once, and I will never forget it, a man said during one of those meetings that he had been told not to befriend my mother. She was a white lady. She must be up to something. He shared honestly what he had been told, and what he also struggled with believing himself: "If you are black, you can never be friends with a white person. Not really. You will think your white friend respects you and you will begin to trust, but a day will come when they will call you nigger. It is unavoidable." It was a complicated moment for me as a kid to witness, it was ironically not black and white at all, but entirely gray: he didn't trust my mother, but he wanted to. And amazingly, he told her so.
In these workshops, I began to hear my mother and her friends deconstruct racism using Nat Rutstein’s definition of prejudice as, "an emotional commitment to ignorance." After all these years, I have to agree that that remains the most compelling definition I have heard. It means that functionally, prejudice is the place in the road where thinking stops, where examination ceases. It is an absence of thinking made possible by devotion to some previous assumption. In the face of evidence that contradicts, prejudice is a refusal to connect the dots. A refusal to think for emotional reasons. As such, it aborts inquiry and distorts the construction of knowledge by substituting a superficial or bankrupt misapprehension for reality.
It is no good.
I recently raised the question here on Letters of the Living: "What is Patriarchy?" This is a very complicated question to answer. Answering is complicated because we have to start the conversation from a point of commonality. From a shared point of reference. Depending on who’s doing the talking and who’s doing the listening, that can be next to impossible. In a closed group of women, little spoken definition for patriarchy is necessary. Shared experience creates a shorthand. In the "finger pointing at the moon" Buddhist parable on semiotics, the point is made that the symbols we create, be they linguistic, religious, or just a simple finger pointed in the air, all direct our attention to larger truths. But they are not themselves those truths we seek. We create language to share our subjective experiences. Among women, that "pointing at the moon" of patriarchy usually takes the form of a knowing glance, a raised eyebrow, and a sigh. A slumping of the shoulders and a "here we go again." When the moon is full and glaring brightly into your face, very little pointing is necessary- it’s a shared lived experience. Communicating about a shared experience, is quite different from explaining that experience to someone who hasn’t been through it. If someone has never seen the moon, how would you begin to describe it to them? If they lived in a smog-cloaked urban environment, would you first have to describe the smog clouding their vision? The layers of obfuscation between them and that moon? Between men and women, this pointing of fingers up into a smog filled sky is belabored by more than just a lack of shared experience. The problem begins with the authority and autonomy involved in the act of naming, itself.
Since pointing at this particular moon is such a complicated business, why don't I just give you the dictionary definition of "patriarchy," then? Why don’t I just cough up the Cliff’s Notes version and cut right through that smog? Because of the Bible, sirs. Because of the Bible. Genesis 2:19, to be exact, where our problem with naming begins:
Out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field and every bird of
the sky, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called a living creature, that was its name.
Adam, the world's first nomothete, author of the Old Eden Ontological & Phenomenological Dictionary, and according to Bahá’u’lláh (and Muhammad) the first Prophet of God. (I'd just like to point out as a side note, that as a way to roll out the "Greater" and "Lesser" Covenants, being a Manifestation of God with one follower- the only other person on Earth- who happens to be your wife- makes you look like a punk. I'm just saying.)
At this moment in history, I would tend to define patriarchy as "the forest for the trees." It is currently the endemic template of nearly every facet of our social organization. Patriarchy has been compared to the water surrounding goldfish in the tank or like the air that surrounds us. It is something we take so for granted, it is often invisible to us until it becomes so polluted we begin to fall ill. Because it is the immediate environment each of us finds ourselves in as social creatures, we take it as "just so," as "the way things are." It is unquestioned. When we notice it at all, we mistake for "normal" or "natural" a system that we as human beings create with our daily actions and inactions, because we do not clearly see it’s authorship, origins or construction. This normalizing of patriarchy creates a type of double-jeopardy for those it disenfranchises. In addition to suffering the frank and sometimes brutal one-down position imposed on them by patriarchal hierarchy, they must also suffer the cultural invisibility of their wounds and of their struggle. The narrative normalizing their oppression. As Bell Hooks writes,
"Most children do not learn what to call this system of institutionalized gender
roles, so rarely do we name it in everyday speech. This silence promotes denial.
And how can we organize to challenge and change a system that cannot be named?"
What is actually hierarchical and oppressive is labeled "normative" and "normal." That misnomer distorts the perception and classification of reality for everyone, disrupting the production of knowledge in a way that systematically privileges male power. Men can be complacent or blind towards this privileged hand they are dealt, seeing themselves and the game as normal and therefore harmless. This plays out in day to day public and private life constantly. Men attribute the great hand they are dealt to "luck" or "fate." Not to society and history stacking the deck. They feel that this arrangement must be good and right- and why not? It certainly is "normal." This is where the seeds of entitlement begin, but not yet where they come into full bloom. Many men probably assume that everyone has a fair shot at being dealt that winning hand. They are unaware of the lived experiences of even the women closest to them. (More on that later.) But, the reality is, the moment a man plays the privileged hand he’s been dealt through cultural inheritance, he is exploiting women. This is the most common form of sexism- not recognizing and calling the "misdeal."
I think it is possible that for a very, very small group of unobservant men sexism stops here. They simply haven’t done the math or played cards long enough to realize that if they are constantly dealt all the high cards, someone else is constantly dealt all the shit. These men are probably young and naive, without sisters or female friends, and most likely emotionally vulnerable to the ego stroking/manipulation coming at them from the "dealer." It feels good to be a winner. Picture Adam in the garden of Eden, feeling winked at by God, chest swelling with pride, running around naming everything: "Apple!" "Garden!" "Ribcage! No, I mean…wife!" The one thing he failed to name was privilege.* For this man, a spade is not a spade- it is luck, fate, or a sense of unquestioned entitlement. We hope that this man will get over his happy blindness with a little life experience and some critical thinking skills. And maybe an eye exam.
Now, why is it that these probably well-meaning, if not socially blind men are unaware of the lived experiences of the women closest to them? Why don’t their sisters, mothers, girlfriends, wives, and daughters just call a misdeal and show these men the hands they have been dealt? There are probably as many answers to that question as there are women in the world, but they are likely to break down into a few distinct categories:
1) Shame.
2) Fear.
3) Pragmatism.
4) Self-Preservation.
5) Exhaustion.
6) They haven’t figured it out yet, themselves. They feel they must just be really, really unlucky.
Number One: Shame. If we believe we live in a meritocracy, any instance of struggle, violation, and lack of "success" is a sign of moral failure and weakness. Even our vegetable commercials want us to "dominate." Even our laundry detergent must be "Extreme." I once heard a friend exclaim that he had "raped" an exam he had just aced. Raped. Who would admit to being the rape-ee when all the power and glory is in rap-ing? Who would admit to being the "killed" when our societal obligation is to "make a killing?" Our society is a hierarchy- if you are not "one up," you are down.
Two: Fear. Fear of reprisal, of retaliation, of disrupted relationships. And importantly, fear of being disbelieved. Reasons three, four, five, and six are all tied up in this one mother of all reasons.
Women are not believed when they speak. Women are not given the power or authority of naming in our society. Not even to name our own experiences. Beyond the issue of taboo- of the visceral aspects of female lived experience being seen as frankly disgusting, private and not fit for the dinner table, women’s voices are for the most part not informing the discourse on what it is like to be a woman. Adam has already named everything for us. Although one might seek out the rarefied air of women’s studies classrooms and departmental offices for a bit of truth-telling, the culture at large still behaves like the brute in some fairy tale, cutting the tongues and the eyes out of maidens young and old who dare to speak. The lack of female access to cultural authorship is not simply the problem faced by "Shakespeare’s sister." It is not just that we are too busy working second shifts at home care taking our families and fighting for our lives to bother with symbol making. It is that when we do speak we are not believed.
Don’t believe me? Exactly.
Ok, I couldn’t resist, I’ll try again: Don’t believe me? Remember that it wasn’t too long ago that women were not allowed to testify in court in the West. There are still many places in the world where that is true- where it takes a body count of four women’s testimony to equal that of one man’s. And how could a woman give testimony, really, when the root of the word testimony is "testes?" (Don’t believe me? Again, I prove my point. Look it up.)
Testimony is what issues from your testes. A testament is as well. There is no possible way women can be taken seriously as witnesses, namers, truth-tellers, and authors of culture when our etymology casts "truth" as "ejaculate."
So, unfortunately, there is not yet a dictionary that I can cite to define patriarchy for my readers that isn't little more than a penis pointing at the moon. I remember a Bahá’í document that was published around the time I got my first foot out of the door of this religion: Who Is Writing the Future? An equally important question is Who Is Writing the Present, not to mention the Past. Literally- whose perspective gets codified and written down and bound into dictionaries, into history books, into divorce agreements and annulments? Into police reports? Into scripture? I'll give you a hint: (to borrow a pet name coined by 'Abdu'l-Bahá:) it is "Mr. Adam's."
We like to talk about what the Bahá'i Faith and other religions and groups believe about women, but it is more important to me that you believe women. Because, on top of most of us not seeing the forest of the social system we inhabit for all of the tiny little trees of our day-to-day existence and conditioning, we have the additional problem that when one of those trees falls on a woman there is often no one willing to hear it. This disbelief of women is culturally and historically constructed. It has a purpose, it has methodology, and it has ritual enactments. It is, above all else, a mechanism to maintain male privilege and power. It does so by inculcating emotional commitment to ignorance. By building prejudice against women brick-by-brick.
Next Time : Into the Woods.
"The woods are just trees, the trees are just wood."
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