gender relations
a little of consumer behaviour, a little of language, a little of all the pyscho/philo/socio stuff. ripped off -
"There is an ad for Gap on television right now. It's pretty simple: the concept is of a musical and onstage is a couple. The woman sings, "Anything you can do I can do better; I can do anything better than you" and "Anything you can wear I can wear better" etc. The guy sings the refrain, "No, you can't" throughout and, at the end, the woman pulls the pants off the guy and puts them on.
The idea is pretty simple too. The entire ad is staged around the concept of someone "wearing the pants" in the relationship. The pants in question are called the "Boyfriend trouser" and, ostensibly, by taking his pants, the woman is taking control in the relationship. That is, she is now in a position of power. This is designed, obviously, to appeal to women by empowering them symbolically.
This ad made me think of women in power – the idea of a successful woman – and how they are portrayed in ads, on television, in the media, or anywhere, actually. What strikes me as interesting is that women in power always have their power defined as their overcoming of men. Even in something as innocuous as an Archie comic, whenever masculinity and femininity clash, Betty and Veronica are always the ones with the last laugh while Archie and Reggie are shown in some humiliating position.
As a male, I used to be mildly offended that any ad on television that pitted the wits of a man against a woman always had the woman win in the end, but I realised that that was a myopic view of the situation because there are ads that portray powerful and successful men as well, but the reason I did not think of them is because they do not parallel the ads of successful, powerful women; unlike those ads, powerful men in the media are never portrayed as having overcome women. A credit card ad will have a good-looking middle-aged man lean back contentedly in his leather chair as the camera pans out to an overview of his expansive office, symbolically signifying his success and power. There is not a woman in sight.
My point is that modern societies define women as having power if they can overcome men, thus inherently acknowledging the fact that their power comes to them with respect to men and, more importantly, with respect to overcoming what is perceived as the dominant, or superior, group – men – and, because overcoming an inferior group does not display any overtly special power, men do not have to be defined as having overcome women to be portrayed as successful. Thus, based on the perception of modern society – which includes women, as women themselves buy readily into the idea that they are empowered by overcoming male obstacles – men are superior to, or dominant over, women.
Let us look at some essays exploring the idea of male and female. Deborah Tannen's "Asymmetries: Men and Women talking at Cross-Purposes" poses what is commonly called the Difference model in the study of gender and sex in language. She advocates that females interact in "a world of connections" in which "intimacy is key" and where "individuals negotiate complex networks of friendship [trying to] minimise differences, to reach consensus, and to avoid the appearance of superiority" whereas males operate in "a world of status" where "independence is key because a primary means of establishing status is telling others what to do and taking orders is a marker of low status" (214). Therefore, any asymmetrical relationship between men and women is not the result of an asymmetry in dominance but is the result of an asymmetry in ways of thinking.
The allure of this model is twofold. First of all, it propagates the idea that men and women are equal, merely different. Second, it readily explains any miscommunication between the two sexes. Tannen gives multiple anecdotes about how seemingly confounding responses in mixed-sex interactions are reducible to the basic concepts of independence and intimacy. Thus by dissecting any mixed-sex interaction with those two concepts, we are able to understand what exactly provokes a response in each sex. But is such a model tenable?
Up until now, language has been created and maintained by men. Dictionaries, the final authority on the meaning of words themselves, are perhaps the strongest definers of language. In "From discourse to dictionary: how sexist meanings are authorised", Paula Treichler says, "Dictionaries have generally excluded any sense of women as speakers, as linguistics innovators, or as definers of words... they have perpetuated the stereotypes and prejudices of writers, editors and language commentators, who are almost exclusively male (60)." The evidence of this is undeniable. In Muriel R Schulz's "The Semantic Derogation of Woman", she identifies hundreds of words which refer to women that have undergone pejoration – the act of picking up negative connotations through time – some examples being words like "hussy" which used to mean the head of a house, and "harlot", which originally meant a fellow of either sex; both words have pejorated to mean a sexually loose woman. In contrast, she could find extremely few examples of terms in reference to males that have pejorated as much, thus giving a compelling example that men have power over the shape of language.
This approach to language with the understanding that men created and control it is called the Dominance model, in which the dominant form of language and speech – "male" language – is the centre of that language and that all other permutations of that particular language – called vernaculars, which include "female" language – are deviations from the "norm". "Male" language is the impersonal, scientific and factual language of scholarship whereas "female" language is the language one would use in familiar and intimate settings. This model is the traditional model with which linguists approach this area of study. This curiously reflects the point I made earlier on women having to define their power in relation to men because "female" language, in the Dominance model, is also defined in relation to "male" language.
Watching that Gap ad was revelatory because it made me realise that it could be so that the Dominance and Difference models, rather than opposing forces, could in fact inform each other very well. Women tend to define their status in the world and their power with regards to their relationships with men whereas men eschew comparisons with women to define themselves in any way. Utilising the Dominance model, it seems pretty obvious that this indicates the perceived superiority of men as the group able to autonomously choose precisely what it wants to be without an external force and women as the inferior group that is dependent on defining itself by comparing it to something it is not. However, the Difference model suggests that women's definitions of themselves in relations to men are actually by-products of their desire to engender intimacy – they actively wish to define themselves in a relationship with someone else – and it is not that men do not need women to define themselves, but that they wish to define themselves independently.
The study of gendered linguistics would have us believe that one has to choose between the Dominance and the Difference model. We have to decide if we wish to approach this area with the idea of a dominant language in mind, and treat the other as a by-product of the first, or with the idea that men and women are merely different and all breakdowns in communication can be attributed to what Tannen calls "cross-cultural miscommunication". But as I watched that ad, it made me think about how those models – and models in general – are merely frameworks through which to look at things. They are easily understandable concepts with which we can, with comfortable authority, poke and prod into any subject matter at all. But why do we construct models? Perhaps we fear the great complexity of an irreducible chaos. We build tributaries and mills to guide and harness the raging stream and point to the results of our borrowed power and say, "We understand it now." David Lehman's poem "When a Woman Loves a Man" ends with the lines:
When a woman loves a man, she wants to stay awake.
She's like a child crying
at nightfall because she didn't want the day to end.
When a man loves a woman, he watches her sleep, thinking:
as midnight to the moon is sleep to the beloved.
A woman wants to stay awake because, desiring intimacy, the waking hours are more time to be spent together with the man she loves; but a man, loving her back, wants her to sleep so he can watch her in her sleep. Lehman's usage of the simile "as midnight to the moon is sleep to the beloved" suggests that a man believes his beloved is most beautiful when she sleeps as the moon is most beautiful in the darkest of night, piercing the darkness with its lunar glow. But what is a glow? Especially the moon's glow? It is a reflective light. The moon draws its beauty from the light it reflects from the unseen sun, but is it lesser because of this reflection? The sun does not dominate the moon – they both have their own times to govern the earth, and yet without the sun, the moon cannot be beautiful; it cannot even be seen.
The truth is that models are merely constructed perspectives which we may utilise to view phenomena. They may be elaborate and complex, but they are still just points of view and one point of view necessarily limits you to seeing only one side of something – you can never see the entirety of a sphere without changing your view by walking around it; there will always be half a sphere hidden from your eyes. But a qualitative analysis of these perspectives is needed, too. A fork can be seen as an implement with which to eat, or it could be seen as an instrument for poking out eyeballs. Regardless of what view one takes of a fork, all these perspectives share an overarching trait: that a fork is to be used to spear things. We understand that a fork is a relatively simple concept when we see that all potential views of it share very similar characteristics. However, the perspectives on men and women are complicated, the Dominance and Difference models seem to oppose each other and yet both have widespread arguments for and against them. That there can exist valid and yet contradictory perspectives on the same concept suggests to us that the concept in question is multi-faceted enough to encompass many perspectives. So we may never understand the other sex, and we may read gender and linguistics essays till we're blue in the face, but men will probably continue to misunderstand women, and women will probably continue to misunderstand men too because, beyond the crutches of models and perspectives, gender relations might just be complex enough to eternally confound."
p.s. the full poem by david lehman.
p.p.s. i need to read beyond notes, textbooks and blogs. sure, they do offer information and provide insights. but the scope is too damn bloody narrow.
jacq | 6:17:00 PM
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