kill.
Source:
Rothenberg, P. S. (Ed.). (2010). Race, Class, and Gender in the United States (8th ed., pp. 123130). New York, NY: Worth.
OPPRESSION
Marilyn Frye
It is a fundamental claim of feminism that women are oppressed. The word "oppression" is a
strong word. It repels ant attracts. It is dangerous and dangerously fashionable and endangered. It
is much misused, and sometimes not innocently.
The statement that women are oppressed is frequently met with the claim that men are oppressed
too. We hear that oppressing is oppressive to those who oppress as well as those they oppress.
Some men cite as evidence of their oppression their much-advertised inability to cry. It is tough,
we are told, to be masculine. When the stresses and frustrations of being a man are cited as
evidence that oppressors are oppressed by their oppressing, the word "oppression" is being
stretched to meaninglessness; it is treated as though its scope includes any and all human
experience of limitation or suffering, no matter the cause, degree or consequence. Once such
usage has been put over on us, then if ever we deny that any person or group is oppressed, we
seem to imply that we think they never suffer and have no feelings. We are accused of
insensitivity; even of bigotry. For women, such accusation is particularly intimidating, since
sensitivity is on eof the few virtues that has been assigned to us. If we are found insensitive, we
may fear we have no redeeming traits at all and perhaps are not real women. Thus are we
silenced before we begin: the name of our situation drained of meaning and our guilt
mechanisms tripped.
But this is nonsense. Human beings can be miserable without being oppressed, and it is perfectly
consistent to deny that a person or group is oppressed without denying that they have feelings or
that they suffer….
The root of the word "oppression" is the element "press." The press of the crowd; pressed into
military service; to press a pair of pants; printing press; press the button. Presses are used to
mold things or flatten them or reduce them in bulk, sometimes to reduce them by squeezing out
the gases or liquids in them. Something pressed is something caught between or among forces
and barriers which are so related to each other that jointly they restrain, restrict or prevent the
thing’s motion or mobility. Mold. Immobilize. Reduce.
The mundane experience of the oppressed provides another clue. One of the most characteristic
and ubiquitous features of the world as experienced by oppressed people is the double bind –
situations in which options are reduced to a very few and all of them expose one to penalty,
censure or deprivation. For example, it is often a requirement upon oppressed people that we
smile and be cheerful. If we comply, we signal our docility and our acquiescence in our situation.
We need not, then, be taken note of. We acquiesce in being made invisible, in our occupying no
space. We participate in our own erasure. On the other hand, anything but the sunniest
countenance exposes us to being perceived as mean, bitter, angry or dangerous. This means, at
the least, that we may be found "difficult" or unpleasant to work with, which is enough to cost
one one’s livelihood; at worst, being seen as mean, bitter, angry or dangerous has been known to
result in rape, arrest, beating, and murder. One can only choose to risk one’s preferred form and
rate of annihilation.
Another example: It is common in the United States that women, especially younger women, are
in a bind where neither sexual activity nor sexual inactivity is all right. If she is heterosexually
active, a woman is open to censure and punishment for being loose, unprincipled or a whore. The
"punishment" comes in the form of criticism, snide and embarrassing remarks, being treated as
an easy lay by men, scorn from her more restrained female friends. She may have to lie to hide
her behavior from her parents. She must juggle the risks of unwanted pregnancy and dangerous
contraceptives. On the other hand, if she refrains from heterosexual activity, she is fairly
constantly harassed by men who try to persuade her into it and pressure her into it and pressure
her to "relax" and "let her hair down"; she is threatened with labels like "frigid," "uptight," "manhater," "bitch," and "cock tease." The same parents who would be disapproving of her sexual
activity may be worried by her inactivity because it suggests she is not or will not be popular, or
is not sexually normal. She may be charged with lesbianism. If a woman is raped, then if she has
been heterosexually active she is subject to the presumption that she liked it (since her activity is
presumed to show that she likes sex), and if she has not been heterosexually active, she is subject
to the presumption that she liked it (since she is supposedly "repressed and frustrated"). Both
heterosexual activity and heterosexual no activity are likely to be taken as proof that you wanted
to be raped, and hence, of course, weren’t really raped at all. You can’t win. You are caught in a
bind, caught between systematically related pressures.
Women are caught like this, too, by networks of forces and barriers that expose one to penalty,
loss or contempt whether one works outside the home or not, is on welfare or not, bears children
or not, raises children or not, marries or not, stays married or not, is heterosexual, lesbian, both
or neither. Economic necessity; confinement to racial and/or sexual job ghettos; sexual
harassment; sex discrimination; pressures of competing expectations and judgements
about women, wives and mothers (in the society at large, in racial and ethnic subcultures and in
one’s own mind); dependence (full or partial) on husbands, parents or the state; commitment to
political ideas; loyalties to racial or ethnic or other "minority" groups; the demands of the selfrespect and responsibilities to others. Each of these factors exists in complex tension with every
other, penalizing or prohibiting all of the apparently available options. And nipping at one’s
heels, always, is the endless pack of little things. If one dresses one way, one is subject to the
assumption that one is advertising one’s sexual availability; if one dresses another way, one
appears to "not care about oneself" or to be "unfeminine." If one uses "strong language," one
invites categorization as a "lady" – one too delicately constituted to cope with robust speech or
the realities to which it presumably refers.
The experience of oppressed people is that the living of one’s life is confined and shaped by
forces and barriers which are not accidental or occasional and hence avoidable, but are
systematically related to each other in such a way as to catch one between and among them and
restrict or penalize motion in any direction. It is the experience of being caged in: all avenues, in
every direction, are blocked or booby trapped.
Cages. Consider a birdcage. If you look very closely at just one wire in the cage, you cannot see
the other wires. If your conception of what is before you is determined by this myopic focus, you
could look at that one wire, up and down the length of it, and be unable to see why a bird would
not just fly around the wire any time it wanted to go somewhere. Furthermore, even if, one day at
a time, you myopically inspected each wire, you still could not see why a bird would gave
trouble going past the wires to get anywhere. There is no physical property of any one
wire, nothing that the closest scrutiny could discover, that will reveal how a bird could be
inhibited or harmed by it except in the most accidental way. It is only when you step back, stop
looking at the wires one by one, microscopically, and take a macroscopic view of the whole
cage, that you can see why the bird does not go anywhere; and then you will see it in a moment.
It will require no great subtlety of mental powers. It is perfectly obvious that the bird is
surrounded by a network of systematically related barriers, no one of which would be the least
hindrance to its flight, but which, by their relations to each other, are as confining as the solid
walls of a dungeon.
It is now possible to grasp one of the reasons why oppression can be hard to see and recognize:
one can study the elements of an oppressive structure with great care and some good will without
seeing the structure as a whole, and hence without seeing or being able to understand that one is
looking at a cage and that there are people there who are caged, whose motion and mobility are
restricted, whose lives are shaped and reduced.
The arresting of vision at a microscopic level yields such common confusion as that about the
male door-opening ritual. This ritual, which is remarkably widespread across classes and races,
puzzles many people, some of whom do and some of whom do not find it offensive. Look at the
scene of the two people approaching a door. The male steps slightly ahead and opens the door.
The male holds the door open while the female glides through. Then the male goes through. The
door closes after them. "Now how," one innocently asks, "can those crazy women’s libbers say
that is oppressive? The guy removed a barrier to the lady’s smooth and unruffled progress." But
each repetition of this ritual has a place in a pattern, in fact in several patterns. One has to shift
the level of one’s perception in order to see the whole picture.
The door-opening pretends to be a helpful service, but the helpfulness is false. This can be seen
by noting that it will be done whether or not it makes any practical sense. Infirm men and men
burdened with packages will open doors for able-bodied women who are free of physical
burdens. Men will impose themselves awkwardly and jostle everyone in order to get to the door
first. The act is not determined by convenience or grace. Furthermore, these very numerous acts
of unneeded or even noisome "help" occur in counter-point to a pattern of men not being helpful
in many practical ways in which women might welcome help. What women experience is a
world in which gallant princes charming commonly make a fuss about being helpful and
providing small services when help and services are of little or no use, but in which there are
rarely ingenious and adroit princes at hand when substantial assistance is really wanted either in
mundane affairs or in situations of threat, assault or terror. There is no help with the (his)
laundry; no help typing a report at 4:00 a.m.; no help in mediating disputes among relatives or
children. There is nothing but advice that women should stay indoors after dark, be chaperoned
by a man, or when it comes down to it, "lie back and enjoy it."
The gallant gestures have no practical meaning. Their meaning is symbolic. The door-opening
and similar services provided are services which really are needed by people who are for one
reason or another incapacitated – unwell, burdened with parcels, etc. So the message is that
women are incapable. The detachment of the acts from the concrete realities of what women
need and do not need is a vehicle for the message that women’s actual needs and interests are
unimportant or irrelevant. Finally, these gestures imitate the behavior of servants toward masters
and thus mock women, who are in most respects the servants and caretakers of men. The
message of the false helpfulness of male gallantry is female dependence, the invisibility or
insignificance of women, and contempt for women.
One cannot see the meanings of these rituals if one’s focus is riveted upon the individual event in
all its particularity, including the particularity of the individual man’s present conscious
intentions and motives and the individual woman’s conscious perception of the event in the
moment. It seems sometimes that people take a deliberately myopic view and fill their eyes with
things seen microscopically in order not to see macroscopically. At any rate, whether it is
deliberate or not, people can and do fail to see the oppression of women because they fail to see
macroscopically and hence fail to see the various elements of the situation as systematically
related in larger schemes.
As the cageness of the birdcage is a macroscopic phenomenon, the oppressiveness of the
situations in which women live our various and different lives is a macroscopic phenomenon.
Neither can be seen from a microscopic perspective. But when you look macroscopically you
can see it – a network of forces and barriers which are systematically related and which conspire
to the immobilization, reduction and molding of women and the lives we live….
From: Marilyn Frye, The Politics of Reality (Trumansburg, N.Y.,: The Crossing Press,
1983).
ESSAY ASSIGNMENT
Read Frye’s essay, “Oppression”, and Tatum’s essay, “Defining Racism, ‘Can We
Talk?’” posted on D2L.
Write an essay (3 full pages) in which you discuss the connections you can make
between Marilyn Frye’s birdcage metaphor and Beverly Daniels Tatum’s analysis of
“internalized oppression.” In the paper, you will be answering the following questions:
What do these two ideas have in common?
•
How does the birdcage illustrate Tatum’s idea that members of oppressed
groups often “[believe] the distorted messages about one’s own group”?
•
What specific examples can you come up with that describe the bars of the
cage?
•
What are the implications for one who is caged and has internalized distorted
messages about their own group?
•
How might one’s life be affected by this phenomenon?
Thesis statement
Your thesis statement will be your answer to the question: How does the birdcage
illustrate Tatum’s idea that members of oppressed groups often “[believe] the distorted
messages about one’s own group”?
Audience
Write with clarity to an audience that has no knowledge of the essays and may not be
familiar with the concepts of oppression that are expressed.
In essence, you will be discussing how the ideas in these two texts speak to each other,
that is how they can be synthesized. The majority of the essay will be putting the two
ideas together and adding your own commentary about the ideas.
SYNTHESIS ESSAY REQUIREMENTS
1. Your essay should follow APA formatting.
2. The essay should be at least three full pages in length (no more than 4)
3. The essay should include the works cited (APA format) on a separate
“references” page (see example in handbooks or on-line).
4. The essay should have a clear thesis statement, as well as introductory
and concluding paragraphs.
5. In the essay make sure to introduce both writers and articles with which
you will build your synthesis.
6. While you will be discussing your own ideas, maintain 3rd person, objective
voice; avoid using “I”.
7. If you receive a score under 85%, you may rewrite your essay according
to the instructor’s suggestions in order to improve your grade. The final
score will be the average of the original and the rewrite scores.
While you are reading…
Marilyn Frye’s “Oppression”
Find answers to these study questions:
1. What qualifies as oppression, and what does not according to Frye?
2. Can you explain a double bind? Have you experienced this phenomenon?
3. What does the metaphor of a “cage” stand for?
4. Define myopic focus and macroscopic focus. How do myopic focus and
macroscopic focus relate to a birdcage?
5. What does Frye believe about gallant gestures? What other term does she use
for gallant gestures?
6. Both Tatum and Frye refer to things that cannot be seen, are invisible. What are
they? Do we deliberately not see (acknowledge) them? If not, what
psychological or cultural mechanism renders them invisible?
“People call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate
me from a doormat or a prostitute.”
Rebecca West
While you are reading…
Beverly Daniel Tatum’s Defining Racism, “Can We Talk?”
Find answers to these study questions:
1. How does Tatum define racism?
2. Can you list a few metaphors Tatum uses to describe stereotyping/prejudice in
our society?
3. Can you describe the story offered at the beginning of the article?
4. Who can be racist, according to Tatum’s definition?
5. Tatum offers a metaphoric image (see #2) to explain the spectrum of racism in
this country. Can you mention that image and name different parts of the
spectrum?
6. What is internalized oppression?
7. Look back at the spectrum of racism in Tatum’s article. Can this spectrum be
applied to sexism? Can it be applied to any –ism?
8. Can you point out the specific study cited by Tatum that could be supported by
McIntosh’s list of invisible benefits that privileged groups possess?
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