Take a quick look at these suggestions for what women ought to do to succeed in interviewing/business, www.fortune.com/fortune/annie/0,15704,652442,00.html?cnn=yes
There is one theme that predominates these suggestions...women, to be more successful in business you need to be more masculine, be more like a man...you need to deny yourself. Its always good in meetings to have something in your hand, like a pen! I wanted to die laughing! Men are more responsive to women who carry something fallic on their person. In some ways we ought to just let Freud rest in peace (preferably in his more sexist themes).
Does this bother any of you like it bothers me. Why not demand that the elite males that dominate positions of authority be a little more reasonable, more open-minded...or at the very least, a little less like a troupe of cavemen? If we want "women" in the workforce, which we most certainly do, then why can we not let them be women when they get there. Women in business should not mean pseudo-males.
The women's movement did a lot of good (it hurt itself greatly by not staying in touch with practicality), but it is currently at risk of being bludgeoned to death by popular culture and rolled back institutionally. My humble suggestion, from a rather poor perspective, is that women not lose the forest for the trees...that, while it is absolutely necessary that one succeed on the terms that success may require at a given time, it would be wrong to fall into the trap of thinking that current arrangements are either fair or natural. Women can be themselves and successful, and the burden of adaptation is not on women, but on institutions (and the elites that occupy them) that require women to choose the either/or...EITHER subordination OR transformation.
I sent this along to friends a while back and was struck by two things: 1) that i got only one reaction, and 2) the reaction suggests that it is important that women become role models and leaders, by whatever means necessary. I will disagree with this position for several reasons.
I used to believe that gradual reform would eventually transform society, that eventually unjust domination would rupture under its own weight by having, by the nature of its own founding principles, to have to accomodate itself to death. Eventually the untidy, even ugly, juxtaposition of just reform and illegitimate leadership would cause an internal collapse. My beliefs have changed considerably.
Now I believe that the kind of gradual reformism that is advocated by a "whatever means necessary" approach is much like chasing a bump in the carpet. It will never progress to the point of exposing, and counterposing, in the consciousness of unjustly subordinated individuals a view of thier own servitude and submission. Secondly, the idea that the ad hoc nature of reform and its internally contradictory reality would eventually create its own collapse was born of a naive reductionism that I am embarassed to admit I once espoused. The nature of power ordering in contemporary society is extraordinarily complex, Gramsci's unilinear approach to hegemony was brilliant and helpful, but does not answer Foucault's challenge of the diffuse nature of power. You reassert the legitimacy of a social order everytime you seek to make reform on its terms. What some women gain in material advance all of humanity loses in cultural and spiritual diversity.
I do not have an answer to this problem. Women must work and get the most out of it that they can in order to feed their children and abusive unfaithful husbands. It would be unfair to demand they support "the cause" in the abstract at their own expense, there is no "cause" in general, only particular instances of injustice. The question must be posed, how can a movement accomodate the needs of the people.
Finally, its undemocratic and illiberal to suppose that justice must wait for the hearts and minds of a few elites with a lot at stake to come around. Liberal Democracy ought to be naturally averse to entrenched dominance.
There is one theme that predominates these suggestions...women, to be more successful in business you need to be more masculine, be more like a man...you need to deny yourself. Its always good in meetings to have something in your hand, like a pen! I wanted to die laughing! Men are more responsive to women who carry something fallic on their person. In some ways we ought to just let Freud rest in peace (preferably in his more sexist themes).
Does this bother any of you like it bothers me. Why not demand that the elite males that dominate positions of authority be a little more reasonable, more open-minded...or at the very least, a little less like a troupe of cavemen? If we want "women" in the workforce, which we most certainly do, then why can we not let them be women when they get there. Women in business should not mean pseudo-males.
The women's movement did a lot of good (it hurt itself greatly by not staying in touch with practicality), but it is currently at risk of being bludgeoned to death by popular culture and rolled back institutionally. My humble suggestion, from a rather poor perspective, is that women not lose the forest for the trees...that, while it is absolutely necessary that one succeed on the terms that success may require at a given time, it would be wrong to fall into the trap of thinking that current arrangements are either fair or natural. Women can be themselves and successful, and the burden of adaptation is not on women, but on institutions (and the elites that occupy them) that require women to choose the either/or...EITHER subordination OR transformation.
I sent this along to friends a while back and was struck by two things: 1) that i got only one reaction, and 2) the reaction suggests that it is important that women become role models and leaders, by whatever means necessary. I will disagree with this position for several reasons.
I used to believe that gradual reform would eventually transform society, that eventually unjust domination would rupture under its own weight by having, by the nature of its own founding principles, to have to accomodate itself to death. Eventually the untidy, even ugly, juxtaposition of just reform and illegitimate leadership would cause an internal collapse. My beliefs have changed considerably.
Now I believe that the kind of gradual reformism that is advocated by a "whatever means necessary" approach is much like chasing a bump in the carpet. It will never progress to the point of exposing, and counterposing, in the consciousness of unjustly subordinated individuals a view of thier own servitude and submission. Secondly, the idea that the ad hoc nature of reform and its internally contradictory reality would eventually create its own collapse was born of a naive reductionism that I am embarassed to admit I once espoused. The nature of power ordering in contemporary society is extraordinarily complex, Gramsci's unilinear approach to hegemony was brilliant and helpful, but does not answer Foucault's challenge of the diffuse nature of power. You reassert the legitimacy of a social order everytime you seek to make reform on its terms. What some women gain in material advance all of humanity loses in cultural and spiritual diversity.
I do not have an answer to this problem. Women must work and get the most out of it that they can in order to feed their children and abusive unfaithful husbands. It would be unfair to demand they support "the cause" in the abstract at their own expense, there is no "cause" in general, only particular instances of injustice. The question must be posed, how can a movement accomodate the needs of the people.
Finally, its undemocratic and illiberal to suppose that justice must wait for the hearts and minds of a few elites with a lot at stake to come around. Liberal Democracy ought to be naturally averse to entrenched dominance.
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