Against Patriarchy

As paradoxical as it may seem, women struggle for freedom, independence and recognition is far from being achieved. Absurdly we still live in a world where the so-called best and most civilized nations of the ‘free world’ are places where one sex is still discriminated in favour of the other. This practice is currently enacted by men to favour other men through the systematic discrimination of women. To say the least, women are oppressed, strategically excluded, looked upon, but more generally hated. Fundamentally entitled to nothing. To none of the pleasures, to none of the jobs, none of the satisfactions, none of the cultural achievements, none of the property, none of the eases of life. To nothing. If they happen to enjoy some of these rights they are considered to be occupying men privileges and prerogatives, standing in a situation entitled to be only truly for males. In many ways, women are more disrespected today than they were two to three generations ago when women stood at their place and did not subvert hierarchies. In fact, although we can say that women have gained legally more or less the battle for equal rights, it is not so sure they have made real progress in improving the social and cultural mentality.  On the contrary, sometimes it seems that the ravages of feminism has played an important part in making men dislike women perhaps even more. In both instances, women continue to be simply, basically, hated by men. They are men’s most hated object in the living world. Because they have proved that they too can talk, and perhaps even think. And this is a threat to male power !

Men may deny these assumptions, but they are rather of the order of matters of fact. 

Women oppression starts with fathers. Not with mothers. Let us be clear on this point.  It is not mothers who compete to crush the daughters of the family, it is the fathers.  In this sense, the myth of Kronos eating his children is still a valid interpretation of the reality of family relationships. Men, whether in the family or outside the family, for fear of losing their social status or part of it will do whatever it takes to oppress the women who challenge them and their status quo. They will do anything to destroy their children in such eventuality or keep them confined within the hypocritical indecency of their egoistic patriarchal power abuse and insecurity.

If it occurs that mothers crush their daughters it is because in the majority of cases mothers are actively or tacitly implicated by the fathers, or their husbands, to support the reduction of freedoms of their daughters. Every mother wishes for her daughters a better or different future than the one she has had. But nonetheless mothers are implicated if not constrained, most of the time, by the violence of their husbands and their threatening power to be men’s secondary agents of patriarchal dominance over women. If mothers thus engage in maintaining and imposing upon women the reduction of freedoms and the abusive power structures of patriarchal domination through education and strict rules of behaviour, it is to be ascribed in the majority of cases to male violence and their being oppressed themselves. What fathers may not do, it will be mothers who will do it for them. Ending by becoming men’s best allies in crushing women chances and struggles to achieve independence and a life of their own. 

The contribution of women in men’s domination of women is an idea that has been analysed and discussed abundantly, in particular within the psychological and psychoanalytical fields of study. But perhaps along with the great book of Michel Tort : “La fin du dogme paternal”, a very interesting look at the issue has been written by Camille Lacoste-Dujardin in the book: “Des mères contre les femmes. Maternité et patriarcat au Maghreb” éditions La Découverte. In this book, the oppression of women and the reproduction of patriarchal structures is directly attributed to the women of the families. The women are the ones held responsible for collaborating in educating the daughters to respect and submit to patriarchal structures. Women who disobey will be punished. And since women are considered to exist only in virtue of their quality of mothers, the individual that is decisive to lift them up to the status of mother is the ‘son’. Therefore, the son becomes the central point of the family, and the focus of her own respectability. In western patriarchal societies, sons are also cardinal elements of the family, the reason for this, as well known, being that only males are the legitimate descendants and heirs of the father’s name, property, and heritage. They are the ones who will keep and transmit the lineage.  Instead, in the Islamic societies of the Maghreb, as per the book, we understand something more about patriarchal societies. And it is that women existence, honour, visibility, social recognition or however we want to call it is determined by their sons, by their becoming ‘mothers of sons’.

Now this is a sad situation. Because not only are women oppressed by men, men structures of power, men’s patriarchal systems and male alliances to keep women under their control, but moreover women are asked by men to participate directly or indirectly to women’s oppression and their own oppression. They are forced to reproduce the mechanisms of their own oppression and by doing that are disabled to dismantle the oppression and engage in revolution.

If this phenomenon is a constituent element and strikingly evident element in the reproduction of patriarchal structures of dominance in Islamic societies, that are by definition infinitely more patriarchal than western societies, a similar phenomenon characterizes western societies in very much the same way. To be fair we can be grateful to Camille Lacoste-Dujardin precious analysis of Islamic societies in the Maghreb, but also of the Mediterranean, for uncovering for us how the mechanisms of patriarchal oppression functions in patriarchal societies, and more precisely in the family. The family as first key step for the broader study of society. Through the Islamic lens, it is possible to grasp an insight into the mechanism of reproduction of patriarchal societies. Patriarchal oppression always begins in the family.

It is a pious illusion that women are free in western societies or have equal status. In the reality of things women are not equal to men and do not enjoy the same amount of freedom. For the simple reason that women are deliberately, consciously, actively, discriminated by men, who together ally, network and work together to keep women always second to them. In the family, it begins with fathers who will use all their power to keep the daughters within the rules.

In conclusion, it is important nonetheless not to be mistaken about who ultimately is responsible for women oppression and its mechanisms of reproduction. It is men, and their system. Not women. In the specific, it is fathers’ veiled antagonism, egocentric narcissism, male status in the family, at the root cause of much of women oppression. It is in the father figure that the oppression of women begins.

Women participation in women oppression, although important in the path to revolution, must thus be considered only as a secondary element, a derived element, similar to an induced and learned behaviour brought about by women as way of survival strategy against patriarchal oppression.

Therefore, to spark change women should primarily become conscious of their political participation in women oppression and refuse to abide by those mechanisms any longer. Refuse to be oppressed oppressors.

Unfortunately, it is not easy to find female feminist allies. Women tend with no doubt to be men’s best friends, no matter how insistently they try to affirm their feminism. Caught between the hammer and the needle women need to negotiate between their sexual attraction towards men, their responsibility of being mothers with determined functions that often require them to submit to men’s rules, and their being fully revolutionary women. The fact is most of the time they end up serving predominantly men’s interests destroying unwittingly women’s work for emancipation.

In this sense women have still to undergo a preliminary revolution within themselves before starting any other revolution. When women will truly refuse to play the ‘men’s game’ by helping men reproduce the mechanisms of oppression, exclusion and dominance, and learn how to be friends and unconditionally true allies with women then maybe women will stand a chance to win a better future.

As for now women are disunited in reaching that level of awareness. Family, children, husbands, lovers come first. Women continue to prefer the power of the phallus, and all the privileges, social advantages, security, wealth, etc., that it carries along to true revolution and sisterly love.

But let’s not forget the fault is still on men and their system.