Envisioning and Creating the Future

Insights from Sandra Lipsitz Bem, The Lenses of Gender: Transforming the Debate on Sexual Inequality (Yale University Press, 1993) 176-96.

I. Eradicating Androcentrism: “[T]he cultural debate about sexual inequality must be reframed so that it addresses not male-female difference but how androcentric social institutions transform male- female difference into female disadvantage” (Bem 176-77); we must move away from debating whether men and women are fundamentally the same or fundamentally different, take for granted “at least a subset of sexual differences,” and concentrate on how to eradicate androcentrism.

• Commonality among Women: Given all the differences of race, class, ethnicity, etc. among women, is there enough underlying similarity to constitute women as a viable political group who can be served by a feminist program of social change?
  • The cultural lenses of androcentrism, gender polarization, and biological essentialism together create a category “woman” that is automatically associated with inequality, disadvantage, etc. across classes and cultures, even though the degree will vary depending on the situation of various groups of women.
• Causes of Inequality: Do the economic and political disadvantages facing women stem from sex discrimination or from personal choices made by women?
  • Not really an either/or: discrimination operates through highly androcentric social institutions, forcing women make life choices in the context of a system that makes it extremely difficult to coordinate paid work with responsible parenting.
  • Such structural discrimination is revealed when we compare the type of life choices faced by men and women; discrimination lies in the very fact that women have to make choices not faced by most men.
• Strategies for Ending Inequality: Is the best strategy gender neutrality (never make any distinctions on the basis of sex) or special protection for women (make provisions for women’s childbearing and child rearing roles)?
  • Historical problems with both strategies: The principle of gender neutrality enshrined in legal codes has helped only those women who are similarly situated to men, while special protection policies reinforce sexist stereotypes and support the idea that women are not capable of competing with men.
  • Not really an either/or: Androcentric culture has always given men special benefits (“affirmative compensation”) for their typical life patterns and special needs; the only way to even approach gender neutrality is to give women the same kind of special benefits (see Bem 183-89).
  • Must extend the same kind of group rights and benefits to women that are now extended to men (though currently disguised as “normal procedures,” “business as usual,” or “human rights”).
  • Gender neutrality—a focus exclusively on individual rights and talents—can only be truly equitable when the playing field is perfectly level in terms of group rights and benefits, which is not currently the case (currently, only rich people, white people, and heterosexual people have system-wide group rights).
• Nature of Desired Equality: Should women and men play exactly the same roles at work and home or should women continue to play different roles but get the same respect, status, rewards, etc. as men?
  • Refocus the issue: Since androcentric institutions turn male-female role differences into female disadvantage, eradicate androcentrism so that different roles will be equally esteemed and rewarded in society; then and only then can both sexes really make life choices that are truly free.

II. Eradicating Gender Polarization: Controversial, radical, and difficult to achieve program that would reduce the male-female distinction to a narrow biologically-based difference in reproductive function: “people of different sexes would no longer be culturally identified with different clothes, different social roles, different personalities, or different sexual and affectional partners any more than people with different-colored eyes or different-sized feet are now” (Bem 192).

• Gender polarization keeps both men and women from fully developing their human and individual potential
  • Gender Polarization tends to downplay individual diversity and push men and women alike into their respective gender boxes.
  • Gender Polarization falsely genders personal qualities, traits, behaviors, and ways of relating into “masculine” and “feminine,” ignoring the fact that these are all potentially human characteristics that do not belong exclusively to either sex
  • Gender Polarization creates a false emphasis on becoming a “real” man or woman as opposed to a biological male or female
• Gender polarization reinforces androcentrism and strengthens the social reproduction of male power.
  • Gender Polarization sets up different roles for men and women and therefore obscures the need for institutional structures that would coordinate work and family in such a way that males and females could easily participate in both.
  • Gender Polarization sets up psychological constructs of masculinity and femininity, predisposing “men to construct identities around dominance and women to construct identities around deference” (Bem 195) and pathologizes those who deviate from these gender scripts.
  • Gender Polarization rationalizes the sexual status quo and encourages the culture to explain away sexual inequality as sexual difference.
• Depolarizing gender necessitates situations that give women more experience of power and status and that give men more experience of nurturance and responsible service to others.
• Eradicating androcentrism requires a social revolution; eradicating gender polarization also requires a psychological revolution.