I was particularly taken with the
phrase Culture of Belligerence – that was coined by a American blogger that I
linked in my last post. I think Robert Platt Bell fingers some significant
cultural shift that has been occurring for some time. He mentions that people
don’t seem to recognise that there has been a fundamental attitudinal change
from one generation to the next. The culture has been breaking in new ways of
being bad. He likens us to that frog in slowly boiling water, who won’t jump
out because he doesn’t realise he’s being cooked.
Well I’m a she-frog and perceive with
maddening regularity, just how much has changed over the last 30 years. I wish
I could jump out of the pot, but it’s my culture too and I’d rather rail and
rant. I’ll croak till I croak.
The changes are enormous. The rat race has ramped up under an unregulated free
market ethos; the ‘politics of attack’
dish up insider dirt to discredit any opposition; the media feeds us a voyeuristic
diet of sensation instead of balanced and holistic news; violence, murder and
misogyny have become normalised on the huge array of screens that interface this
brave new world; bullying in schools is commonplace; a culture of
binge-drinking amongst young women and men accompanied by a rape culture is horribly
real.
I suggest many of these cultural changes
are due to the Empire of global corporate capitalism striking back against the
enormous inroads made by the Movements of Feminism, Environmentalism and Indigenous
peoples’ during the 1960’s, ‘70s and ‘80s. Peoples’ Power really did shift the collective global
consciousness and the power elites did not like it.
I was in the vanguard of the second wave of Feminism that hit the western world during those earlier times. We were armed with an idealism that believed we could make a difference. However, entrenched and institutionalised sexism is hard to budge and has bitten back like a Hydra - with two heads erupting from any one head that’s been chopped off.
The cultural backlash we have been experiencing since Women’s Liberation started smashing the Hydra’s heads of patriarchy has spread its poisonous vapours far and wide, terrorising our societal landscapes. Despair, inertia and disempowerment overcome both young and old.
In the ‘70s we did a good job of hacking
off the head of the age-old idea that men by biological right should dominate
women. Nowadays, the dehumanisation of women by objectifying and sexualising
the female form in popular culture seems to have increased, not decreased.
Gender roles which value submission in
women, and power in men seem to be constantly in one’s face – billboards, TV,
movies, video games etc etc. We watch television shows that have the hero
chain-sawing up the innocent young woman, and we’re encouraged to root for the
guy behind the saw.
The 1950’s was tough for women, but back
then such casual violence and vicious misogyny, was not accessible in any
mainstream visual form. Now we wean children on this kind of image. Not to
mention the daily, weekly, monthly doses we are force-fed of domestic violence.
We set up Women’s Refuges and Rape Crisis shelters in the 1970’s – today the
need just grows and grows as their public funding dwindles. The assault we
commit against our children in the form of child poverty and all its many
guises is shameful.
The
following statistics come courtesy of The Auckland Women’s Centre:-
1
in 5 NZ women are
sexually assaulted by a man in their lifetime. Young Maori women are almost twice as likely to experience sexual
violence.
1
in 3 women will
experience psychological or physical abuse from their partners during their
lifetime.
1
in 4 girls (compared
to 1 in 10 boys) experience sexual abuse during their childhood.
Our courts have moved away from the
analysis underpinning the Domestic Violence Act 1995, which recognised the
dynamics of male power and control
in domestically violent situations.
For every 1000 incidents of sexual
violence only 100 are reported and only 8
perpetrators are convicted.
In the 1970’s we demanded Equal Pay
for equal work.
In 2014, NZ women are paid on the
average 13% less than men.
On average women in NZ spend twice as long per day on unpaid work
than men.
Of the top 100 companies in NZ only 11% have female directors.
44%
of women earn less than a Living Wage
of $18.40.
Where is anything like Pay Equity – or
even talk of it any political party - which we also demanded so long ago?!
Sex-role
stereotyping was on
our agenda then.
Today, pink for girls and blue for
boys not to mention that dead duck of Women
are from Venus and Men from Mars underlines many a ‘serious’ parental discussion
in playgroups and schools. Seriously?!
Both upbringing (culture) and innate
biological difference matter in social behaviours, but when we really examine
gender-role differences, research has continually shown that nurture wins hands
down over nature. For example it has been revealed that gendered attitudes to
competition emerge at a young age. But research also shows that the stereotype
of girls being averse to competition can be broken by something as simple as
single-sex schooling. Examining extremely different societies, the research is
pretty compelling. Amongst the patriarchal Maasai who ‘treat their women like
donkeys’ men were more likely to be competitive. But in the matrilineal Khasi
society women were more competitive than both Khasi AND Maasai men.
If you put girls in pink and treat ’em
different, they will grow up different than the blue boys. It all depends on
what the larger society values, how women – and men - will turn out.
The culture of belligerence, has
warped our collective reason. We have created an ultra-machismo, dumbed-down
kind of world, where male heroes are measured by the size of their muscles, and
not their brains, by the size of their guns and how many people they can kill,
or stuff they can blow-up.
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| Worship Worthy?! |
Being tough, mean, intimidating is the
new cool. We are raising our children, boys and girls, in the art of bullying
and intimidation. We are carefully nurturing them to be competitive and misogynist.
Yikes, it would be funny if it weren’t tragic.
Competition is continually glorified.
Through a steady stream of propaganda
from all media outlets, the male sports section of our communities is given
pride of place. Testosterone-ridden games we are told, define our sense of
nationhood.
Corporate workplaces reward aggressive
behaviours rather than positive teaching behaviours. Workplace culture fosters “hardening
up” and preaches that you are weak, if you don’t want to work ridiculously long
hours.
If we go on telling ourselves the
collective myth that to survive we need to be profit-driven, aggressive,
hostile, only out for ourselves – we get what we’ve got. If we were more
co-operative, tolerant of cultural difference and welcomed women’s voices and
experience to be part of the public commons, then we would all change.
Herakles
and the Hydra
So I call this fiercely competitive
macho culture we live in, the Hydra - the patriarchy that feminists described
and fought so many years ago. If we don’t sever, sear and stopper its multiplying
monstrous heads we will all die from its poisonous venom. In the original Greek
story the nine-headed Hydra was a female serpent who lived in a swamp and was a
guardian of the Underworld. It seems to me we are already living in a hell of
sorts, if we allow video games that award points to children for shooting
prostitutes in real 3-D. Where punters, like mesmerised mice before the glare
of the snake about to eat them, consume stuff like the TV series Breaking Bad.
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| Haindl Tarot |
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| The Wizards Tarot |
I am switching sexes in my metaphor. Women
have to become the wily Herakles in their battle against the machismo Hydra.
One of the beast’s heads was immortal, so can we ever win? Herakles did - with
the help of his young nephew. Generations can unite and only with whanau can we
ever achieve a peaceful, just and cooperative society.
Let’s rally and surf the
wave of History into Herstory.
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