And when (or if) gender oppression is acknowledged, the necessity to combat it and the need to think about how we might fight it don't get much attention, theoretically and practically.
>To
>wit, you get lefties like Wojtek who make disparaging remarks about
>prostitutes to illucidate disdain of mainstream television theorists.
To his credit, Wojtek at least quickly acknowledged your point. However, I would like to take this occasion to note that what is despised often gets cast as 'feminine' and/or sexualized, and this habit comes from and reinforces sexism and social conservativism.
>Why
>should someone thinking big thoughts actually take the real contradictions
>faced by working class women, on an individual basis, into account? (this was
>meant to be read sarcastically) But then, Sydney Biddle Barrows aside, most
>female prostitutes can't make enough money to live and raise their kids any
>other way.
I actually think that those who can't or don't take gender, race, etc. into account are not thinking big enough thoughts to address the totality of social relations.
> Barbara Bergmann (who is a dyed in the wool old red baiter) in
>"In Defense of Affirmative Action" presents some interesting studies which
>point out that the same people who see group oppression frequently use minute
>differences to justify individual discrimination. The same group of people
>who see that large groups are discriminated against on the basis of race,
>gender, religion, sexual preference, etc. will also justify the superior pay
>and work treatment of individuals who are commonly in powerful positions.
>e.g., when comparing the work, skill, and educational backgroups of individual
>men and women in the same job, people who recognized group discrimination,
>agreed with the minute justifications put forth to pay individual men more in
>every situation. So if a woman and a man have the same skill set, experience,
>education, but the woman has a few months less on the job, in each case, this
>was used to justify the much higher pay treatment of male employees. A
>similar experiment was performed with car sales. Cross sectionally, white men
>buyers universally paid less than minorities or women. In short, it's very
>easy to discriminate on an individual basis.
Also, something that may look gender- and race-neutral at first sight (for instance, seniority and experience) has, more often than not, gender and race embedded in it. To take just one example, as long as women are the ones who are asked to carry the burden of care-giving disproportionately, women will find it exceedingly difficult to accumulate the same degree of seniority and experience as men, in that women's labor market participation often gets interrupted by the need to take care of others (children, the sick, the disabled, the elderly, etc.) In my view, labor movements and the left should take on such questions actively.
Yoshie