Playing the Patriarchal Blame Game

Obie-award winning playwright Eve Ensler was on The Jane Pauley Show recently, discussing her new play The Good Body.

But what I heard thru most of the discussion about the play was Ensler once again beating that old tom-tom song "It's all the Patriarchy's Fault."

While, to some degree, Ensler has a point (and did point out the irony evident in the vaginal reconstructive surgeries taking place in Beverly Hills), to another degree she, and most feminist thinking, is a bit off about laying the problems of women solely at the feet of the so-called patriarchy.

An account of Ensler's upbringing should call into question her judgment and generalizations about patriarchy: she admits having grown up in an upper middle class home with an abusive father and lots of secrets. Even with all that dysfuction, Ensler had access to many advantages: the social skills, verbal acumen, and education opportunities that are part and parcel of the upper middle class. But she never mentions them. These advantages, and her adept use of them, facilitated opening the door for her to project her father issues across various social classes and ethinc cultures in an attempt to convince all of us of the evils of global patriarchy.

Perhaps the problems were never really global patriarchy but a local patriarch.

Ensler, though, says the evidence that her claims about the patriarchy are true lies in the stories of women she interviews. Speaking with many women across social and cultural boundaries, Ensler's selective hearing gives her that evidence she claims is inherent in the interviews.

And anyone who studies statistics knows how easy it is to skew evidence to one's advantage.

Ensler also kept talking about the wonders of the matriarchy. Yet she visited India, a culture with a highly developed sense of the matriarchal in its belief systems, and did not comment on the fact that it is this idealization of women within the culture that works to keep women oppressed. It is also the idealization of motherhood that keeps women from advancing within Roman Catholicism--which is the same idealization that kept women oppressed within that pagan cultures of both Rome and Greece. It is also the elevation of the position of women as mothers and keepers of religion within the home in Orthodox Judaism that oppresses women.

I am sure that Ensler and most of feminism would say that this is matriarchy within patriarchy, that none of these systems represents a true matriarchy, and that we should look to an unrecorded past, somewhere before the Hellenic world, or east of the Hellenic world, as the proof-in-the-pudding of the superiority of matriarchy.

If this idealized matriarchy was so profoundly wonderful, where is the evidence of it...and why and how did it die out?

Still, to boil all these Western systems down to the demon called Patriarchy is a dangerous simplification predicated on an upper middle class Western secularist view of the world--which, frankly, holds a very narrow and culturally relativist view of women all on its own. This view holds that women are not responsible for physically abusing their children, for emotionally tormenting the men in their lives, for manipulating "the system" thru the elevation and glamorization of victimhood--after all, these are the results of patriarchy. This argument absolves women of any contribution to their decisions, destinies and actions, and is just as demeaning to women as any supposition of The Patriarchy.

Think about it--does any woman, or group of women, really believe that they are not in any way, shape, or form, responsible for their actions because their actions are orchestrated by some other outside force called The Patriarchy??

We might as well all be living in the times of John Calvin and revelling in the doctrines of Predestination. After all, it was Predestination that absolved the wife beater of his actions and made him a sympathetic victim unable to beat the fate laid out for him by another Unseen Patriarchal Force.

Now, I know that some readers will be compelled to defend Ensler's views and point to the Taliban and the horrific treatment of women in the Middle East and Africa as further evidence of the evils of the patriarchy. Ensler has even gone to these cultures and interviewed women in an attempt to prove that it is indeed the Evils of Patriarchy manifest in Religion.

But, seriously, do we know enough about these cultures to know fully that what has gone on in them is totally the result of the evils of patriarchy? Or are those horrors the result of revisionist religious thinking impacting on a people who were bombed into the Middle Ages by nations with their own supposedly progressive agendas? Or can we say that, collectively, colonial oppression is part and parcel with the oppression of women (and has nothing to do with one social class conquering and converting another class to that of a lower status)?

Personally, I am sick and tired of the old Western feminist creed of "It's the Patriarchy's Fault" and seriously tired of women like Ensler using their familial dysfunction, their priviledge, and skewed worldview to prove their personal ideological point about how evil men are (unless, of course, they are feminized). To me, that way of thinking is, in the end, as faulty and damaging as Rush Limbaugh on a right-wing tizzy tirade.