Still the Little Ladies
by Bronwyn Spart-Hoxha
director, Centre for Gender Dialectics,
Greater Freelton Area College of Applied Arts and Technology
Here are some other fields dominated by women that E. N. Beej didn't mention in his article: operating cash registers, waiting on table in cheap restaurants, housecleaning. The gals are taking over everywhere, eh?
E. N. makes the undialectical but typical masculo-bourgeois error of confusing social reality with his own mythological conception of the world. If women are taking over public education, it's not because women are taking over the world, but for one reason and one reason only: education is becoming less important. The public values education less, so it lets women run the schools while the men are off doing more important things.
The "feminine" values E. N. Beej talks about are in fact the values the patriarchal male elite wants to inculcate in all its subjects, male and female – docility, submission, self-denial. Since women are demonstrably more skilled in these fields, who better to run the campaign of mass brainwashing we refer to as education?
I mentioned that the men are off doing more important things. To find what those things are, I'll ask you to compare two numbers. The first is the number of Torontonians who can name the director of the Toronto District School Board, and the second is the number who can name the complete line-up of the Toronto Maple Leafs.
Male values are not in decline. In fact, they are triumphant. They have achieved a predominance in bourgeois society which threatens the survival of the culture. The most valued activity in society today is the frivolous male preserve of sport. Society is obsessed with sport, especially professional sport, and sport is obsessed with male values. The frivolous values which dominate the male mind have acquired the status of cultural icons.
The director of the Toronto District School Board makes a lot of money by most people's standards. In fact, occasionally the public gets upset at the money education officials make. However, everyone knows that every member of the Toronto Maple Leafs makes far more money than the director of the Toronto District School Board, and the general opinion is that they should earn more! The Leafs were urged to weigh Curtis Joseph down with enough money to sink a battleship in order to keep him with the team.
Vince Carter's paycheque from the Toronto Raptors is larger than the combined paycheques of the members of the Ontario provincial legislature. Of course, they don't have his important ability to throw a basketball through an iron ring.
Bourgeois society has become the fulfilment of the archetypal male fantasy – being perpetually free to play ball while Mum takes care of the important things. The beneficiaries of this fantasy are overwhelmingly male. In every major sport, male players make huge sums of money while female players make nothing, or next to it. The only sports in which women can earn appreciable sums of money are tennis, track, and that pageant of gender stereotyping called figure skating.
The importance of sports to bourgeois society has skyrocketed over the last thirty years. For a hundred years the average professional baseball player was paid about five times as much as the average American. Now he is paid over fifty times what the average American earns. And yet we are told that society now reflects feminine values! During the long years of their oppression women have apparently been yearning for the chance to pay baseball players bigger salaries.
And what is the function of the education system in all this? In the United States, it is to produce professional athletes! The most successful of this year's American high school graduates is LeBron James, who, after announcing his intention of playing in the National Basketball Association instead of going to university, has just acquired a promotional contract worth ninety million dollars before playing a single second in the NBA, or even signing a contract to play in it.
If James had gone to university he most likely would have spent his time playing basketball and getting courtesy passes in all his subjects. You may recall that the administration and staff of Georgia Tech almost drove a professor to suicide after she (sic) refused to pass some important male campus athletes. The best paid faculty member at most American campuses is the football coach. Does anyone want to guess how many of them are women?
Bourgeois public education has always promoted submissiveness, the better to reinforce male hegemony throughout the social order. In recent years a phony gender egalitarianism has been promoted by the school system. Girls are encouraged to do whatever they want to do rather than what girls are supposed to do. Interestingly, though, they never seem to want to take Computer Studies. The importance of the computer in social control and especially in defining and reinforcing an ever more rigid social hierarchy cannot be underestimated. Taking Computer Studies is the first step on a road which can lead to putting one's hands on the levers of bourgeois power. But girls never take this first step.
Like all institutions of bourgeois society, the school system exists to promote the needs of corporate capitalism. These days corporate capitalism needs computing staff and a docile workforce, so the school system produces computing staff and students whose brains are addled by sport. When not designing computer systems to facilitate bourgeois hegemony, the modern now à go go citizen sits calmly on the couch watching professional sport.
So to everyone who shares E. N.'s view that society is now dominated by the feminine I offer this simple advice – stop your bitching and learn to hit balls with a stick. The women won't get in your way then.
Posted May 22, 2003
Still the Little Ladies © Coolth, 2003
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