The Myth of Female Oppression

Only people who are full of shit believe that women have suffered the historical indignities of oppression. Women are one of the most privileged groups of human beings to have ever lived; only lower status men have ever suffered from discrimination.

The premise that men oppress women for the benefit of other men is fundamentally flawed. It seems to be the by-product of philosophical speculation within the domain of the social sciences, rather than based on any rigorously oriented scientific methodology. Although I doubt the veracity of the foregoing premise, I do believe there is considerable empirical and statistical evidence pointing to a tremendous amount of oppression being exerted by women over other women. As a matter of fact, it is quite possible to assert that women have been oppressed; except that women have historically oppressed other women, as well as many men, through the use of both her sexuality and reproductive biology.

To begin with, sexual relations between both genders functions as a means of socio-economic exchange by which the woman offers both her womb and vagina as a means of receiving such benefits as money, status, power and commitment. Sex would be used as a means of economic exchange at a going marketable rate that most women would accept as adequate compensation for the giving of sexual favours. Due to the fact that men compete for women as a scarce commodity within the marketplace of heterosexual transactions, women are inevitably driven to possess little desire for any particular sexual relationship itself given the superabundance of men she is able to choose from; this enables her to exert a considerable amount of influence over the relationship by coercing the man to provide her with resources that will persuade her to have sex with him.

Women who would offer sex readily, without participating within the process of sexual negotiation based on socio-economic exchange would readily invoke the hostility of most women by making the service of copulation readily accessible to men; by lowering the costs of sex, the ‘loose’ woman is a threat to most women because she undercuts the economic bargaining power of women within heterosexual transactions and reduces her ability to maneuvre her way into positions of power in a world characterized by male patriarchal dominance.

As many evolutionary psychologists have noted repeatedly, it should come as no surprise that women have a considerably greater hostility towards pornography and prostitution than men do. In a survey conducted by Klassen et al. (1989), 69% of women, as opposed to 45% of men were likely to disapprove of prostitution. In fact, female opposition to both prostitution and pornography is of long-standing duration. According to Walkowitz (1980), the anti-prostitution and smut campaigns of the nineteenth century were largely participated in by women.The laws which have formed the basis of every society that has ever existed has been aimed primarily at controlling men and not women. Men are arrested for all manner of crimes at a much greater magnitude than women are. Baumeister (2002) says that in 1998, 92% of all arrests for sex crimes involved men and the other 8% of arrests would involve women. The only exception to the rule would be prostitution and as we see from Walkowitz, much anti-prostitution legislation was put in place by means of direct female agitation.

In addition, it is women and only women who have sanctioned the horrific practice of mutilating the bodies of pre-pubescent females; a notable example of such would be the practice of genital subincision and infibulation or female genital circumcision. According to researcher H. Lightfoot-Klein (1989), the decision as to which daughter was to be circumcised was determined exclusively by the maternal figures of the household and that the operation is performed solely by women. Lightfoot-Klein also notes that girls who refuse to allow themselves to be genitally circumcised are routinely harassed and socially ostracized by other girls. Another researcher, A.A. Shandall (1967, 1979), found, after a statistical analysis of hundreds of surveys submitted in the region of northeastern Africa, that most men actually prefer wives who have not undergone the surgery and that female circumcision is not conducive to male sexual pleasure.

The notion of culture and socialization functioning as the primary agents behind sexual differentiation in anatomical sex and gender roles really invokes the argument of infinite third man regression; if we are socialized by society than what socializes the basic infrastructure around which the dominant social institutions gravitate? Who or what socializes society? The division of labour between men and women is largely a product of neuro-endocrinological and physiological differentiation between both genders, resulting in sexual dimorphism in such traits as physical strength and intelligence. Every society that has ever existed has been a patriarchy dominated by men; there has never been a society ruled by women. In spite of enormous cross-cultural variation between many societies, the sexual physiological differentiation between men and women is the same in all societies. The universality of patriarchy on an anthropological level, as well as the androgenic hormonalization of the male central nervous system during embryological development producing significantly higher levels of male aggression and motivation, would make the existence of male patriarchal dominance physiologically inevitable.

Thus, subjecting male-female relations to a Marxist-Leninist sociological analysis along class lines is clearly illogical. The members of both groups possess the same hormones, albeit in vastly different quantities, and none can truly be in any dialectical antagonism to the other because a certain symbiosis between both sexes is necessary for the perpetuation of the human species. In the final analysis, the concept of sex is really a synthesis of both biological and socio-cultural factors; the social organization of human interactions is really an instance of behavioural conformation to a limited set of biological parameters that determine our existence as living organisms.