Comparative Patriarchies

Sounds like a women's studies class, no? But that's on my mind this morning. I woke up feeling sick, shoulder and arm cramping--the physical aftereffects of a hideous nightmare involving my sexual assault by a large group of young men and boys. As I lay there doing a dream post-mortem, it occured to me that everytime I'm in another country: Mexico, the UK, Spain, France, in this case, India--the local articulations of patriarchy strike me as brutal, baldfaced, and somehow harder for me to deal with. I know full well that patriarchy is doing just fine in the US, and that misogyny is chugging along quite nicely. My skin, however, is used to deflecting that particular set of arrows. I suppose it has to do with the with my particular social milieu; as an academic, the circles I generally travel at home are populated with people who are my allies, are indifferent, or know better than to voice their hatred of me outloud. I have made a safe little niche for myself. I suppose that's to some extent how this blog has functioned for me.

The housemates are now gone (for now) but in their company I had the impression that if these (smart, affable) guys are any indication: educated American men (still?) don't regard women as their equals. Not really. Affluence and education aren't guarantees against hatred. I say hatred because that's how it feels to be regarded as less than fully human.

I'm trying to think comparatively here because that's how I like to read: put two or more things together and they'll shed some light on each other.

At home, there's a popular sense that women are equal, and that feminism is redundant: obnoxiously so. People get pissed when this myth is undercut, and that's when the hatred really comes out--often in the form of accusations of hatred. This, I think, is a particularly American cultural habit. It happens with pretty much any other form of oppression: race, class, sexuality, disability. Americans need to think of themselves as fairminded and egalitarian, so any evidence against that is a threat to that sense of self.

Here, cultural politics are harder for me to read. The country's just elected their first woman president, Pratibha Patel. The cultural significance of this is hard to read: on the one hand she's a woman, but then so was Thatcher and Indhira Ghandi. Not much feminist or progressive analysis that I can find online, but one blogger puts it this way (http://feministblogs.org/author/aishwarya/):

India’s presidential elections are a couple of weeks away (on the 18th of this month), and a woman, Pratibha Patel, is contesting. This is, of course far less interesting than the U.S presidential elections and Hilary Clinton, since the Indian president a) isn’t elected by the public and b) has very little power to do anything anyway. Our
current president has spent much of his time writing execrable poetry and motivational texts.
Since they don’t actually have much of a role to play, the choice of president is often an exercise in tokenism. We have had presidents from minority/disempowered castes, religions, etc before, and though they have been quite good ones, one suspects that their real function was to prove what an equal society we are. I have heard people say smugly of India that the fact that we have a Muslim president, a Sikh Prime Minister and Christian power-behind-the-prime minister proves that we are a diverse and egalitarian country (it also gives the Hindu right wing something to feel oppressed about) regardless of what normal Sikhs, Muslims and women may experience in day-to-day, nonpolitical life.*

My anecdotal observations are are small, limited to hanging around one IT company of around 200 people, conversations with a handful of individuals, going out in the city, and reading the local English language media (newspapers, billboards, and TV mostly). Complicating this is the fact of the enormous diversity in this country: ethnicity, religion, language, state. So there is no such thing as the Indian attitude towards this or that. I've heard that Hyderabad is a relatively progressive place for women. I've seen women (not many, but some) driving their own scooters, and there actually are a handful of women working in the testing department at the company--more than in a similar place in the States. I've also seen the dispossessed widows who are forced to beg--disowned by their children at the death of their father. I've seen ads proclaiming: "She is goddess, and we've created a world just for her" pushing some new clothing store for women. I've been harrassed on the street. I've also been told that police are "sympathetic" toward women, so having one with you when you go make a report (on a stolen cell-phone for example) is handy as it will get your case handled sooner.

Some things are familiar, some not. Different articulations of the same assumption. Men are more fully human. The norm.

You know what brought this on? Two things, I bet. 1. My very brief encounters with two elderly widows yesterday, and 2. An old Cary Grant flick: The Awful Truth. 1937 screwball comedy in which both Grant and his wife are apparently cheating on each other: he divorces her--and the focus is on her whether or not she's innocent. In the end, he believes she is, and they reconcile. His apparent infidelity is forgotten. The eponymous truth is, I'm sure, suppossed to be that they love each other. Against the grain, there's some hope here that its a satire of marriage, but I don't think that's why it won academy awards.