Patriarchy and Entitlement …

So, when I talked about Sarkeesian’s last, explicit, non-DLC video, I talked a bit about male and female entitlement. In pondering it a bit, I think that when we understand patriarchy properly, we start to see how the whole idea of male entitlement — and, by extension, female entitlement — has the whole thing backwards.

Let’s start by reminding ourselves of what “male entitlement” actually is. It’s surprisingly hard to find an actual definition of male entitlement on-line — both Yahoo and Google searches don’t actually have a post that actually defines it in the first 10 entries — so I’m going to use Sarkeesian’s, which I think is basically correct:

…“male entitlement” is the conviction that men are owed something by virtue of their gender.

Thus, female entitlement would be the conviction that women are owed something by virtue of their gender. I’ve already pointed out that the “damsel in distress” line that Sarkeesian pushes is, in fact, more an example of female entitlement than male entitlement, as the men are in fact being asked to demonstrate their ability and value before being accepted by the damsel, while the damsel’s main qualities are that she’s female and attractive. But if we take on from this, we can see that the expectation under patriarchy is this: what men feel that they are owed because of their gender is not the thing itself, but a chance to compete for that thing. Under patriarchy, men get the chance to prove themselves in an occupation or in a business or to fair maiden (who, as Uhura once pointed out, might be neither of those). The big problem with patriarchy for women is that they are pushed into passive roles, and so are not allowed to compete for those things; they get to select from what is presented to them, but don’t generally get to compete for those things, at least not openly.

What this leads to is a culture when men are encouraged to actively pursue what they want, while women are encouraged to passively wait for someone else to give it to them. The reason for that latter, of course, is that society is structured so that women trying to achieve those things on their own is so strongly discouraged that it is almost impossible for them to actually achieve them. So if a woman wants power or wealth or anything else, she needs to get a man to do it for her, under patriarchy.

But what this also ultimately leads to is a culture where men are expected to earn what they get, while women are expected to get that given to them. Again, this is only because the culture doesn’t let then earn what they want to get, which is not a good thing. However, the latter attitude is certainly more “entitled” than the former. Given this, patriarchy actually seems to encourage female entitlement more than male entitlement; women thus have more need to watch for their entitled attitudes than men do.

But isn’t patriarchy just as system where men oppress women? Given that starting point, then you can’t have anything like female entitlement: a slave can never be entitled no matter how well-treated they are. However, that doesn’t seem to me to be the correct understanding of patriarchy. Patriarchy, it seems to me, is best seen as a system that enforced a strong division of roles based on gender. The system worked fine if you were a person who liked and could thrive in that system, and was an oppressive system if you couldn’t. For women, the enforced passivity was a worse issue than it typically was for men, because if the men they were attached to either couldn’t or wouldn’t give them what they wanted, there was no way for them to achieve it. On the other side, men who couldn’t achieve what they wanted usually could eke out some kind of living, and might merely be alone given that they couldn’t fulfill their end of the bargain that would be required to get any kind of relationship … and feel like a complete loser because of that, of course.

This system, then, worked relatively well for those who could live in it, and badly for those who didn’t. It is also interesting to note that the culture also did, in fact, advocate against men taking from women by force, and thus using violence to enforce male domination (which it didn’t discourage among men). Using force on a woman was considered less than manly, at least in part because it was too easy. Real men didn’t need to hit women, and so real men didn’t hit women. Even most feminist theory admits that the violence was not overt and explicit, but was implied, particularly in terms of rape. Even there, “stranger” rape was always considered worse than “date” rape, likely because the date rape was seen as a woman withholding what the man had earned, while the stranger rape was the man taking something he had not yet earned — and likely couldn’t earn. In fact, the approval of marital rape can follow from this as well: having proven his worth, for her to withhold what he had earned is unjust, and so moves to take it are simply seen as righting injustices.

Again, this is not a good attitude. But it is not an entitled attitude, in the sense that it is entitlement based on gender. Again, it is an attitude of having earned what you want using the agreed upon mechanisms, and even seems to link back to my comments on Nice Guys(tm); men are told by society that if they do certain things, they’ll get what they want. If they do those things, and the person reneges on the deal, that’s them breaking the deal, not them being entitled to something they haven’t earned. On the other hand, women must get things that they haven’t earned only on the basis of their gender, because they can’t achieve them any other way. That’s what patriarchy forces on them.

Given this, it’s clear that patriarchy fosters more an attitude of female entitlement than male entitlement, and it is high time that we recognized that, especially if we want to use entitlement as a way of describing the situation and, most importantly, in changing our society away from the restrictive patriarchal one.

Tags: feminism