Oppressed and Oppressors? The Systematic Mistreatment of Men.

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Article from: Sociology | August 1, 2001 | New, Caroline | Copyright Sociology (Hide copyright information) Copyright

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ABSTRACT This paper argues for a structural definition of oppression as systematic mistreatment. Using the work of Connell and other theorists, I discuss the implications of the proposed definition for the oppression of women and suggest that men, too, are systematically mistreated and therefore oppressed in modern societies. This structural concept of men's oppression is compared with the idea developed in the men's movement of the 1970s that men are oppressed by sex roles, and with more recent discourses of masculinity. I argue that men may have conflicting interests in relation to the gender order. While men are frequently the agents of the oppression of women, and in many senses benefit from it, their interests in the gender order are not pregiven but constructed by and within it. Since in many ways men's human needs and capacities are not met within the gender orders of modern societies, they also have a latent 'emancipatory interest' in their transformation.

KEYWORDS feminism, gender order, interests, masculinity, oppression, patriarchy

Oppression as 'systematic mistreatment'

Recent disputes within feminism have produced one consensus at least: that oppression is multi-dimensional. The group of women, oppressed within the gender order, includes women who are privileged on other dimensions and in an oppressor role in relation to other, relatively disadvantaged groups of women (Bradley 1996:93). Similarly men, the oppressing group, may also be oppressed in terms of class, ethnicity and so on. (According to Hartmann (1981) patriarchy is a set of hierarchical social relations between men which enables them to dominate women.) Many studies of gender at work have recognised the oppression of men as workers, and that their attempts to make work meaningful often involve ideas and practices that are oppressive to women (for example, Willis 1978; Bradley 1999). But sociologists of gender hardly ever discuss the possibility that men are oppressed on the same dimension as women, i.e. in respect of gender relations. Almost all of those who now describe men as oppressed are part of the anti-fe minist backlash, [1] who deny the oppression of women and even see women, especially feminists, as oppressors of men (for example, Farrell 1993). In contrast, I shall argue that both women and men are oppressed, but not symmetrically. While men are positioned to act as systematic agents of the oppression of women, women are not in such a relation to men. Yet unsurprisingly, given the inescapably relational character of gender, the two oppressions are complementary in their functioning - the practices of each contribute to the reproduction of the other. In particular, the very practices which construct men's capacity to oppress women and interest in doing so, work by systematically harming men.

My argument depends on a certain way of understanding oppression, which must first be introduced and defended. Although oppression is undertheorised, we can distinguish several main approaches, often implicit in the sociology of gender. Subjectivist approaches make the group's self-concept the crucial criterion for oppression, while objectivist or realist approaches focus on whether the putative oppressed group is disadvantaged or harmed. Some realist approaches I shall call zero-sum, because they emphasise benefits accruing to an oppressor group which gains as the oppressed group loses. Others, such as the one I advocate, focus instead on the institutionalised nature of oppressive social relations, so that oppression can sometimes exist without a clear or enduring oppressor group.

'Common-sense' approaches to oppression are often subjectivist, assuming that an individual or group must be the best judges of what is happening to them. In more sophisticated versions, the meanings of social practices are seen as relative to cultural context. [2] In this view, judgements that clitoridectomy, footbinding or institutional rape are harmful or oppressive can only be validly made by 'locals'. For Laclau and Mouffe, for instance, subordination is only oppression if, under the influence of some external discourse, the subordinated see it as harmful and mobilise against it (1985:154). Actors' accounts are, therefore, our only source of knowledge of whether social relations are oppressive. Such a view is attractive to feminists who suspect realist approaches of silencing women or marginalising their experience. [3] 'It is wrong to undermine a person with the claim that she does not know what she wants or feels, or that what she wants or feels is inappropriate; and you cannot know what is wanted or felt and cannot discover oppression unless you listen to people' (Seller 1988:176).

It would be hard to justify a procedure for identifying and characterising oppression that did not see experience as significant. But oppression cannot be 'read off' experience, precisely because subjectivity is socially constructed. If we make actors' accounts key to the characterisation of social relations as oppressive, what are we to make of the conflicting accounts of the subordinated? Some women believe men are oppressed, some that the gender order is natural and non-oppressive, others that women are oppressed and so on. Subjectivist and relativist approaches reduce oppression to a rhetorical category instead of a valuable concept in critical sociology. In contrast, for realist approaches, the key criterion for oppression is not whether certain social relations are perceived as harming a particular group, but whether they do harm it, either directly or by depriving it of potential contextual resources.

A common, and 'common-sense', realist idea of oppression is the zero-sum conception. Here oppression is a relationship between groups, in which the oppressor group acts in ways that harm or disadvantage the oppressed, in order to gain corresponding benefits. Examples would be the relationship between the owners of the means of production and the wage-workers they employ (as understood in Marxist political economy), or the relationship between husbands and wives as conceptualised by Delphy (1970). While admirably clear, the zero-sum conception makes it hard to characterise some groups as oppressed, although they are systematically disadvantaged. Initially assuming a zero-sum position, Abberley (1987:7) writes:

To claim that disabled people are oppressed involves arguing... that on significant dimensions disabled people can be regarded as a group whose members are in an inferior position to other members of society... that these disadvantages are dialectically related to an ideology or group of ideologies which justify and perpetuate this situation... that such disadvantages and their supporting ideologies are neither natural nor inevitable... Finally it involves the identification of some beneficiary of this state of affairs.

But the identification of an oppressor group is tricky - the entire group of non-disabled or 'TABs' (temporarily able-bodied) can be seen as beneficiaries when considered as taxpayers, but become losers when considered as family members, potential carers and likely future members of the group of disabled people. Abberley later concludes that the main beneficiary of the oppression of disabled people is 'the present social order, or, more accurately, capitalism in a particular historical and national form' (1987:16).

Like Abberley, I do not believe we need to identify a clear-cut agent/beneficiary to speak of oppression. Sometimes there is one, sometimes not. I propose the following structural definition, which subsumes zero-sum conceptions when they are applicable, and allows us to recognise the very different, yet related, oppressions of women and of men.

A group X is oppressed if, in certain respects, its members are systematically mistreated in comparison to non-Xs in a given social context, and if this mistreatment is justified or excused in terms of some alleged or real characteristic of the group.

The key phrase, 'systematically mistreated' implies that as a result of institutionalised social practices, Xs' human needs are not met, they are made to suffer, or their flourishing is not permitted, relative to other groups and to available knowledge and resources. While human needs are culturally mediated, some basic conditions for human well-being can be specified independent of social context (Doyal and Gough 1991:chap. 4). We recognise these as needs because undesirable consequences arise from a failure to meet them, though the severity of the price paid may range from death to discomfort. Unmet needs may result in forms of development that preclude 'flourishing', the term used by ecological feminist Cuomo (1998) in her feminist ethics. For Cuomo, knowledge of a thing's nature can give rise to knowledge of what it is for it to flourish.[4]

'In comparison to non-members' means that Xs are disadvantaged in relation to non-Xs on some particular dimension or in a specific context -- …


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