Capitalism and the U.S. "Gender Project".

The sexism we find in capitalist societies is due to a grafting of past cultural practices (of a different mode of production) being maintained as ideology by those who want to hide the underlying class conflict. Laissez Faire capitalism would eventually get rid of gender divisions that describe agricultural societies given the role of the female as proletariat in such a society, and the privatization of the family. Why gender stratification has survived is because it is actively maintained by the capitalist elite to mitigate the effects of class conflict, thus the rapidly changing definitions of womanhood in U.S. society based on periodic inauthentication by the underlying structure.

This is the main reason that Marxist sociologists do not take the epiphenomena of race and gender to be the main phenomenon as class is. Sociology should have a gender neutral and not a male or female oriented methodology that can study the organization of society and the best way to do that in my opinion is the way of the classical sociologists. This was elaborated by C. Wright Mills (1956) in the Sociological Imagination, which involves an intersection between the history of a society, biography of individuals and their social structure. Instead of “gendering� this methodology, dividing up the field and helping to maintain a grafted cultural relic of a different social structure, I think a conscious attempt should be made to make the existing methodology gender neutral.

Regarding structure creating (gender) roles, advertisers (and the reason for their effectiveness) is that they are reproducing in raw form the gender roles projected by the U.S. social structure, in which women are considered worthy of contempt in everything except their sexuality and that also according to a predetermined narrow script of "beauty". In other words women are hidden, invisible and veiled (not physically but socially) as far as identity goes in everything except their sexuality. Why this appears outrageous to most is because of the ideological carryover that seeks to present the gender values of the past as if they were today's gender values (the conservatives) and for others the gender values of a non-existent utopia as 'freedom achieved' (the non conservatives), whose movement has been co opted, since the structural status quo has remained. However this outrage is quickly pacified among both (conservatives and non-conservatives) when they are punished for trying to incorporate those old or new values into the current structure, both men and women when they try to deviate from predetermined roles are punished by a bureaucratized structure regardless of cultural ideals. The vast majority of men and women have a role to play in such conditioning and punishment, as they fit into the role-structure prescribed for them, I would argue more so than the advertisers. In other words by reinforcing those role ideals they help to reproduce them.

Gender oppression faced by women in traditional patriarchal societies is qualitatively different to that faced by women in an advanced capitalist society, and I would argue the oppression they face under capitalism is much greater. The reason for that is the breakdown of the family where women had status claims in pre-modern societies, as well as the addition of objectification to the mix of earlier oppression, based on a narrow sexual image something that is uniquely a capitalist phenomenon. Not only is oppression of women hidden in the U.S, it has been bureaucratized /rationalized in the entire social structure something that explicit coercion (of the Taliban type) can never achieve due to limited resources and the continuous struggle involved between oppressor and oppressed. In the earlier type of oppression women knew who their enemies were, now they are hidden through bureaucratized control, as a result women either blame themselves for their (socially defined) “inadequacies� or turn on other women.

Therefore, structural adjustment and not education is the key to success, if we assume egalitarianism as the desired value and goal but such attempts at change are often co-opted by the elite with great effectiveness by being directed towards benign directions or through slogans of "liberation" and "change" as they currently plan to do by constructing a messiah (in the person of Obama).

M. Asadi
asadi.org