Male Dominance over Females: Essay

Male dominance over females is one of the earliest known and most prevalent forms of inequality in human history. Due to its everydayness, male dominance seems natural. But one question never goes away. Might innate biological mechanisms be a hindrance to women attaining equal power with men? Or might men’s authority to command women be credited to the nature of the male personality itself, rather than anything else? My research has convinced me that male dominance over females is not inscribed in the natural makeup of man, just as the nature of women does not mean weakness. Male dominance is an expression of historical and cultural values and male-controlled structure. I offer four propositions. First, the ability for male dominance and destruction lies in the origins of the dangerous metanarratives men tell about women. Second, since men's metanarrative about women is partial, we need to demetanarrativise our corporate culture of male dominance to allow for the further valorization of women. Third, accepting that male dominance exists may present possibilities for the amelioration of gender image. Fourth, since male dominance is rooted primarily in our social systems, its solutions also have to include the entire system.

When and How Did It Begin?

Tracing the origins of the appropriation of the feminine by the masculine is an overly ambitious endeavor. The origin of this phenomenon will remain ambiguous. The reason is that the phenomenon is never entirely in focus. It has endured, as it is today, alongside a complex, so that it should be seen for what it is, a single thread in the broad fabric of complex human reality. Nonetheless, if the goal is to deconstruct the claims of inevitable and universal male dominance, some concrete reasons for its historical appearance and its perennity must be offered. To do this, it is proper to begin from man’s basic observations of identity and differences in things and experiences. Human senses are vital tools for achieving this as well as for making claims and judgments. With the tools, man can make observations, and give meaning to his experiences and environment into which he was thrown, to use Heidegger’s terminology.

Furthermore, imposed on man are two key observations over which he has no control. One is the variance between males and females. The other is the regularity in nature, such as the change between day and night. The difference between the male and female gender is a regular biological observation as changes between day and night are a cosmological constant. The effort to make sense of dichotomies in human experience brings about a dualistic classification of similar as well as dissimilar things. This, thus, constitutes a key category of symbolic thinking in social structures.

Scholars such as Robert Ardrey have argued that biology is destiny. That is, gender roles in society and the rights attached to these roles, are said to be fundamentally determined by our genes; a result of natural selection. A growing evidence, however, shows that male dominance is far from being biologically rooted. Appropriation of the feminine by the masculine is a historical phenomenon. This argument is that male dominance of women grew from a specific set of social contexts rather than ensuing from some universal feature of human nature. Allying with most activists for the rights of women, I do not support the claim that men’s domination of women is natural.

A lot has been written on the origins of the domination of women by men, but little attention has been given to a crucial factor of early human sexism — warfare. My inquiry has convinced me that gender inequality, together with the derogatory description of ‘feminine’ as passive and ‘masculine’ as aggressive, can be inferred from male hegemony and primeval warfare. Warfare is a common characteristic of the primitive era. Almost all group and village societies took part in warfare. Essentially, men were the warriors. They fought battles with bows, clubs, spears, arrows, as well as other muscle-powered weapons. In such conditions, male’s strength and height became crucial. Success in military expeditions and the fate of the whole communities became contingent on the relative number of aggressive muscular men who were mentally and physically prepared to risk their lives in combat. They were taught competitive sports, such as wrestling, dueling with spears, and racing with heavy weights, in training for their combat roles.

Early enough boys were subjected to severe physical ordeals like circumcision, trials of stamina, starvation from food and drink, and drugs to instill masculinity in them. To get males to risk their comfort and their lives, an enticing system of rewards and dreadful punishments was required. While expulsion was the punishment, sexual pleasure was the reward. Those who best endured the rigors of warfare were remunerated with wives and concubines. In some cases, only those who had fought an enemy in battle could marry. This explains why virtually all group and village societies taught that only males should be proficient in the use of clubs, spears, and arrows, and why they often forbid women to touch these weapons just as they generally barred women from front‐line warfare. Since some women are beefier than some men and could no doubt be trained to in battle, excluding them seems irrational. But if wives and concubines were to be the the incentives for men to become masculine and bellicose, women had to be trained from birth not, obviously, for combat.

Due to the importance of male combat teams, group and village warfare largely tended to promote the organization of communities around a core of permanent male figures. It was the line of resident males, therefore, that acquired control over the resources (including women) of the community. Moreover, polygamous marriages between one man and several wives emerged from the same principle that uses women as a reward for male bellicosity. Menial work for women, ritual subservience, and devaluation of women also emerged from the reward system, at the expense of women. Another result of the foregoing is the Man Box and its consequent metanarrative.

The Man Box as a Propeller of Metanarrative

If men must fit into the demands of warfare, then they must behave and act in certain ways; they must have a CV. They will have to act from the 'box'. This is called the Man Box. It signifies a set of beliefs systematically communicated by peers, parents, media, families, and society, and places pressure on and conditions men to act in certain ways. The Man Box can also mean a collective socialization of men into what is deemed manly. In television shows, men are shown to be rugged and tough, and they are usually philanderers. In the British film series, James Bond is an example, the character of the principal actor, Mr. Bond, remains unchanged even when he is succeeded by another. The Man Box, moreover, leads to male self-proclamation of superiority over, among other things, the female gender. In a society dominated by male metanarrative, to be a man is to be strong, athletic, providing, protective, and combative. Early as during childhood boys are expected to cultivate these characteristics. Due to this, the Man Box is created and recreated.

The Man Box creates a gender us-other and superior-inferior dichotomy between men and women. During his days, Aristotle strongly believed that the relation of male to female is by nature a relation of superior to inferior and ruler to ruled. In some ways, men’s collective socialization, in parallel, is like the fire and the shadows of Plato’s cave. For some people, the idea of the Man Box is all they know, and the idea of a person out of the Man Box is a gross anomaly. The Man Box also achieves a male metanarrative, a partial but dominating male story that privileges men over women. Like narratives, male metanarratives have identity-building functions, but on a greater level of social organization. The danger of male metanarrative is the hierarchization of gender and knowledge. Only ideas from select groups are allowed into the collective body of official knowledge. With this comes totalizing systems that favor men’s perspective of life.

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Agencies for Male Dominance

Perhaps, there are no other agencies that perpetrate the appropriation of the feminine by the masculine than culture and tradition. Both play important roles in human life. Whether we are conscious of it or not, the forms and shapes of human interaction with the world are contingent on how one is shaped by a given culture and tradition. Omolara Ogundipe-Leslie has argued that the traditional structure is one of the mountains on the back of an African woman. One way the veracity of such a claim may be verified is through the gender socialization process. This associates valor and strength with men and the roles of wife and mother to women. In the play 'Anowa', Osam wastes no time reminding Badua that he is a man and that getting his daughters married is not one of his duties. Getting them born, aha! But not finding their husbands. Similarly, in Unoma, customary traditional practice expects females to assume roles as domestic workers. Very early in life, female children learn from their mothers how to cook and keep the house.

The ideal woman falls within the framework of her traditional roles as wife and mother. Furthermore, cultural social values are strong to the extent that the respect and love that a woman earns are conditioned on the degree of her appropriation of the values, as well as her ability to adapt to her assigned cultural gender roles. For Buchi Emecheta, as it is evident in her novel 'The Joys of Motherhood', gender inequality in the Igbo society — and any other society — is founded on the gender socialization process. But, of course, this cannot be possible without the necessary grounding it gets from customary traditional practices. In the same novel, Nnu Ego’s son, Oshia, would not fetch water or assist in cooking because, as he sees it, “that is a woman’s job”. Strong-Leek Linda — and rightly so in my judgment — makes the case that women are indoctrinated to envision the world from a patriarchal perspective.

The birth of a girl child is often greeted with unhappiness, as though feminity is an aberration from a natural order. A conclusion that may be drawn from a literary hermeneutic on Okonkwo, Achebe’s protagonist in 'Things Fall Apart', is the image of a man for whom feminine values are invaluable. For example, he expresses his anger at his son, Nwoye, who prefers his mother’s “tortoise and its wily ways” stories to his father’s “masculine stories of violence and bloodshed”. Even when Nwoye begins manifesting an interest in Whiteman’s God, Achebe casts Okonkwo in deep regret: “How then would he have begotten a son like Nwoye [...] Perhaps he was not his son! No! [...] How could he have begotten a woman for a son? Looking at his favorite daughter, Ezinma, he had thought: she should have been a boy” (61-63).

Within the ambit of cultural and traditional scope, women are also conceived as child bearers and helpmates for their husbands. Even in the Greek primitive society often applauded as an enlightened society, the perception of women was no better. For instance, two poets of that society, Aeschylus (circa 525-456 BC) and Euripides (480-406 BC), conceived woman as only the nurse of the germ poured into her bosom by men. Moreover, in most cases, to be valued within their cultural environment, women are expected to give birth to a male child. This is why Okonkwo’s wife, Ekwefi, is seen as a cursed woman because, after ten live births, only one child — a girl — survives. For the expectant father joy or sadness begins at the first cry of a baby depending on the sex. While Wigwe’s wife, Adag, in 'The Concubine' gives birth to a male child (or full-current) and is accompanied by pomp and heavy feasting, Madume is sad by his wife’s continuous birth to female children (or half-currents). Similarly, while in 'Things Fall Apart' Okonkwo slaughters a goat in celebration of his wife who has had three sons in a row, Madume is dispirited by his wife’s inability to produce a male heir.

Rape cases count as another relevant aspect of male domination. In a society controlled under the influence of male metanarrative, women are often judged based on their appearance, as though a woman’s appearance might have made all the difference between an ordinary occasion and one on which a sexual assault took place. In 1989, for example, three Florida jurors, Roy Diamond, Dean Medeiros, and Mary Bradshaw, acquitted a man of charges of kidnapping and sexual assault because, according to the jurors, the victim’s dress was suggestive, that she was calling for sex. Proper dressing, especially in public spaces, has to be respected, but concluding that a woman’s clothing may mean her implied consent to be sexually assaulted or her implied welcome of sexual harassment is another evidence of male dominance.

What Can Be Done?

Gender revolution; we need to revolutionize the way we view women. But some practical ways towards this needed revolution must be suggested. One thing to do is to acknowledge the existence of the appropriation of the feminine by the masculine. Acceptance, they say, that a problem exists is the first step to healing. Voluntary ignorance is an important element that perpetuates systems of oppression. Domination brings about oppression, and this opposes so many fundamental human values so much that it incites opposition when people come to know about it. Acceptance of the existence of the fact of women's domination by men obliges men and women to speak out and to end the silence upon which continuous domination depends. Repressive cultures disguise the truth of oppression by denying that it exists, calling it something else, or diverting attention from it.

Accepting the existence of dominance leads gracefully to another thing that must be done — to demetanarrativise our societies. As we have seen in the foregoing discussion, warfare created what we have called the Man Box; the male metanarrative emerged from the interaction of principles of warfare and the Man Box. If we must combat male domination, we must demetanarrativise our corporate culture of male dominance. In 2009, Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie gave a popular TED talk titled 'The Danger of a Single Story'. The talk bothered on the resulting danger when human beings and situations, which are complex by nature are reduced to a single narrative. Adichie’s argument was that every individual life contains a diverse aspect and cannot be reduced. What happens with male metanarrative is that it reduces women’s value by elevating that of men. By privileging men over women, a male-centered society takes away women’s humanity. To demetanarrativise our male-metanarrativise world is to achieve a way of viewing women not as a second-class gender but as a class of people as valuable as men.

The to-do list of solutions to the problem we have evoked must also include another important point. We also need to understand that privilege and oppression as effects of gender inequality are not a thing of the past. It is happening right now, in subtly and open ways, and until we work to change the social system that brought it to bear, healing particular wounds caused by male-centered principles is short of being the necessary solution. Healing society from the wounds of male domination is no more a solution to the subjugation that causes the wounding than military hospitals are a solution to war. Since male dominance is a deep social structural problem, changing people will achieve no better result. Of course, to change a system for the better, people will have to change. But to achieve a more durable and sure solution, the entire social system has to change.

Conclusion

To summarize, male dominance as one of the oldest forms of inequality in human history is not inscribed in the natural makeup of man but is an expression of historical and cultural values and structures controlled by men. Modern society needs a revolutionary view of women, we need a gender revolution to finally overcome the dominance of men over women and ensure gender equality.