Gender Equality Wed 6^th Sept

This is not a topic from the today programme which is so obsessed with the Labour leadership that it is unendurable. Two items on the World Service, the first on the gang rape victim in Pakistan now working to outface women's oppression through running a blog, the other on the new female presenter, the first ever, of an American evening news show, chime in with what I am working on mentally -- the cultural effects of severe stress on the mother/infant dyad.

In conversation on the equality issue a man once asked me "haven't women now got what they want?" Admittedly this was about 20 years ago but it is as laughable a question now as it was then. And yet he could not see it and I'm sure most men and quite a few women today would not really see it. In a culture like ours where women work as prostitutes, lap-dancers and all the etceteras that go with that; where women with children are disadvantaged at every turn; where women predominantly fill the lower paid jobs, equality has changed its meaning. In a male dominated society it means "a lot of women are a lot better off than they used to be". It also means that women from other parts of the world are being trafficked in, by men of course, to supply the need for more unequal women. The fact that there are also men being paid for sex does not alter the essential fact. Neither does the hierarchical fact whereby wealthy women are more equal than less wealthy men and so on down the line affect the issue.

The two initiating topics reveal the extreme ends of the continuum: the oppression of women in an impoverished, conflict-ridden threatened subculture and the tenacious hold of the male on to meaningful power. When women form the majority of "anchormen" on the evening talk shows the power/influence will move elsewhere. However that's a side issue. Looked at biologically each individual organism is concerned with self-control and control for self-benefit, and to the extent that this requires control over an individual of the opposite sex males have the edge over females with dependent offspring; this effect is enhanced by culture, in general in direct proportion to the complexity of the culture.

It was interesting, and typical, to find myself listening, as I took a break from writing this, to an item on woman's hour discussing the word housewife and its demeaning or positive associations. Either way it denotes a role that is in support of the man whose role is seen as primary. The one who is proud of being housewife, and the one would not be, cannot perceive her role as primary. I think it actually lies in the inherent tendency to treat the male partner as the eldest child (see chapter 9). The tendency to support offspring has to be almost overpowering for female mammals, the fact that in Homo sapiens it is now inherently brought to bare in favour of adult males is bad luck for the modern female. In two fiction tales in the last week I have come across the situation of a female student giving up her course halfway through and taking on a job to support her man while he completes his studies: in both cases he subsequently deserted her. Americans wouldn't be writing this sort of stuff if it didn't happen, it is a good example of what I'm talking about.

15:06 p.m. and right on cue, in the lunchtime World Today, I stuck with the World Service as radio four news remains unendurable, an item on immigration worldwide stating that 50% are women who send back in total millions of dollars to support their families, often suffering rape, abuse, and being overworked and exploited. The item is concerned with the lack of legal protection for women in these situations, well nothing surprising about that, from my point of view it's just another piece of evidence confirming that when you get right down to it is women who support men and keep the species going. An item from weeks back that I meant to comment on but could not links in: the high profile divorce settlements in which two wives were awarded for the first time a reasonable settlement from the riches their husbands had amassed while they were in support.

Once again I'm getting carried away, all this belongs with an Update I must start now has a spark of energy seems for the first time to be manifesting. It will relate to the book I'm currently reading, another one by Ian Hodder, The Present Past; it will do with enculturated neuroses and make clear the links between gender inequality and an institutionalised schizoid condition.