Male Dominance

The existence of male dominance itself has obscured the problematic nature of gender relations. Men as a relatively, although differentially,

privileged group have less to gain from exposing the arbitrary and unjust aspects of gender relations. They benefit from these inequities in many ways. In Western culture as in most others, gender is a differentiated and asymmetric division and attribution of human traits and capacities. Through gender relations two types of persons are created: males and females, each posited as an exclusionary category. One can be only one gender, rarely the other or both. The actual content of being a male or female and the rigidity of the categories themselves are highly variable across cultures and time. There are also many important differences in any one society between women (and between men). Nevertheless gender relations so far as we have been able to understand them have been (more or less) relationships of domination. That is, the organization of gender systems has been (more) defined and (imperfectly) controlled by one of its interrelated parts—the male. Thus feminists insist that the concept of power must be extended to include and account for asymmetric gender relations.

Male dominance exists in any system in which men as a group oppress women as a group, even though there may be hierarchies among men (and women). Typically in male-dominant societies, men have more access to and control over the most highly valued and esteemed resources and social activities (e.g., in a religious society men will be priests, and women will be excluded from the most important religious functions or considered polluting to them). Male dominance has material bases in men's violence against women (e.g., rape) and in their control of women's labor power, sexuality, and reproductive capacity. It also has a psychodynamic base as a defense against the infantile mother and men's fear of women. Male dominance has assumed many different forms throughout history; it has been (and still is) exercised against different women in varying ways, but it still remains a dynamic force today No account of a society can be adequate if it lacks a subtle and particularized analysis of gender relations.

This relation of domination and the existence of gender as a socially constructed system have been concealed in many ways, including defining women as a "question" or the "sex" or the "other" and men as the universal or at least ungendered "species being." In a wide variety of cultures and discourses, men tend to be seen as free from or not determined by gender. In contemporary academia, for example, male researchers do not worry about how being a man or studying men may entail gender bias, but feminist theories by their very association with women are assumed to be political (not schol-

arly) or trivial (not something you have to work at to understand because people just "are" their gender). Rarely have male scholars selfconsciously studied the "psychology of men" or "men's" history or considered the possibility that how men feel about women and their own gender identities may affect every aspect of their thinking about and acting in the world. This denial of men's own location in and determination by gender systems has practical consequences as well. Male scholars tend not to read feminist theories or to think about possible implications for their own work. Women are left with the responsibility for thinking about gender, but because we do it, such work is devalued or segregated from the "mainstream" of intellectual life. Such devaluation and segregation are present in both psychoanalytic and postmodernist discourses.