further evidence that "patriarchy" means more than just "men"

[sev]

current working definition:
Patriarchy: the system by which power/authority is concentrated & maintained in the hands of upper-class, moneyed, heterosexual able-bodied white men. The current dominant culture of the US, and, as far as I can tell, the UK and any number of other places. (in "western culcture"?)

I used to call it the "heteropatriarchy," which, while useful to remind people that patriarchy is about more than gender, has begun to strike me as a red herring. Gender and sexual orientation are so closely interrelated that explicitly calling out the "hetero" part lets people forget about all the other parts. Lately, I've been more likely to just call it 'the dominant culture' in an attempt to defuse debate about whether patriarchy empowers any particular individual male (which is a common derailing tactic, in which the empowered group takes a systemic problem and relegates it to the purely individual and/or interpersonal -- huge props to Tim Wise for this insight; it's the usual personal/political tension, but in a particularly useful shape). However, I've started to realize that giving up the word "patriarchy" in favor of "dominant culture" is robbing my language of a goodly amount of punch, and maybe it's time to reclaim the term.

Anyway, I was having a conversation with a friend about body image and the media, and he was talking about how the problem had finally become tangible to him, as mass media has started targeting aging, muscular male celebrities. (specifically, he'd recently seen articles mocking Arnold Schwarzenegger for drooping pectorals (at age, what, sixty?) and Sean Penn for not maintaining the hard-body that he'd once developed for some film or another. In both cases, obviously ridiculous examples, apparently, to people who understand bodybuilding as my friend does. Why mock somebody for failing to sustain that which is unsustainable? But anyway, he's finally got an example he can sink his teeth into, that makes it clear just *how* ridiculously divorced from reality the media is, on body-image issues.)

And it seems to me that the patriarchy is schizophrenic about muscle. On the one hand, the media promulgates the image of the ideal male body bulging with muscle, and loss of muscle opens men up to ridicule. On the other hand, simply muscling up doesn't actually gain you any respect from the patriarchy -- it just sets you up for future mockery when you can't sustain it forever. What's going on here?

My theory: Muscle-building is democratizing. Muscling up, while easier with leisure and lucre, is (unlike the actual aspects of patriarchal power) still believably acheivable by, for example, lower-class minority men.

The patriarchy protects itself from interlopers, which means that the muscular body cannot actually be a ticket into the patriarchy. The muscle, then, is a distracting tactic -- the promise of patriarchal power in a supposedly acheivable package. Body image issues in general are disempowering to their targets -- they keep us distracted with self-hatred and self-"improvement" in the vain (!) hope that conforming to the media-ideal will bring us empowerment. And we're bombarded with images of thin-women-are-powerful-women (note the juxtaposition in the canard, "you can never be too rich or too thin") and muscled-men-are-powerful-men (adoration of sports figures, for example), which we can never attain (neither the bodies nor the power, really, but even if we *do* attain the body, we find that the power that comes with it is very constrained).

By distracting us with an unattainable body image, the patriarchy keeps us from actually assailing their internally-reinforcing power-structure. And never has it been more apparent than now that the "us" in question is not just women, but also disempowered men (read: most men!)

(and this, my friends, is what comes of insomnia; lying awake from 3am to 5am, trying desperately to sleep, but instead thinking about what? Men. I *like* men, and all, but I'd rather be sleeping.)

Comments

[firecat]

Yeppers.

[xlerb.livejournal.com]

While we have class issues in scope: I can't help noticing that manual labor has somewhat more exercise value than sitting on one's behind behind a desk, all else being equal.

[jfarr.livejournal.com]

It seems like a lot of this behavior is left over from a time when not just interpersonal but social and political capital was based largely on a man's abilities in hand-to-hand combat. A strong physique was necessary to ensure the survival of the tribe, and leaders actually led the charge into battle rather than pushing a pen around in some office halfway around the globe.