The evolutionary stages of capitalism in developing and developed countries have brought cultural and institutional changes. Maria Mies’ Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale analyzes how early forms of patriarchy created the sexual division of labor, the basis of the subordinate place of women, that includes current forms of societal and situational violence against women in the 21st century.
According to Mies, the origins of capitalist patriarchy began during the 15th century, when as many as six million women were murdered under the guise of “witch-hunts” and prosecuted by a new set of masculine laws and lawyers. Following closely on the eradication of matriarchal “natural healers” came the development of male-run modern medicine. Patriarchal decisions over women’s bodies became the norm, as women’s knowledge of healing from nature was suppressed and ignored, and nature became as dominated as women. Colonization of the white man onto foreign lands gave them a new level of power over less industrialized cultures. Black women and men were then exploited under white men, and white women were colonized into the role of ‘the housewife.’ Through quick-spreading control, male supremacy established its rule over the rest of society during the 19th century.
Violence, and especially violence against women, is structurally engrained within the overbearing, widespread umbrella of patriarchy. Violence has the ability to take many different forms, as shown in documentaries such as Jean Kilbourne’s Killing Us Softly and Bill Moyer’s Consuming Images. Both films explained how women endure pressure under constant media images, which portray their socially expected behavior and appearances. These messages define the norms and stereotypes that women are expected to follow. Choice, liberation, and freedom all disappear when the patriarchal structure controls and dictates the choices that women should make in order to become accepted. This form of violence against women is certainly not as obvious as physical violence, yet it involves a subtle level of male control and female oppression. By ‘indirectly’ subordinating women through coercive means such as the media and public images, male and female relationships as friends or lovers, are (re) defined and women’s individual freedom is compromised.
Patriarchy is created from a set of structural, dominant and subordinate relationships. Female empowerment and women’s freedom are at risk under such a system; how can women truly be liberated without complete gender equality? Following the rules of a patriarchal system, the freedom is a false liberation. In order for a woman to experience this level of ‘empowerment’ within male-run institutions, she usually has developed a false consciousness, and truly believes that she is individually free, as she is not able to see the chains that bind her. According to Marx and Engels, this idea of ‘consciousness’ is a social product of a human being’s social existence, and can manifest as clarity or detachment. In the documentary The Price of Pleasure, women were presented as experiencing personal achievement male-run project that encourages female stripping, nudity and pornography, for the enjoyment of the ‘male gaze’ — a constant part of a woman’s life. When women have been so deeply indoctrinated with patriarchy, they experience the highest levels of male domination not as imprisonment, but as the norm and ‘freedom.’
Historically, as Mies argues, the subordination of women occurred through housewifization and the exploitation of female biological reproductive capabilities. Colonialism, modern science and the witch-hunts were all gendered, creating the first forms of capitalist patriarchy. This created the idea of the active male and passive female in real-life practices. To clearly see this process, one must see the progression to patriarchy in a general way, instead of through a personal lens. The greater structure, patriarchy, inflicts confinement and imprisonment on women, but also on men. Since it was men centuries ago who created this structure of inequality, it is not always seen that, through that creation, men also imprisoned themselves under strict expectations of masculinity and stereotypes of their relationships with women. Even when one has a consciousness of morals within the system, s/he cannot transcend the rules of the structure (patriarchy), as it is too powerful. It is similar to a worker who lives in a capitalist society and is structurally confined under capitalism, but he still must work and function under that oppression in order to succeed. He of course has choices within that system, but if he has a desire to work outside of that capitalism, he will find that it is not an easily obtainable option or choice. This absence of choice is the key to understanding consciousness and false consciousness within a patriarchal system. Simultaneously, men take the position as guards, and women take the position of prisoners, except the guard is also the prisoner within the greater penal system, as he also lives under restrictions and expectations. Hope in transforming patriarchy into an egalitarian system lies in Hegel’s philosophy that it is the slave who can develop a higher consciousness than the master, as the slave lives in his oppression constantly and has a developed understanding of the situation. This creates conditions for revolution and group consciousness, such as the women’s movement, and the civil rights movement.
Mies writes about rape as an act of male power, domination and assertion over women, and also as a physical act over women with a goal of making a statement to other men. In these ways, women are used as an object (commodity) and then disposed of after use. Rape creates a dominant/subordinate relationship within a patriarchal society made up of greater levels of domination and subordination. This type of abuse is common in countries such as impoverished India, which is an economic structure of sexual segregation, but as the incidence of statistic of rape or attempted rape is one in five women in the U.S., it is clear that the strict class system and monetary issues in India are not defining reasons for this phenomenon.
Indian women are bound by their families’ dignity and worth, visible in dowry struggles and murders. In-laws have the right to extract a monetary dowry from their new daughter and her family, except in many instances there is very little money to take, which leads to anger and physical violence against the woman. This harassment and abuse stems from a greater patrilocal, traditionally rooted marriage institution that is supported by families and police officials. This has manifested into a cultural norm of violence against women, which continues to add to the main factors in the oppression, subordination and exploitation of women. The socially constructed and historically produced situation of women versus men embodies the analogy of product and owner. Even after the ‘abolishment’ of slavery, this set of relationships is clear in modern America and impoverished Indian villages.
The Price of Pleasure takes domination and sexual violence against women and researches it in another form: pornography. It systematically connects porn with domestic and sexual abuse, such as rape. Many women, such as those in Girls Gone Wild, view pornography as a liberating experience, as they feel proud and confident enough to flaunt their physical assets in return for compensation, publicity and acceptance from men. In that sense, they think of their position within porn as being one of control, a transcendence of patriarchal subordination. Other women make a career within the porn industry because they have no other options. Without a high level education or resources, it has become extremely difficult (for women) to acquire a well-paying job, not to mention any job. Women are easily accepted, and in many cases forced due to limited options, into the sex industry.
Pornography has become a world where images that once were imaginative in fantasy, now have the possibility of becoming reality. Operating as a ten billion dollar industry, it is the perfect example of the evolution of the deviant morphing into the normative. The Price of Pleasure shows that the mainstream media legitimizes pornography through music videos, hosts such as Howard Stern and shows such as Cat House and The Girls Next Door. The latter an hour of programming that gives average Americans full access into the lives of Playboy bunnies. Thanks to porn actors such as Jenna Jamison who glamorize the life of porn, popular culture has grown to idealize these images. As Mies wrote, patriarchal capitalism brought with it the commodification and degradation of women, and Chyng Sun, director of The Price of Pleasure, clearly shows that this phenomenon culminates in pornography. Racist, sexist and offensive images in pornography run the risk of becoming the mainstream ideology.
The influx of women joining and appreciating porn shows a defeatist attitude that says: “if you can’t beat sexism, join it” so at least you can believe you have some control over your actions. As the documentary iterates, this huge industry is a product of society’s failure to question this profit-driven system. Images of women being dominated in sexually violent situations only feed women’s internalization of their subordinate place within society.
Maria Mies makes correlations between the evolving patriarchal capitalism in the 16th-17th centuries, the witch-hunts, and women’s self sacrifice in dowry wars and honor killings in present day India, and the sex industry. Along with women in the porn industry, these actions portray the internalization and acceptance of male rule in all areas of life. It brings about mental desensitization as to what is normal and abnormal in society, to tradition, family roles, and to one’s place in the system. In the USA, the profit-driven system of capitalism can only continue if the population accepts patriarchy. The the onslaught of advertising and media images portray the perfect capitalist woman’s expected actions and appearance, in order to groom and shape the female population into a collection of unconscious women. Women can challenge their subordinate position within capitalist patriarchy through a transformation of their collective consciousness.
