Issues in Patriarchal Societies

In the 1890’s the term ‘feminism’ was coined, about 50 years after the women's rights movement started. The fight for the equality of the sexes has been going on for over one hundred years. People who are feminists seek to fight for equality between men and women. This includes equality in education, employment, and salary. Aldous Huxley wrote the novel Brave New World in 1931, in a time where women were still fighting for equality. Just 11 years prior, women were given the right to vote in the U.S. When you analyze Brave New World through a feminist stance, it exposes the inequality in an “equal” society. In the novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley explores the inequality of the sexes by showing the patriarchy throughout the society. He

Throughout their lives, women of all ages are constantly being bombarded with advertisements convincing them they must meet an ideal of the perfect body image. This is all thanks to companies that share a common goal to influence the mainstream population into believing they need to purchase certain products in order to compare to the impossible standards set by the beauty industry. In Dave Barry’s “Beauty and the Beast” he displays that it is planted in young girls minds that they need to look, dress, feel, and even act a certain way. However, men aren’t as affected by these capitalistic marketing schemes. In short, the media has affected the way women think of themselves.

1. What is a patriarchal society? In what ways do the different civilizations we have studied exhibit patriarchy and how did they reinforce it (hint: Hammurabi’s code, Chinese philosophy, Ancient

Females have been constantly shamed for generations if one does not act, dress or look a certain way. The media has been a major influence on women from a young age on how one is perceived in society. The media has created an impossible goal for women to achieve. The media will take multiple different parts of women that are seen as perfect and Photoshop them and put them on billboards (Kilbourne, 2010). This makes young girls lead a life where one will inevitably fail to what she has always been shown as the ideal women. This causes eating disorders, depression and low self-esteem in women, which leads to mass amounts of unnecessary cosmetic reconstruction surgeries (Kilbourne, 2010). This is just one negative issue with the way societal norms degrades women. Women are constantly portrayed as objects and to be viewed as lesser than a male. The way men are shown of needing a masculine side and cannot show femininity

Multimillion dollar companies frame women as submissive beings, and focus on their appearance. They have to sell the woman’s body in order for them to make a profit for their products. There is a disproportionate portrayal of women in the media as sexual beings rather than intellectual beings. As a result, men focus on the sexual nature of the woman and disregard the intellectual capacity of the woman, which allows men to objectify women.

Boys from a young age are taught to be powerful and in control; better than a woman. In this documentary, Barbara Berg explained how patriarchy is Americas default setting where men hold the positions of privilege and power and where women are very often treated as secondary class citizens. This further leads to an issue of major media outlets consisting of an overwhelming amount of men on boards when compared to women; typically, five to one, respectively. Almost everything we hear through media is coming from the male

Beauty is defined in American culture by the dominate ideology of white middle class males. Hegemonic ideology is promoted by online media outlets with femininity communicated as a way to serve the sexual desire of men (pp. 449). The pressure on women to look and behave certain ways is deeply imbedded in our everyday life. I will use two online media stories; the PBS online video, Merchants of Cool, and Yahoo Style as the basis of this essay.

Many will make the argument that we must all understand each form of oppression due to our all facing oppression under capitalism, a system build upon the inherent oppression of many, however I would like to - using social, political, and historical context - make the argument that all forms of oppression are fueled by and normalised through different (completely harmful and often deadly) ideas and thus, the experiences of those who are directly affected by the aforementioned will be different - and argue that we must address both patriarchy and other forms of special oppression, as well as capitalism, not ignoring, nor favouring either, as even with capitalism alone eliminated, patriarchy would exist independently, at least through societal norms which - without challenge - would be sustained across economic systems, due to its rooting itself in various aspects of our culture and society, I will

This week ‘s lecture content focused on Women and Sexist Oppression and it is something that has been a subject for centuries. Women all over the world are oppressed because of religion, politics, or even their male partners. It has caused Feminists to bloom, even more, some are too overbearing, and others are not overbearing enough. Society as a whole talk about how people should treat women better and how we can and will change things but still everything is the same because women have been unjustly held back from achieving full equality for much of human history in many societies around the world. Women face a series of oppressive social policies and role expectations, to be a woman in society today means you are constantly expected to live

Society is often responsible for forging one’s beliefs. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini is a criticism on the hardships and challenges, found in a patriarchal society, caused by society itself and those empowered through social conditions. Hosseini expresses his beliefs through the relationships between the characters, plot development, and contrast. First, both main characters go through enormous amounts of pain and suffering.

American society views the acceptable man as being controlling and domineering, whereas the acceptable and desirable woman’s purpose is to cater to the man, physically and sexually. Females are nearly always stripped down (often literally) to what lies at their core, their essential, biological womanliness, their essential subordinate position to man.” (Byerly, Carolyn, Ross 26) When women are portrayed in such a way, individuals begin to be dissatisfied with themselves, as well as with the ones they are intimate with, comparing them to the impossible standards of society. While attempting to appease the opposite sex, then they aren’t being true to their

The purpose of this paper is to explore patriarchal values that reinforce violence towards women in intimate partner relationships. This paper argues that patriarchy and the social construction of masculinity reproduce male violence against women. The following sub-issues that that will be discussed are patriarchy, capitalism, the religion of Islam, and the construction of masculinity and femininity. All the sub-issues encompass patriarchy values which allows inmate partner violence.

Although they have been given more rights and equality, women still lack fairness in areas such as education, domestic abuse, crime, and lower class value. Cassandra Clifford states in her article “Are Girls still marginalized? Discrimination and Gender Inequality in Today’s Society”, “Woman and girls are abused by their husbands and fathers, young girls are exploited by sex tourism and trafficking, girls in many countries are forced into arranged marriages at early ages. Twice as many women are illiterate as men, due to the large gap in education, and girls are still less likely to get jobs and excel in the work place than boys.” She describes some of the issues that women face today around the world. These issues are what keep society from coming together to form a better world.

The media, which seems to endlessly show women as sexual objects, has the capability of limiting a woman’s potential and damaging their self worth. More often than not the media depicts the way people go about their daily life. People look at the media to determine how they should dress, act and in some cases even how they should perform sexually. There are the fashion magazines that focus on beauty, attracting and satisfying men, self-improvement, and (occasionally) work and politics. Examples are Vogue (emphasizing fashion and makeup), Cosmopolitan (emphasizing sexuality and relationships with men), and Self (emphasizing self-improvement and employment). Not only are most magazines directed at women, but the ones that are directed towards men are about work and politics, not about how to improve your looks or please your woman. The media along with other social institutions plays a large role in how women are viewed. A horrible example is being set for today’s youth, and men are taking the loss of self respect of women in the media to the extremes, thinking that they can degrade women in everyday life as well. With the constant representation of women being viewed as nothing more than sexual objects, women themselves are beginning to feel as though they have little or no potential, as well as no self

Throughout the course of human history, societies worldwide tend to follow a specific pattern of male domination in politics, economics, and culture. From the earliest city-states of Mesopotamia to the massive empires of China and Rome, women were forced to take a limited role in society. This systematic oppression of women is indicative of a patriarchal society, in which “women have been subordinate to men in the family and in society generally” (Ways of the World 59). Though these civilizations share the characteristic of male supremacy, each had different practices governing interactions between the genders. Each society had a unique idea of exactly what rights women were afforded and how the patriarchy was enforced. The Mesopotamian, Chinese, and Greek civilizations were undeniably patriarchal, but how the dominance of men was expressed varied between each society.