One of the cornerstones of patriarchy is its oppression of women via the enforcement of reproductive and domestic labour, and that includes the provision of sex. We need to note again here that women are not the only ones who can birth a child. Trans men and non-binary people can and do get pregnant, and their capabilities in this area should be respected and recognised. But it’s also important to acknowledge that patriarchy is invested in maintaining reproduction as a matter only for cisgender women. That is to say, the ‘traditional values’ of patriarchy and its adherents aren’t interested in accommodating the spectrum of gender. Assaults on reproductive healthcare (which includes limiting or entirely removing access to uterine birth control and abortion) aren’t rooted in concern for unborn children but in the desire to maintain a strict gender binary that keeps cis women in reproductive servitude and thus subservient to the cis men who appoint themselves captains of the domestic vessel. Marriage and childbirth are sold to women as essential components for our happiness, but the reality is that both contribute to the structural inequalities that severely impact our lives—and all too often, this includes the belief that every part of our body belongs to the men who claim access to it.
When I was pregnant, I signed up to an online group of women who were due in the same month as me. Through the months and months (and months) of pregnancy into the terrifying beyond of parenting, I looked on as women shared not only queries about Braxton Hicks and teething, but also intimate, vulnerable stories detailing the extensive emotional and domestic labour they performed in order to keep the tenuous balance of their families in check. I’ve been privy to testimonies of domestic violence, family abandonment and, frighteningly, what I would call comprehensive sexual abuse. There have been more stories than I can count of women whose partners cajoled them into sex either in the late stages of their pregnancies or early postpartum weeks, with many of the women tentatively asking each other how they could help these unweaned sulks to understand that they just didn’t feel physically or emotionally up for it—because the management of men’s feelings and entitlement around sex is just another job required of us, even when we are in physical and mental recovery from pregnancy and childbirth.
Make no mistake, servicing men’s sexual needs is still considered a wifely duty. They used to call this conjugal rights, which was just a fancy legal way of saying, ‘Rape is okay if you’re married to her.’ But, like so many things, changing the law hasn’t necessarily changed the practice.
In 2017, Ginger Gorman wrote a harrowing article for News.com about the numbers of women who either feel pressured to have penetrative sex shortly after childbirth or whose partners actually rape them (‘Women are being pressured into sex too soon after giving birth’). Through anecdotal research, Gorman identified three main causes for this:
1. Succumbing to verbal ‘nagging’ or pressure
2. Overt and physically violent sexual assault
3. A sense of obligation to ‘service their man’
These stories aren’t uncommon. I’ve heard women joke flippantly about how they’ve ‘never given so many blow jobs’ as they have in the weeks after their baby was born, because God forbid Him Upstairs goes without having his cock worshipped for a few months. One particularly horrendous story involved a woman recovering from a physically traumatic birth. After three months of what he called ‘being understanding’, her husband insisted that it was time to take care of him now. She refused, so he took to watching porn and angrily masturbating in the living room whenever she was in there breastfeeding their child.
They’re divorced now.
Unfortunately, not every woman has the power to up and leave an abusive or coercive relationship, particularly not when there are children. What does the woman who relies on her husband or partner for financial support do when sex is treated as one of her many domestic obligations? ‘Sacrifice’ is an unavoidable part of having children, but the demands it places on women are very different to those it places on men.
Which leads us here: looking at one of the most oppressive inequalities shouldered by women partnered with overgrown oafs cleverly disguised as human males.
Money.
‘She was going to go back to work, but her salary barely covered the childcare!’
You’re probably familiar with this classic argument about how heterosexual couples choose to wrestle with the challenge of childcare, employment and financial burdens following the birth of a baby. My favourite is when it’s offered by the man in the relationship, because it means that, while listening, I get to indulge my secret internal fantasy of scooping him and all the men like him up into a giant net and dropping them into the middle of the sea.
Oh, her salary barely covers the childcare that you apparently have nothing to do with? Thanks for that, Brian, you smarmy git.
Repeat after me: The cost of childcare isn’t the fucking responsibility of the mother.
Now, I know how maths works (and I’m a girl!). I know that when you add two salaries together and take away childcare fees and repayments on a car he mostly gets to drive, you end up with the same figure no matter which column you subtract it from. But there’s a subtle difference between assuming that the partnership ends up with only, say, twenty dollars more overall and assuming that, after childcare fees are paid, the mother ends up with only twenty dollars more overall.
Making childcare the emotional and financial responsibility of the partnered mother alone doesn’t just further distance men from the responsibility of raising children, it fundamentally disadvantages women by keeping them out of the workforce, threatening their superannuation payments later on and denying them the ability to live a life beyond their identity as a mother. It disadvantages children, because it helps to reinforce a society in which those things are the automatic domain of women, thus repeating the cycle ad infinitum. Women who are kept out of the workforce are more likely to suffer later on, particularly if their relationships dissolve.
But, like all issues, this is one made comprehensively worse when class and racial oppression are introduced. Women from low-income backgrounds and/or women of colour (especially Aboriginal women) face enormous oppression in Australia, not to mention the very real threat that their children will be taken away from them. It’s just an extra layer of shit on a thick shit sandwich.
As long as women are considered the ‘natural’ caregivers for children, we’ll be expected to sacrifice more in order to have them and to be grateful for that sacrifice. This is what allows unequal domestic and economic arrangements to persist, fundamentally challenging women’s right to individual autonomy and freedom. As if there are no benefits to a woman working other than financial ones, as if she needs to justify her desire to work in the sense of cost versus gain, as if it would be something she would only want to do in order to benefit financially, and as if it’s her responsibility alone to cover those costs. The rates of Australian women working part time are among the highest in the world, with more than one child destabilising paid employment even further, to the point where many women feel obliged to opt out altogether. And here’s a sobering fact for you: average Australian women with super retire with around 42 percent of the superannuation of men, and one-third of us retire with no super at all.
In the toxic dumpster fire that is our patriarchal world, women are still expected to be the best at, and most capable of assuming, caregiving roles, like being teachers, childcare workers, nurses and wives. It’s surely just a very interesting coincidence that these roles are often underpaid, undermined and underappreciated. When social conditioning also instructs us to believe women do these jobs because a) we’re just better at them and b) we love them so much we would do them for free, it becomes even easier to ignore the huge responsibility they actually represent (not to mention to dismiss the massive favour women do society in general by relieving it of the responsibility of that burden).
So, what’s the solution?
In my own home, having open lines of c
ommunication has been hugely rewarding. My partner and I have ongoing conversations about how we can model equality to our son, from having set weekdays in which one or the other of us acts as primary parent to making sure he sees both of us doing things like vacuuming, washing clothes and cleaning the kitchen. I’m not afraid to have endless discussions about our domestic dynamic, even though I find it boring and frustrating most of the time. Unfortunately, this seems to be largely why women in hetero partnerships just throw their hands up and conform to gendered domestic expectations—it’s too tiring and dull to keep having the same arguments over and over.
But we have to keep pushing for these things. Look at Sweden, where parents are entitled to 480 days of paid parental leave after the arrival of a child. For just over a year, parents are paid nearly 80 percent of their wage, with the remaining ninety days paid at a flat rate. Parents are also allowed to reduce their working hours by up to 25 percent until the child turns eight. Notice I said ‘parents’ and not just ‘mother’. In Sweden, each parent is entitled to 240 days of the 480 days of paid leave, with ninety days reserved exclusively for each parent. A parent can give 150 days of their 240-day entitlement to the other parent, but the ninety-day reserve is non-transferable. So in your basic heterosexual relationship, men are supported to take three months off work to be the primary carer for their kid or kids while the mum goes back to work. And in Sweden, the men do. Imagine if we had a similar model of care here in Australia. It would go a long way towards dismantling archaic ideas around what women’s true purpose is.
Paid paternity leave is just as important as paid maternity leave, not just because men who are thrust into the responsibility of being primary parents gain firsthand insight into what’s actually required in the day-to-day care of children but also because it models empathetic masculinity from day dot. I cannot stress to you enough how important building empathy is in the fight against gender inequality. Men are just as capable of caring for children as women, and it’s imperative that children see men in this role if we are to disrupt the sexist lessons that take root in childhood and can morph into full-blown misogyny later on.
I want my child to see value in extending empathy and care to people beyond himself. I want him to consider the gentle care of children to be as much a masculine trait as a feminine one, and for him to value the work that women do both in and out of the home. I want him to reject the bullshit, dangerous notion that women exist to amplify the greatness of his own life. We exist in our own right, and our potential for success isn’t conditional on helping to give men like him a free ride.
The lessons taught to boys and girls about who does what in the home are inextricably linked to the roles they feel entitled to assume later in life. What is made easy for boys to ‘get away with’ might not seem like that big a deal when you’re talking about a five-year-old, but it becomes a much larger deal when that five-year-old becomes a grown man with expectations of what the world either owes him or will allow him to escape punishment for. When there are teenage boys who still sleazily demand that girls and women ‘get back in the kitchen’ to ‘make me a sandwich’ as a means of putting those girls and women in their proper place, then we are still battling against a deeply embedded, learned culture of sexism.
No, these aren’t just harmless jokes. Even if individual boys and men don’t think they mean it this way, what they’re buying into is the misogynist idea that women are subservient to them. It’s a silencing tool meant to disempower the women being targeted. Most of these men will have been birthed and raised by women. Many of them will go on to marry women and possibly start families of their own. But when the world itself remains fundamentally unequal and sexist, and the essential economic work performed by women is rendered meaningless and therefore invisible, this is what it will always come back to whenever those men find themselves being challenged by mere girls.
Get back in the kitchen, bitch. Where you belong.
3
GIRLS ON FILM
I wasn’t a particularly outdoorsy child. While other kids seemed to have energy to burn riding their bikes up and down the street or playing organised sports (Sidenote: Why?), I spent most of my free time reading The Babysitters Club and playing Barbies in my room (which really just involved making Barbie and Ken do sex). Occasionally, I would hang out in the living room and re-create scenes from the 1985 movie Return to Oz, a terrifying follow-up to L. Frank Baum’s classic tale that begins with Dorothy being institutionalised and almost subjected to electric shock therapy and then goes on to feature talking chickens, a gang of crazed hybrid men called the Wheelers who rolled around on all fours, and an evil princess named Mombi with a cabinet full of women’s heads that she wore interchangeably depending on who she wanted to be that day. It scared the shit out of me, so naturally I watched it whenever I had the opportunity. What can I say? My parents didn’t keep a close eye.
Fairuza Balk’s Dorothy Gale seemed more relatable to me than Judy Garland’s turn as the ruby-slippered heroine back in 1939. It seemed conceivable to me that Balk’s Dorothy and I could be friends or, you know, maybe even the same person. For years, I gazed hopefully into the mirror in my bedroom and told myself that, if I just believed harder, Ozma would appear to me just as she had to Balk’s Dorothy at the movie’s end.
Spoiler: she didn’t.
I was a lonely girl with a big imagination, and I looked for heroes and adventure wherever I could find them. Every week, my mother would drive us to a video store packed with floor-to-ceiling racks of pirated movies. New movies came in all the time, but there were titles we went back to again and again. Our favourites included The Goonies, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Dream a Little Dream, The Princess Bride, The Lost Boys, Spaceballs, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, White Water Summer, Back to the Future, Explorers, Stand By Me, Labyrinth, The NeverEnding Story, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Teen Witch and Wayne’s World.
You might have noticed that most of these movies are stories about boys and treasure, or boys and aliens, or boys and computers, or boys and time travel, or boys saving the world or, in the case of The NeverEnding Story, boys and a giant flying dragon that looks like a dog. I didn’t question this when I was a kid, because why would you question something that has formed the backdrop of your entire life? They were movies, I watched them, and I went to sleep at night pretending I was in them.
But as much as I loved slipping The Goonies into the VHS player and lying back in a beanbag with a packet of microwave popcorn on my lap (as children, we considered the advent of instant popcorn to be right up there with landing on the moon and air-conditioned cars), when I reflect on the experience now I realise something was missing. I could pretend I was Dorothy in Return to Oz or Sarah in Labyrinth. I could imagine myself as Teen Witch’s Louise. I was in awe of Sarah Connor, that total badass who, like the best heroines, liberates herself from the prison in which men have trapped her and goes on to save the world. But these four were really the only leading ladies I had on high rotation. There were girls living in the other worlds stacked in the video cabinet, but they were sidekicks or romantic rewards for the boys and men whose actions dominated the plot.
If I learned anything during the formative years of my childhood, it was that if a girl or woman was ever allowed to be the hero, it also meant that most of the time she could be literally the only woman in the film. I can’t overstate how much this has impacted my cultural understanding as an adult of women’s place in the world—so what has the flipside of that done for my male contemporaries who grew up watching an endless stream of men dominating stories, embarking on hero’s quests and teaming up with other men as they plotted to either take over or save the world? Toxic masculinity exercises itself in multiple forms, not all of them obvious. Men can be ostensibly ‘good’, but the assumption that the world’s stages exist to tell their stories first and foremost is just another way for them to help keep women in the wings.
Fun fact: I went through the IMDb e
ntries for the films listed above, which represent a good cross-section of movies that kids all over the world grew up with in the 1980s and 1990s, and counted all the parts credited and uncredited to male and female actors, because that is the kind of super-cool and way-fun person I am. What I found was depressing, but completely unsurprising. Strap yourselves in, folks, because we’re in for a stats party!
Across these sixteen movies, a total of 521 roles were assigned to male actors compared to 179 roles for female actors. Percentage-wise, that means that in the movies I watched on repeat as a child, women account for only one-third of the characters or bit parts.
I broke it down further to compare the gender balance of performers across each title. Women account for around a quarter of the characters in each movie—even in movies supposedly about a girl and her quest (a rarity in films of the 1980s and 1990s). For example, Labyrinth tells the story of a bookish girl named Sarah who wishes her annoying baby brother away then has to travel to the land of the Goblin King to retrieve him. It’s an incredible movie, full of magical Jim Henson puppetry, literal twists and turns, and a healthy serving of David Bowie’s nutsack in a pair of spandex pants. But the cast of this story about a girl’s quest is still infuriatingly weighted in favour of men—sixty-two to twenty-eight to be exact.
You could argue that Labyrinth should be made an exception because so many of the characters are actually puppets. Does it really count if the majority of people operating them are dudes? Well, yeah, it does actually. Not only because it speaks to the gender gap that exists in terms of employment (as in who gets to count themselves in it) but also because workplaces dominated by any one demographic—be that gender, race or, I dunno, people who wear clown shoes to work—is not representative of the world we live in and/or the diverse range of folks who occupy it. And the entertainment industry seeks to tell stories about the world we live in and its inhabitants. That’s impossible to do accurately when you have one demographic of people—white, straight, cisgender men—in charge of deciding what matters and what doesn’t.
Boys Will Be Boys Page 7
