Sexism has been defmed (Humm 1989) as ‘a social relationship in which males denigrate females’. Like racism, on which the word is based, it is a form of prejudice.
Sexism is deeply engrained, and hard to get at. It often requires a real change in the whole attitude structure of the person before it can shift. So this is more long-term work. Sexism is often based on low self-esteem, so that the man in question is able to boost himself up by putting women down, or so it seems to him. So the whole pattern of low self-esteem has to change before sexism can go, and this is a long-term therapeutic operation.
However, all these things are kept in place by social assumptions about the male ego and how it should be. It is often stated in articles and books (Connell 1987) that because of hegemonic masculinity the male ego needs a lot of support and boosting (and this job is of course mainly done by women) in order to keep it functioning at all. This seems to be the case. One of the most striking statements I came across in the early days of the men’s movement was a quote from Keith Paton (later Mothersson) in a newsletter which said—‘The healthy male ego is oppressive and wrong.’ This insight sounds condemnatory, but unless we see how normal (in the statistical sense) sexism is, we can never deal with it.
A substantial body of feminist research has documented sexism in the media, for example in the use of sex-role stereotyping where women are always mothers and domestic workers. Feminism is always anti-sexist, but the anti-sexist men’s movement, which appeared to be growing in the 1970s and early 1980s, has now almost disappeared in the West (Rowan 2004), although there have been anti-violence movements in other countries. The reason for this may be that we all underestimated the importance of the Patripsych—an internal constellation of patriarchal patterns. This is a structure inside, which corresponds to oppressive structures outside, each supporting the other. The internal structure arises out of a set of movements towards, against and away from a symbolic patriarchal figure or set of figures, and is held out of consciousness by the usual defence mechanisms, this time in the cultural unconscious. The tendency for men is to have unconscious ‘against’ patterns, with idealised glorified images of aggressive mastery; and the tendency for women is to have unconscious ‘towards’ patterns, with the glorification of morbid dependency as love, motherhood, etc.; while the tendency for both may be to have unconscious ‘away from’ patterns, glorified as private living, religions of withdrawal, etc. All these unconscious patterns would then be seen as defences against messages coming from the Patripsych (Rowan 1997).
Now if we see one of the key political issues as patriarchy (or to put it more generally, dominance cultures), and one of the key psychological issues as the Patripsych, anything we do on one level will feed into whatever we do on another. Patriarchy forms a good lead in to all the problems of domination and submission in our social system; I have spelt this out in some detail elsewhere (Rowan 1987). And the Patripsych forms a good lead in to all the problems of internal self-oppression which affect us most inwardly. This is similar to what Hogie Wyckoff (1975) has called the Pig Parent—an internalised form of cultural oppression. Most importantly, the insights we get on one level can be applied directly to the other level.
We can do serious work on the Patripsych using the group workshop methods of psychotherapy as outlined by Hogie Wyckoff (1975), Sheila Ernst and Lucy Goodison (1981) and others, and in this way can get a lot of feeling for the kind of work we are going to have to do to change patriarchy on a large scale. We shall get a much better sense of what is possible, what is important, what works and what doesn’t. And as we do this, we can start to find new ways of working, which do more justice to the fact that the person within the person is the person behind the person. Rowan has done a lot of work with men on male consciousness, which bears directly on these points (Rowan 1997). And there is no reason why we can’t think of many new ways of working, once we have the basic insight. The whole thing opens up. As the feminist Laura Brown succinctly puts it: ‘I do not see it as either a- or anti-political to attend to internal, nonconscious manifestations of oppressive phenomena’ (Brown 1992:244)
Similarly, we can start to look at other things in the same way. We can look at situations, and see from a dialectical point of view that in order to understand the situation, we have to look at the situation behind the situation—history, class interests, alliances, power structures, economic resources, etc.—and at the situation within the situation—interpersonal relations, norms, shared experience, attitudes, etc.—and then see that the situation behind the situation is the situation within the situation. But this would take us too far away from our central concerns here.
References and further reading
Brown, L.S. (1992) ‘While waiting for the revolution: the case for a lesbian feminist psychotherapy’, Feminism and Psychology, 2 (2): 239–53.
Connell, R. (1987) Gender and Power, Cambridge: Polity.
Ernst, S. and Goodison, L. (1981) In Our Own Hands, London: The Women’s Press.
Humm. M. (1989) The Dictionary ofFeminist Theory, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Rowan, J. (1987) The Horned God: Feminism and Men as Wounding and Healing, London: Routledge.
—(1997) Healing the Male Psyche: Therapy as Initiation, London: Routledge.
—(2004) ‘Achilles Heel and the anti-sexist men’s movement’, Psychotherapy and Politics International, 3 (1):58–71.
Wyckoff, H. (1975) ‘Problem-solving groups for women’, in C.Steiner (ed.) Readings in Radical Psychiatry, New York: Grove Press.
