(Trigger Warning)
“A rat in a maze is free
to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze,” (Atwood, p.165).
-The Handmaid's Tale
When a rat is in a maze it believes
it is free. It thinks because it can move around it is no longer in a cage,
when in reality it is still trapped. Sexism has been a continuous maze in our
society, and folks, it is still here. We are still holding up those elaborate
walls to the kingdom patriarchy and just because we almost had a female
president doesn’t mean woman are equal, it means women are just now being
allowed to move around. Pharr (2001), “Sexism, that system by which women are
kept subordinate to men, is kept in place by three powerful weapons designed to
cause or threaten women with pain and loss,” (p. 143). These weapons include
economics, violence, and homophobia, (Pharr, 2001).
Holding
up Sexism
Keep
wages, education, and training opportunities scarce and withhold adequate
paying jobs with the excuse that women are just not capable of filling them. Reinforce
the illusion of equality and scarcity, explain there simply just isn’t enough to
go around.
“Better never means better for everyone. It
always means worse, for some,” (Atwood, p.211).
-The Handmaid's Tale
“Blame
the economic victim and keep the victim’s self-esteem low through invisibility
and distortion within the media and education, (Pharr, 2001). Continue the
threat of mental and physical violence lurking around every corner to keep fear
in the back of her mind, and the conformation of dominance and superiority in
his. Demand irony, and demand that a woman must protect herself from the
violence of men, with a man of her own, and if she rejects this, label her as a
refusal of man and normality, as inferior, a bitch, as abnormal, as a freak,
as a lesbian. One prisoner to another.
References
Atwood,
M. (1985). New York: Anchor Books.
Pharr,
S. (2001). Homophobia as a Weapon of Sexism. In Race, Class, and Gender
in the United States (5th ed., pp.
143-152). New York: Worth.
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