Re: gender, sex, equality, oppression

On the basis of biological distinctions there have been varying degrees of role distinctions all along.

“All along,” of course, in my viewpoint, gets divided into two periods of our species history, which, altogether, dates back about six million years. It’s during the period of what we call civilization (last five thousand years) that a distinction becomes a problematic inequality. A key early book addressing that was Riane Eisler’s The Chalice and the Blade.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chalice_and_the_Blade

Within the period of civilization: There are more children. Women are more preoccupied with all that entails. Plus, domestic life based in homestead and property becomes more complex. It becomes the realm of women.

Meanwhile, social productivity becomes a critical issue. It becomes more burdensome, more strenuous. With civilization there is a work machine and a war machine. The extent to which society comes to value productivity and militarism (for growth, expansion, accumulation, conquest or defense) is significant and problematic.

So: Men as highly valued warriors, workers, zeks.

In his Against His-story, Against Leviathan, to describe the condition of the laborer within the social-productive megamachine, Fredy Perlman chose the word ‘zek’ — a word meaning gulag prisoner in Solzhenitsyn’s work. This was to emphasize that civilization has been a labor camp from its origins — positioned in a polarity with primal community. At one end of the polarity stands organic community: a simple sustainability; an organism, in the form of a circle; a web woven into the fabric of nature. At the other end is a development-oriented productive machine: no longer a circle but, instead, a pyramid of hierarchies; no longer a web, but a grid expanding the territory of the inorganic.

The latter became the realm of men. It has been hugely problematic. It’s perverse, and yet it’s been the more-valued, more-aggrandized realm.

This situation resulted in an inequality that feminism has sought to address. The first wave came to focus on the right to vote. After that was won the first wave dissipated. The second wave, during the nineteen-sixties and seventies, broadened the critique and the aspirations in regard to equality. The recent third wave went deeper in terms of considering issues related to gender construction and gender expression.

* * * *

There’s a tendency to consider the gender-role distinction of women as universally oppressive and male gender expression as universally problematic:

https://juliecohenauthor.medium.com/yes-it-is-all-men-642172b959d2

It can be hoped that there will be a post-feminist wave that will recognize the extent to which the vast majority of people are afflicted by a reality wherein a social layer of elite “alpha” males is privileged. A sorry consequence is that many of the non-alpha males are encouraged to identify with them and emulate them. The actuality is that the historic roles, hierarchies, and gender expectations are oppressive for most of the men.