After I submitted this Wespeak at the end of last semester and it was never printed, but I feel it is still relevant. I want to respond to Alison LeBlanc and Stephanie Schwartz’s quote “Please do not compare ‘CEOS and Secretary Hoes’ to the KKK and the senseless murder of thousands of innocent people based on their racial association. There is a clear distinction between say, dressing up as a KKK member, and dressing up as a CEO.” Although from a strictly external point of view this quote makes sense, it ignores and devalues the immense sufferings incurred in a patriarchal world by innocent people based upon their GENDER association. Historically, men have functioned as oppressors of women-identified individuals, producing and reproducing the image of themselves as normative and dominant. As a result of this tactic, women have constantly been labeled and treated as the inferior other. Thus, this gender binary, which as in all binaries requires an unequal distribution of power, has constructed a hierarchal system in which women are relegated to the base of the pyramid. Inarguably, the primary goal of the oppressor is to ensure the perpetuation of his power, and the mode by which to achieve this is to maintain steady control over the oppressed. In order to reach this aim, the oppressed must be kept in constant fear, threatened with bodily and/or psychological harm by their subjugator, in order to preclude them from developing a hope or sense or spirit that could motivate them to attempt to change their lot. As a means of preventing women from demanding their fair share of the power distribution, men have employed a multitude of tactics which have often brought about the torment and “murder of thousands of people” based upon their status as women. The examples I could give of this practice are endless, but here I will offer three.
1. The selective abortion of female fetuses in China, a country which due to overpopulation has limited every family to one child. According to government figures, as a product of this process, 119 Chinese boys are born for every 100 girls.
2. The 1400 American women who die each year as a result of being beat to death by their violent husbands.
3. The rape and murder of roughly 340 women factory workers in Juarez, Mexico. The male-dominated government is doing its best to hide these murders, and there is suspicion that members of the police force have actually been involved in the killings.
By no means is my primary reason for writing this article to self-identify as a “man-hater,” which hopefully you will understand is not the case. Nor is my intention to call for the dissolution of fraternities. Instead, I simply wanted to explain why it is problematic to oppose parties and institutions (and by these I do not mean actual frat houses—it’s figurative) built on a foundation of racial oppression but to condone those signifying gender oppression. If we as individuals, as universities, as a world, are going to fight oppression of all kinds, it should NOT be “alright for a fraternity member to speak his mind without fear of being called a sexist.” We don’t support parties boasting the domination of one particular race over another—let’s do the same with gender.
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