Cross posted at Pink Scare.
Scholars have taken many approaches to this question, usually ending up talking about the division of labor. Sex difference and inequality had to be enforced so women would raise a work force for us and not ask for any pay. And her children would be good workers, because she did "woman" right and taught them right. In other words, so that they would provide the domestic labor necessary to continue the cycle of labor in the public sphere (see Angela Davis ). The capitalist needed domestic servants so they created good man and good woman by promoting the bourgeois morality.
This is an answer which has always made sense to me, but I've never seen it as a complete explanation of patriarchy as we see it today, since it doesn't even begin to capture capitalism as we know it today. So many women work outside the home now, for instance, and capitalism relies on that public labor. And in my life, patriarchy has been less about telling me where to work (or not to work), than about telling me what to buy.
Anyone who has taken a marketing class, or worked in marketing, or watched Mad Men (I've done all three) has heard the phrase: Who is your target market? The identification of your market is more than just an identification of a demographic. It's what tells you how to sell your product. If your target market is boys between 12 and 18, you're going to make this edgy, you'll use black and green colors, and you'll play some rock music in the background, and you'll portray the use of your product as an act of rebellion. Yeah, those boys will eat that up. But where did all this knowledge about which group likes what comes from? I argue that advertising itself created it. Sure. certain demographics may have leaned certain ways to begin with, but adveritising made them lean harder in the old categories and made them start to lean in categories of difference that never existed before.
Advertisements are my daily lesson in how to be a woman. Most feminists have known that advertisements are a significant medium for gendering and outright sexism, and criticism of representation is incredibly easy to find on feminist blogs and in feminist books today (see Sarah Haskins' "Target Women," which is really the best of the best of this criticism).
The theory behind this type of criticism is that advertisements take lazy routes and rely on offensive stereotypes to sell their products and boycotts and letter writing can show the companies in question that is not a successful way to sell. What I haven't heard, however, is the argument that not only does consumer culture rely on sexist stereotypes to reproduce itself, but that in fact, it creates the illusions of gender and sex difference so that it can create its own target markets. If it weren't for collective identity, marketers wouldn't know what to do. Marketing isn't a reliance on old stereotypes, but the creation of target markets.
I also contend that this is probably a fairly new phenomenon. In the 1800s, people knew they needed textiles and knew they needed any number of other products that could be produced en masse because of the industrial revolution. Marketing was as simple as making the product known, having a good price, and making that product easily accessible. In fact, this held true for the most part up until the 20th century. Technology and competition within that beautiful "free market" made products that were less obviously necessary or not at all necessary. Marketing became an effort to convince someone that he/she, in particular, needed this product.
Think of how many types of woman were created in advertisements. Even if you look at the division of labor that Davis and other radical feminists point at as the link between capitalism and patriarchy, you see what advertising has done to that. Being a good mother and housewife is a hell of a lot more complicated than it was in the 1800s. It involves owning all the best housekeeping tools, all the Baby Einstein tapes, all the most nutritious food for your family, it involves object after object that is supposed to save you time so you can dedicate more time to being a perfect caregiver. But the real change is that it's not just domestic woman who has been developed by adveritising. This goes far beyond the division of labor. She's a sexual woman. She needs clothes. She needs to groom herself regularly. She needs makeup and razors and exfoliants.
I could make a similar argument for all the modern men that have been created by advertising (the guy who needs his man cave, the guy who just wants to drink beer and not listen, the guy who would rather eat a cheeseburger from Carl's Jr. than take his wife out somewhere nice). The collective identity formation through advertising occurs on both sides, but of course, the different collective identities being shaped by advertising leave men with more power than women.
Then it's that reliance on the shame on not doing woman right that originated in the division of labor that makes these proposed identities stick. Someone said that's what woman does. Everyone saw it. I must do it now. And I'll need money to do it. And I'll need to spend money to do it.
On the flip side, this consumer culture means gender guilt becomes class guilt. I'm not only poor but I can't do woman right. Or, because I'm poor, I can't do woman right.
The bottom line here is that the late capitalist system of consumerism has created the need for more complex and detailed gender differences than a simple division of labor requires. And marketing is the actual creation of those differences. It's not only promoting stereotypes, but creating new binaries that never existed before. Advertising, that need for one person to sell another person something so that person can survive, divides us not just into domestic servants and public-sphere workers, to men and women, but into so many other things we didn't even know we could be. We're fit women or we're unfit women. We're yogurt eating women or we're not yogurt eating women. We're coutour or we're not coutour. We're Jackies or we're Marilyns . These aren't naturally occuring categories and they aren't categories that were created by a mere division of labor. They're categories created by the needs of a modern capitalism, and our success in aspiring to the right category has a direct impact on our amount of power in the capitalist system.
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Interesting. This is exactly what I've been thinking about lately but I wouldn't have known how to write it. This makes me glad I don't watch much TV. I don't read many magazines either. I think we underestimate the knowledge and influence of advertisers.
I agree lyndorr. Like my co-blogger at Pink Scare, T, says, corporations spend trillions of dollars on advertisements for a reason. They're effective.
As a historical materialist, I really, really appreciate your concern about this topic! I am so happy to see a sincere interest in identity politics matched up with marxism, which often is side-lined in discussions of identity.
The best place I have seen the "story" of the sexual division of labor as the basis for male domination has to do with conceptualizing women as property in Claude Levi-Strauss's work. Building on that work Luce Irigaray's "Women on the Market" (1978) explains how it takes two men for any woman to have meaning (most notably, the father who sells his daughter, or makes a deal with the future husband, and the man who takes her on as a burden to clothe, house, and feed). Her "work" is to pay for her keep through her ability to reproduce heirs; her contribution is child rearing and making the man viable as he goes into the world to secure his fortune, which legally belongs to him and then his first-born son. Irigary also offers how such a practice creates meaning in women's minds of their own worth and their relationships (competitive for the attention and gifts of men) with each other.
I agree very much with the notion that current advertising and cultural productions reinforce these ideas and are setting new, ugly goals for women and men. The only place where I may diverge on the opinions expressed above is in thinking this only new and not drawing from some bit of the disgusting white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal cesspool that has been bubbling with off gasses for many centuries. This cesspool is the well from which the new targeting is drawn.
Speaking of commodities, women (as historical commodities, bought and sold, and traded on the market) have a very unique relationship with commodity culture. On commodities: "As among signs, value appears only when a relationship has been established. It remains the case that the establishment of relationships cannot be accompanied by the commodities themselves, but depends upon the operation of two exchangers. The exchange value of two signs, to commodities, two women, is a representation of the needs / desires of consumer-exchanger subjects: in no way is it the 'property' of the signs / articles / women themselves."
The pitch nowadays looks like the pitch of yore-- the "target [of / for] women" is to make them BETTER commodities, since that is how they (still) see themselves, if they are conditioned well in patriarchy.
The real question is what "targets" happen to make women "worse" commodities but that women still like. Can I hear it for Birkenstocks and any other thing that typical, patriarchal men do not like us spending money on or owning?
Thanks for engaging with me on this, Liz. Your points are all very fair.
Your last question is interesting: [quote] The real question is what "targets" happen to make women "worse" commodities but that women still like. Can I hear it for Birkenstocks and any other thing that typical, patriarchal men do not like us spending money on or owning? [/quote]
Don't you think there's an extent to which these are advertised as counter-culture commodities, to subvert the obvious fact that it's still women buying things to place their identity? So it might seem like it's a form of resistance to buy commodities that aren't mainstream womanly, but in the end, it's you still forming your identity through commodity culture. It's still the advertiser creating a new target market, or a demographic that didn't exist before the market created a need for its existence.
Also, Liz, you may be interested in a follow-up post my co-blogger T has written:
http://pink-scare.blogspot.com/2009/06/capitalism-consumerism-and-patriarchy.html
Of course, commodity culture, the idea that we are the things we own, is a problem for all of us, men and women. So, I really appreciate your point. Buying more stuff is certainly not the answer, and not buying stuff (cosmetics, hair goo, painful shoes, and uncomfortable clothing, etc.) will not necessarily bring a revolution or utopia but will bring big changes.
There are strange ways (about which I have always felt deeply ambivalent) that women acting as consumers and wage earners throw off the system. When women reach higher paying and more powerful positions, of course, there is a huge element of complicity; however, there is also something of a pain that it strikes with some patriarchal, capitalist men.
For example, the most conservative men with whom I spoke loved that Martha Stewart was sent to prison. Martha is a good example of being at once a capitalist pig and a woman who exploits stereotypical gender difference for her own profit, often leaving women to complain that she set too high a standard for how women should act and be. However, many women loved something about her. They bought power tools and made messes in their homes and engaged their children with it. Just by virtue of her being a woman, catering to something that many women liked, and influencing major companies like Sears and K-Mart to offer certain colors (remember that ubiquitous green?) and items, she was a big threat-- perceived by the men who hated her as being worse than Wal-mart, which merrily bankrupted small towns all over the country. Capitalist men went after her on something they do every day and got a conviction.
While the subversion is not complete, there is something there.
Thanks! This is such fun to talk with people about. I don't get to do it much; everyone scapegoats the historical materialists, even my union!
Nice analysis, made me think of Lacan if I'm remembering correctly - "True power lies with those who define lack."
I love this posting. This stuff is always on my mind. Angela Davis sure does break it down too.
Thanks for the Pink Scare url! It's a great blog!
I'm sorry, I'm confused on the "doing woman right" phrase you use. Does that mean acting the part of a woman correctly or ...doing the right thing to women, as in "doing right by me"?