The term "sexism" was coined in the late 1960s in
the context of the civil rights struggle in the United States. Many young women
found that supposedly ‘progressive' anti-racist and left-wing groups, as well
as anti-war, new left, and student movements in North America, Europe, and
Australia, were not immune from the ‘feminine mystique' identified by Betty
Friedan, and that they were expected to act as sexually available secretaries
and housewives rather than equal partners or decision-makers.
Men's behavior was labelled as 'sexist' to emphasize the
political gravity of women's demands and complaints, implying that prejudice,
discrimination, and ill treatment based on gender were just as important and
unacceptable as those based on race.
In the decades after, the terms 'sexism' and 'sexist' have
proven to be extremely helpful shorthand for describing a wide variety of
ideas, attitudes, and behavior that reflect, sustain, or produce an environment
or results that disadvantage one sex, generally women.
Examples include deliberate acts of discrimination,
intimidation, or exclusion, such as refusing to hire or promote women or
sexually harassing them on the street, as well as the uncritical acceptance of
gender stereotypes, such as boys don't cry and women are naturally suited to
housework, and the use of non-inclusive language, such as referring to all
potential students at a school open day as "he," Sexism, like racism,
isn't only about individual acts of discrimination; it can also take
institutional forms:
An organization may be full of well-intentioned individuals
who want to treat everyone fairly, but it may also be riddled with beliefs that
favor males over women.
For example, when choosing a candidate for a parliamentary
election, political activists may search for someone with trade union or
commercial expertise, while overlooking the fact that establishing a play
program for local children also requires politically relevant abilities.
Computer algorithms learn from people's prior patterns of behavior,
thus institutional sexism can now exist without explicit human participation;
for example, adverts for particularly well-paid or typically masculine
positions have been targeted to males on Facebook and Google.
Although the term sexism is most often used to ‘call out'
individual acts of bad or inappropriate behavior, it can also help us
understand their larger social context:
To describe our society as sexist is to see the connections
between different instances of discrimination, not just to say that some people
do or think discriminatory things.
Laura Bates, who created the online ‘Everyday Sexism'
initiative in 2012 in reaction to her own low-level, negative experiences, such
as being yelled at on the street and grabbed on a bus, obviously saw this link.
The steady drip-drip-drip of sexism, sexualization, and
objectification is linked to the assumption of ownership and control over
women's bodies, and the background noise of harassment and disrespect is linked
to the assertion of power that is violence and racial profiling, according to
Bates.
Bates was able to clarify her findings and, by defining the
problem, take the initial steps in confronting it by labelling a variety of
different situations as "sexism." She believes that grassroots
activism is critical in changing the culture of sexism, and she worked with
others to encourage companies whose Facebook ads appeared on pages that
appeared to condone or encourage sexual violence to leave the platform. After
fifteen advertisers, including Nissan, left, Facebook promised several changes,
including improved moderator training.
The term 'sexism' is still frequently used today, and it
plays an important role in shaping a worldview that represents and expresses
many women's experiences, as well as informing practical feminist politics.
It can be difficult for a woman to use the word without
being stereotyped as an old-fashioned, pessimistic, humorless whiner who
invents issues where none exist and sees the world through a distorted,
feminist lens. This implies that, although silence or involvement in sexist
society generally goes unnoticed, sexism criticism is frequently penalized,
resulting in a situation in which "when we name what we come up against,
we come up against what we label."
Sara Ahmed argues that, in this setting, female academics
have frequently stopped doing the hard and often fruitless job of detecting
sexism wherever they find it, and that as a result, "sexism appears to
have "fallen out" of feminist theoretical vocabulary."
In some ways, academic apathy toward the term may appear to
be a good thing, because feminist academic theory can appear almost
deliberately obscure at times, a way of signaling membership in an elite group
whose language is impenetrable to "outsiders," a category that includes
most black and/or working-class women.
Feminist theory, on the other hand, may, at its finest,
bring seemingly disparate ideas together and infuse greater rigor into public
debates.
My impression is that the term "sexism" has become
almost too simple to use, and that it is being thrown around to the point that
it is losing its potency; it's possible that a lack of academic interest
contributes to its seeming lack of analytical or critical edge.
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