The Oppression of Women as Women

The heaviness of wo cut backforce as wowork force PHIL 202 Assignment 1 26/01/2012 The elderly society in which we await has sy rootatically oppressed women for centuries. It is non until exceedingly recent history, with the Womens Liberation Movement, that women have been capable to take substantive strides towards a more equal and just society. We have come a long panache since that cartridge clip, women can now vote, work, practice politics and harp independently of men it inspectms as though we have come actually close to the equality that we have worked so hard to achieve. However that literary argument has proven to be incredibly false.If we examine Marilyn Fryes metaphor of the gentlewomilitary personnel confine and apply it to the changes that have been brought upon our society we can substantiate how the oppression of women not only still exists, but has gained new dimensions. By inspecting the f be women have made to integrate into patriarchal society we can see that we have succeeded to remove some of the wires that have held us back from escaping the c come on, provided the removal of these wires has added new responsibilities for the female gender and it is these new responsibilities that have added solely new wires to our cages.By examining Marilyn Fryes article Oppression we will examine wherefore she believes that women are oppressed as women (Frye, p. 16) and why it is that, even though men face barriers and difficulties, she believes that they are not oppressed as men (Frye, p. 16) Whilst study Fryes article I was truly disagreeing with the points she was making. How can she state that men are not also oppressed in some manner they have the burden of bideing their families, they cannot express any emotions without seeming weak, and they foundert have the choice of spending as much duration with their children?These circumstances made me certain that men too were oppressed, further in a different government agency t han women. As I neared the end of the article I came to a sudden realization the opinions I had formed were a produce of my microscopic view of the situation and I was not able to see that the burdens men faced were only barriers held in place in prepare to preserve the patriarchal society that has been created and they were not faced with systematic oppression. In order to illustrate this point we can take a carriage at an example from the side of two opposing genders. The workplace seems to be following the path f equality, even though certain issues abide (men earning more than women on average, men holding higher positions etc) they seem to be miniscule problems compared to the ones faced by the women decades before us. The wire on the cage that we would have named ability to pursue a career seems to be a rusty weak wire that is falling apart, no longer equal to(p) of holding women back. It may seem as if this is a victory, merely, the oppressing society we live in has co rrespondd that the destruction of that single wire has been acknowledged and replaced by a new strong and sturdy set of wires in order to ensure systematic oppression.Now that women are able to work they are perceived as lazy and old-fashioned if they dont, however if they do work they are perceived as being intimidating, bad mothers and sometimes masculine. Therefore it seems as if the situation where a women is perceived as hard-working, intelligent, ambitious and modern as well as feminine and an excellent mother and homemaker does not exist, yet it is actively expected of them if any of the aforementioned characteristics are not present she will be given a dreadful dog by society.It is clear that the advancements we have made have lead to an solely new dimension of oppression. If we now continue on to examine the spot of a man in the workplace we can see that they do face barriers but they are in absolutely no way systematically oppressed. If we examine a single barrier they face, for example, the burden of having to game their family, as this is the norm with regards to sex roles. The man must go to work and must earn money to pay the mortgage, to feed their children and to buy his married muliebrity the dishwasher she has been nagging him to get.This is a responsibility that he is expected to fulfill, however he is no way oppressed. In order to obtain an fit job a man may go to school, earn a degree and attain a stable and well-paying job. He will find this job with much more ease than a woman with the corresponding qualifications and will get payed more than the aforesaid women. Being a man will be an advantage to his search and will in no way place any obstacles in his way, as opposed to woman whose gender is significantly attached to whatever disadvantages and deprivations she suffers, be they great or small. (Frye, p. 6) By obtaining a job, he has now earned the labels of intelligent, ambitious, and hard-working of course, in our age and time a woman might be able to guide all of these labels as well. However the labels describing her femininity and home-life might not be as pleasant.What about a man? He is now sustenance his family therefore he is now masculine and worthy, he is also seen as a good father as he is sustenance his children (the fact that he might not spend an adequate amount of time with them is of no importance as in our society financial support takes precedent of emotional support. Therefore our society has given him the burden of supporting his family but we can see that this is only a barrier go down in place in order to for men to be able to exclude women from political and economic life and therefore control it. It may be a disadvantage in some ways, however it is of import to recognize that it is a necessary disadvantage in order to offer control and can in no way be denominate as oppression.The simple term oppression must be mute because without understanding its rightful meaning it is m uch misused, and sometimes not innocently (Frye, p. 0) We must come to the understanding that men do face obstacles and barriers however they do not face the systematic oppression that women do as a result of their gender. Of course there are oppressed men living all around the world, but this oppression does not stem from the simple fact of their sex but many other factors such as socio-economic situation, sexual orientation, political situations etc Simply put, there are thousands, by chance millions of men around the world who are in no way oppressed, but not one single woman because her gender is the delimitate characteristic for her oppression.