Misogyny in North American Society

The purpose of this research is to examine the proposition that North American society is deeply misogynist. The plan of the research will be to set forth, with reference to a modern culture informed by Christian tradition, the effects of misogyny on women relative to their self-identity, their bodies, their relations with other women, and how sexuality itself is understood and affected by it, and then to discuss whether and to what extent misogyny may be internalized and practiced by women in the modern culture.

In recent years, there appears to have been an increase of interest in, discourse about, and indeed confusion over the status and changeability of social roles of both men and women in all cultures. Research into socially determined sex roles of men and women has been a part of this increase. By and large, research studies appear to indicate that, even in the midst of change, traditional patterns and perceptions of appropriate social behavior persist where sex roles are concerned. Indeed, there is evidence that, despite certain shifts in the public perception of men and women in society, the establishment of conventional, socially approved sex roles begins almost from infancy and continues into old age.

The importance of religious authority informing social sanction of approved sex roles cannot be overestimated. Nor can the religious sanction for biases favoring male dominance of society. Dominant culture has historically made difficult the project of asserting wome

en self-interest but must find moral satisfaction only by indirection and more, must find a way not to hurt anybody (or at least anybody else), must find a way to make a decision within the boundaries of religiously sanctioned social norms. The evidence from Secker and Gilligan is that the power and history of dominant culture, whether secular or religious, implies a subsumption of women's prerogatives by their environmental norms. Secker says that ideas about women's proper nature and role need to be "reconstructed" by distinguishing "between the mythological level of pre-ethical symbolism and the ethical level of relationships and choice" This is another way of saying that the clues that myth offers to cultural constructions and cultural meanings simply need to be revisited. However, the difficulty of including the moral claims of women in any project of reconstructing formative myth and deriving ethical systems from it--particularly religious myth--can be seen inasmuch as the available text of myth seems to reflect a well established cultural bias against such claims. Consider the biblical episode of the angels and the men of Sodom visiting Lot and Lot's flight from the cities of the plain (Gen. 18) is one case in point. Four

Category: History - M