Strict gender roles and capitalism

This week I listened to an extremely interesting podcast series called “Gender War Games,” part of the Unladylike podcast, which is an all around excellent listen. Cristen Conger and her guests Marcelle Kosman and Hannah McGregor beautifully explained how strict gender divisions (masculine vs. feminine) serve to prop up capitalism and it gets at the heart of why I bristle at being categorized as “feminine.” I don’t like that word or feel that way; I never have and it’s a label that feels manipulative to me.

Here are my takeaways: Capitalism is designed to exploit the working class (create as few jobs as possible, and pay them as little as possible) for the benefit of the top few (so they can earn as much as possible). Convincing women that their uterus dictates a natural desire to make a family and perform unpaid domestic labor and convincing men that their masculine identity is inextricably tied to money, crushing amounts of work, and ownership of said unpaid women props up this system perfectly.

Capitalism has also somehow convinced people that it’s FINE, even GREAT for the vast majority of the wealth to be concentrated in the hands of the few at the top, because hey, with enough crushing work plus the right skin color and genitalia, YOU TOO could be one of those people! You always have a chance to come out on top! Men, just pull yourselves up by your bootstraps, or if you’re a woman, attach yourself to someone’s bootstraps!

Nevermind that the system is designed to prevent upward mobility. There’s no such thing as the wealth trickling down, that’s been soundly proven in this country. Those at the top are too greedy and they trickle nothing, they just keep it for themselves.

I’m not completely anti-capitalist; it does have its positives, but there are checks and balances that could be put into place to make it far more equitable, so that wealth gap is not so astronomical and no one is left to starve. We have SO many resources in this country, PLENTY to go around for everyone, but that’s not the way things are being divvied up.

(As a tangent, this episode also used the phrase “crunchy to alt-right pipeline” which I had not heard before but I find fascinating, as “crunchy” is a term I may have lightly used to describe myself in the past — I eat a lot of veggies! I like to go barefoot! I try to conserve natural resources! — but oh man has it ever been co-opted by white supremacy. YIKES. The fringe on either end of the political spectrum begin to sound like one and the same because that spectrum is a big ol’ circle, folks.)

At any rate, the text below is taken from the podcast transcript and edited a little bit for clarity.

*****

How does gender maintain the status quo for capitalism?

If your economy exploits the labor of the majority for the wealth of a very, very small minority, then your country cannot provide enough living-wage jobs for everybody in the country.

So one useful thing you can do is convince 50% of the population that it is natural for them to probably not want to have careers.

If you could start right from the get-go convincing 50% of the population that they are natural caretakers, that they’re more comfortable in the domestic realm, that having children is a definitional part of their whole identity, their purpose on Earth, then inevitably they are going to take on the majority of the labor in the domestic realm.

And all of that labor doesn’t have to be paid for because it’s natural, right? This isn’t real labor actually. None of this counts, so nobody has to get paid for that. And it is naturally, spontaneously desired by a category of people on the basis of whether or not you have a uterus.

They start operating on us really, really early through gender-divided children’s clothes and toys and television, and one of the functions of that set of technologies is to get us to identify very strongly with the innate qualities of this category: things like unpaid labor, management of the household, emotional labor, physical reproduction, sexual availability.

The flip side of this is that masculinity is inherently in a crisis. Somebody said that universal basic income is an attack on masculinity because what would it mean to be a man if it wasn’t to work hard and provide for your family? Contemporary masculinity is a trap created by capitalism.

Who’s gaining from that logic that says that you’re not a man unless you are successful under the rules of capitalism? Why would those have anything to do with each other? Unless one was a very useful fiction, that capitalism is exploited in order to convince them that what defines them is lack of access to emotion, capacity for violence, ownership of women, crushing amounts of labor.

That also sucks. It sucks in a way that means that they get most of the money and enact most of the violence. But it still sucks.

The basic premise of feminism is that these models of gender are not working for anybody. They’re really quite bad.