Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!elroy!ucla-cs!uci-ics!holstege@polya.stanford.EDU From: holstege@polya.stanford.EDU (Mary Holstege) Newsgroups: soc.feminism Subject: Re: umm...silly question, but... Message-ID: <17237@paris.ics.uci.edu> Date: 9 Jun 89 01:39:21 GMT Sender: news@paris.ics.uci.edu Reply-To: Mary Holstege Organization: Stanford University Lines: 68 Approved: tittle@ics.uci.edu I think Dan'l is right to point out the need to consider these issues in context, but I think this talk of role models misses the boat slightly. In my experience, when people start talking about the need for role models, the conversation usually takes a very separatist route shortly thereafter: role models for women, role models for hispanic women, role models for old hispanic women, role models for old hispanic women with no children... and so on ad absurdum. The fundamental problem, as I see it, is not a lack of role models, but a role structure twisted by an exclusive focus on the competitive model of human behaviour. If everyone is competing for everything, then there are only two roles: winner or loser, victimiser or victim, Rambo or Pee Wee, pushy bitch or pin-up doll. This compulsion to view everything in terms of competition is particularly popular here in the good old US of A, where the idea is taken to its logical extreme, which I like to call the `guppy theory of humanity': the idea that people are as a-social as guppies and succeed or fail purely by their own intrinsic merits, on their ability to swim fast the moment they pop out into the big wide world. Now there is another model of human behaviour, which stresses cooperation. It should be fairly obvious and uncontroversial that people are, in fact, social beings; that they rely on one another to get by and to flourish, at the very least as chidren, but most likely throughout life. Historically, those who had little or no access to resources (women, for example, or blacks in modern urban American) have stressed the cooperative model more out of simple necessity. I think that is why the poor, minorities, and women traditionally tend to think along more `socialist' lines. Please note, I am not talking about Communism here, nor advocating an abandonment of the competitive model of humanity (it is partly right too). (As recent events in China show us, if we needed the reminder, Communism is fundamentally based on the competitive model of humanity too. Victimiser or victim; oppresssor or oppressed.) What I am talking about is realising that for many roles we play in life, the competitive model is not only inappropriate, but is downright destructive. In the first instance, marriage is not a social relationship that works very well when understood as a competition rather than as a cooperative endeavour. In the second instance, businesses that treat their employees as partners in a joint venture rather than as potential thieves and vandals do a lot better (and make everyone a lot happier, methinks). Does one compete with one's children, or help them? So, back to starting point, role models for women and for men. I don't think much is gained by having women adopt `male' roles from the competitive role structure, any more than the Russians gained anything by replacing a Csar by the Politburo. Victimiser or victim -- what is gained by taking on the role of victimiser, if it leaves other victims in your place? Men rightly resist adopting the downside role, so what other choice is there? Pick a different role structure entirely, brother. [Why "rightly resist ... the downside role" -- are there no positive aspects to "traditionally feminine qualities" that a man can adopt? Likewise, are there no positive aspects of the 'male role' that a woman can adopt? I don't think that a woman should wholly adopt a male role either, but see nothing wrong with taking some of its useful qualities. And vice-versa. --Cindy] -- Mary Holstege@polya.stanford.edu ARPA: holstege%polya@score.stanford.edu BITNET: holstege%polya@STANFORD.BITNET UUCP: {arpa gateways, decwrl, sun, hplabs, rutgers}!polya.stanford.edu!holstege