Welcome to DarkSexism

For thousands of years it has been a specious truth universally acknowledged that women are less than men – less capable, less rational, less objective, less stable, less intelligent,  less brave.  I’ve probably left out a slew of other apt adjectives but you get the point.  The impact of this ‘truth’ universally held has been a constant drumbeat of gender-based bigotry in every arena of life.

And despite almost 170 years of activism (if one uses the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention as a start date), and the many recent successes from the last 50 years, it’s still not a truth universally acknowledged that women are fully human, deserving of full human rights.  Why?  What is it about being female that makes full human rights so elusive?  What’s so stubbornly embedded in male-female relations that defy equality? And why, now during our current era, are we only able to be outraged by predatory sexual behavior of men while the underlying dynamics that make it possible continue unexamined?

Welcome to DarkSexism, a new blog I’m creating to explore those dynamics, misconceptions, prejudices, and values that continue to diminish half the world’s people.

Sexism is the air we breathe.  It’s the ocean we swim in.   It’s foundational to all relations.  We’re born into it.  We’re immersed in it, male and female alike, carrying it along both blindly and intentionally.  And sadly, despite the enormous social advances won by activism, deep layers of darkness enveloping female inequality remain firmly intact.

Since October of last year, we’ve seen an explosion of news stories about powerful men sexually assaulting, menacing, harassing women.   The biggest surprise about the stories has been that there’s surprise.  Most women are familiar with this kind of behavior.  Women know the score.  Women also know that the world we live in is hostile to our reality, particularly when that reality challenges male prerogatives.  The fact that so many men have been surprised only indicates how invisible female reality remains.

As scandals go the recent ones are salacious, outrageous, transfixing.  But they will eventually subside (it already feels as if a fever has broken) while the dynamics that make the behavior possible will remain.  Sexual predation is just the tip of an iceberg that extends far down to a deeper, wider and more stubborn level of embedded sexism.

Sexism is a primal oppression.  It’s been around forever, passed on from generation to generation, through millennia.  If I had to guess when it first appeared, I’d say some time before the discovery of fire.   It has commandeered our deepest sense of reality.   It feels natural.   And there’s the rub.  “Feeling natural” allows it to exist in darkness, in a pandemic of agreement where accommodation, entitlement and collusion reign.   It is how we live, where we live.  It is a matrix.  And it won’t ever be punctured or dismantled without first shining a light on its dark, normative dynamics.  Examining and then remedying what animates male-female relations is a multi-generational project.

I invite you to follow DarkSexism and to participate through your comments and stories.   Naming these stubborn, entrenched dynamics will shed light.   Light brings awareness.   And awareness creates an environment where change can occur.

Gay Walch

(A note about the blog’s name:   Inspiration comes from the world of astrophysics where terms like Dark Matter and Dark Energy are placeholders used to name powerful, invisible forces found throughout the universe but about which we know very little.  We only know they exist because we can measure their effects.  The dynamics of sexism work in a similar way.  Because it’s so hard to see what’s been normalized over millennia, we know sexism exists mostly by its effects on women’s lives.)