Patriarchy and development

I had to visit a few Federal Government agencies this morning. Doing the rounds, in most places, middle-age women stood around gossiping, or sleeping at their desks. The visible level of productivity is extremely low. No doubt in most places, some people are doing work, but for the most part, the civil service does seem the preserve of sub-professional women wasting energy on gist.

This prompted a thought about patriarchy and its relation to development. Having continued reading the university research reports I mentioned in a previous post, I discovered that female students report being undermined from all angles at university. Many end up cooking for their male counterparts in exchange for phone cards or little gifts, positioned as wives-to-be, and carriers of the domestic burden.

Taking together my musings on the survey and my experience this morning, I reached a conclusion that feminist thinkers reached a looong time ago – but you know how it is when a conclusion truly sparks inside your head for the first time. The conclusion: that patriarchy significantly contributes to social under-development. I would go so far as to say that patriarchy is the most significant cause of continued social under-development. You might ask why do I think this?

Well, first, in an obvious sense, patriarchy reduces the employment opportunities of women (apart from the hidden work of child rearing that is). Women are therefore given less chance to contribute to the economy. This is quite an obvious point so I won’t dwell on it.

Secondly, patriarchy tends to undermine women’s confidence. The microcosmic world of the Nigerian university is a case in point. The research shows that women across the country are almost continuously undermined in many different ways, by both their male and female lecturers, as well as by their male counterparts. Undermining a young person’s confidence is tantamount to physical abuse – given the effects it will have on the rest of their life. In most cases, it leads to a devastating internalisation of the values of patriarchy.

Thirdly, and this is the more unusual thought: in a patriarchal society the ‘mother-whore’ dichotomy is thrown into sharp contrast. A woman either functions as a potential mother, or as the whore or the twat. To the extent that patriarchal social systems increase the general vulnerability (economic and otherwise) of women, is the extent to which sex becomes transactional. The young female student body is a site of potential transaction (rather than intellectual potentiality), with male lecturers and male students in strict competition.

Now, when the female body is transactionalised in this way (positioned as the potential whore), I would argue that this has much more general affects on the society at large. The devaluation of women leads to the devaluation of value itself. If, as what a male commentor referred to as ‘student twat’ is cheaply available, this is a symbolic rape of womanhood more generally. And this symbolic rape cannot be contained solely within the sphere of gender relations – rather, it generates its own form of symbolic excess. Just as the woman’s symbolic power is weakened, so to is the apparent increase in symbolic power of the male mis-aligned. In simple terms, the male acquires a sense of entitlement that disrupts all other systems of value. This propagates a rent-seeking mentality, where leadership is reduced to ownership.

The question is: can patriarchal societies truly develop without questioning their own hierarchies of value? I doubt it.