Feminist Visions: The Broken Scale

The Broken Scale Oppression and privilege our broken scale, with one end as light as a feather and the other as dense as a rock. The rock represents an application of tyranny used to rule a group of people, which is known as oppression. The feather is not being chastised or subjected to certain events, which is privilege. In Susan M. Shaw and Janet Lee’s book Women’s Voices and Feminist Visions by bell hooks Feminism is For Everybody shows the relationship between oppression and privilege these writers critique how they play out in society. Oppression uses a group of people to manipulate and control a social group to maintain power, convincing that social group is lesser. It controls people with the five stages of oppression, maintaining masculinities …show more content…
1. The five faces of oppression is method made up by Iris young that identifies the characteristics of oppression. (53) Face one is Exploitation, this process makes one social group, the working class and the other group wealthy and privileged. An example of this would be paying undocumented workers less than the minimum wage as laborers to have a larger profit. Stage two is Marginalization which is being deprived amounts of power. People with disabilities in the 1930’s started being sterilized to prevent the rise of people with disabilities by not giving women reproductive rights. (374-375) Taking away reproductive rights from people with disabilities gave individuals to be considered more able superiority, causing privilege. Powerless is the third face of oppression, this is when a group of individual’s are forced to follow in line while …show more content…
Furthermore, the unbalanced scale of oppression and privilege constructs and maintains masculinity with false truths, also referred to as regimes of truth. This is done by teaching young men the need for violence and reinforcing the “men don’t feel” mindset. This is fabricated at an early age, teaching boy toddlers to be “strong” and they “cannot cry”, while praising them for showing attention to little girls. When this teaching matures into young adulthood, boys who do not show interest in girls or have not been in a violent interaction are considered less “manly”. This teaching makes men hypersensitive of their manhood and fragile of their masculinity. While society teaches men this regime of truth, society instils into women the opposite. At a young age, coaching girls to be submissive and passive. Women are expected to be more emotional and less able. If a woman does not fit these guidelines she is either considered one of the guys or a lesbian. Creating these stationary boxes of a woman or a men forms a thought process that men are physically and mentally stronger than women because they do not let emotions take dictate their actions. This effects the scale because it embodies men’s need to power over a