Patriarchy Essay

Throughout time, society has been highly male dominated, and while in some cultures and religions the female physique has been worshiped in regards to fertility, love, and nature, males remain a dominant figure in all walks of life. All people, however mostly women, will experience some sort of discrimination, prejudice, or stereotyping throughout their lifetime. Religions have contributed to the patriarchal society that is still somewhat prevalent today, and while each sect and variation of…

Representations of hegemonic masculinity can be seen most prevalently in the media, as it is often emphasised and privileged over other forms of masculinity. Through combining studies of hegemonic masculinity and the representation of masculinity in films, advertising and magazines I will present a discussion on how the media usually conforms to and thus uphold the hegemonic view of masculinity, but also how it can challenge it. The majority of studies tend to focus on the United States or…

Boy Based Commercials Rather than domesticity, commercials that feature boys contain violent images. For example, in the commercial for “Power Rangers Super Megaforce Double Battle Figures” there are images of ‘blasters’ and ‘swords’, with the Power Rangers fighting ‘evil’ (Bandai 2014). The voice in the commercial is male, and the intended audience for Power Ranger is clearly young boys. The voice says things like “fire your blaster and swing your sword,” as well as “you’re armed and ready!”…

is ashamed of what she has become. Plath uses many comparisons and images in order to convey her feelings/the woman’s feelings about age, self-image, beauty and society’s view of the three. Some may argue that she is taking a stand against the patriarchy through the poem, but I only agree with this to an extent. I think the Plath portrays the mirror…

The Weaker Sex: Gender Discrimination in World War II “[G]ender subordination and patriarchy are the oldest of oppressions” (Shiva 184). Over the years, women have been oppressed, discriminated against, and suppressed by their male counterparts. It took years for women to gain any type of rights across the globe and women are still struggling for gender equality today. We live in a patriarchal society and most societies in the present and the past are also patriarchal, as a consequence of this…

the feminist community, if not all, can recognize that the patriarchal culture favors and awards the masculine and ensures the imbalance between men and women. (O’Reilly, 400) As a result, feminists are challenged with the overbearing power of patriarchy when raising a child. The act of feminist mothering dislocates patriarchal methods of raising children and replaces them with empowerment of children and mothers, in hopes of causing widespread social change and equality (Ross, 61). This…

run to her son but she was not allowed to go by the overseer. The final image of the mother who is caught in the inescapable hold symbolically shows the predicament of all dalit women who find themselves caught in the tyrannical hold of both male patriarchy and the caste system. Bibliography Sharmila Rege. “Dalit Women Talk Differently: A Critique of 'Difference' and Towards a Dalit Feminist Standpoint Position.” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 33, no. 44, 1998, pp. WS39–WS46. JSTOR,…

In Mardistan, filmmaker Harjant Gill presents what it is like to be male in Indian society. The men in the film live in a patriarchy, defined by Dr. Conrad Phillip Kottak as a “political system ruled by men in which women have inferior social and political status” (Kottak, p.168). Whereas patriarchal thought is still prevalent in numerous aspects of Western culture, it is made more explicit in India, where males are given preference in education and family responsibilities, and families have the…

Men believe they were born with the drive to be on top and it has always played in their favor, but for women globally this is an ongoing issue that demeans their rights and social status. In the novel, My Year of Meats, it portrayed the empowerment of men over women in environments of the household as an husband and as a higher position in the work field. The novel essentially documented the life of two women by the name of Jane Takagi-Little and Akiko Ueno; their physical appearance,…

Patriarchy has been defined in a variety of ways, initially set out as a concept by Millett in 1970 (cited in Bryson, 1999), and later fully developed by Walby in Theorizing Patriarchy (1990). However, the concept was widely critiqued, and fell into dis-use, although it has been the subject of attempts to re-position it as an academic concept (e.g. Hunnicutt, 2009). This essay aims to discuss the prevalent accepted definition of patriarchy, and the criticisms made of it, before analysing more…