Who's in Charge?

While teaching at Princeton, Lisa Belkin was stunned by what she saw after classes: "In social settings and in relationships, men set the pace, made the rules and acted as they had in the days when women were still 'less than.' It might as well have been the 1950s, but with skimpier clothing, fewer inhibitions and better birth control." Belkin wonders why. How could this be happening now?

She asked her journalism students to interview other students to help her "explore this disconnect." Belkin wanted to know "How do these social norms look from within?" None of the responses were enlightening or new, and most agreed that the power dynamics are essentially the same as they've always been: "he chases, she submits" and "that the 'he chases, she submits' paradigm was no big deal." The old-fashioned phrase "boys will be boys" made its way into Belkin's article as well as that now standard post-feminist (read: not really feminist) rhetoric that a "kind of female power" is one in which a woman appears sexually available. It didn't surprise me that none of these college students said anything dazzling because the structure of our society has stayed firmly in place, and that structure is-- gasp-- patriarchy.

As reported by Lisa Belkin, patriarchy is successfully reproducing itself, and, by the way, when women repeat "boys will be boys" they are complicit in this reproduction. (Women are complicit in many, many other ways too.) Please note too that there's no "generational card" being played here; that little saying has been repeated generation after generation after generation, reproducing itself over and over so that it feels very natural, sounds so natural that we naturally accept who's really in charge. The boys, of course.