Short Response for Feb/8

The main theme for today's readings deals with oppression. Marilyn Frye's article spoke to me in many ways and I agree with her on several points. For instance, oppression affects all kinds of women no matter what their class, race or marital status is. Frye's described the oppressive forces against women with the metaphor of a birdcage. It was very appropriate and I find it to be an extremely useful tool to use in explaining others about the symbolic suffocation women experience in their daily lives. It is true that they can vote, buy their own property, and get marry whenever they can. The fact that nothing obvious is hindering a woman to do all of the above does not mean she is finally liberated from the birdcage.

 At the end of the day, however, women are not the only ones that are being pigeon-holed or caged. Men suffer equally from this constriction. For example, I personally think Frye criticizes the  men's door-opening custom too harshly. Men, like women, are forced by an entity larger than themselves to act in a certain way. Like Johnson argues, to blame the system is to choose the easy way out and to blame the individuals inside that system is to totally miss the point. Men were not born to instinctively open doors for women, thus, to blame the individual for doing so is wrong. Like Johnson suggested, we must look beyond the individual themselves- the single bars of the birdcage- to understand what are the values being taught and ways of thinking that allow these subtle ways of oppression to be perpetuated.