Empathic Parenting

Most commonly sexism involves perceiving and acting toward females as if they are categorically inferior. This places sexism in the pantheon of prejudices alongside racism, ageism, and other political pathologies defended as part of natural eternal cosmic truths revealed and supported by religion and science. The hand that writes the truth has long been attached to the "masculist" patriarchal body. And whether the writer has been engaged in producing scripture, literature, scientific treatises, or law - or painting pictures or writing songs - the result is the same: Kings rule by divine right, slavery is a natural consequence of the superiority of the masters and the inferiority of the slaves, and women are born to be objects deprived by nature of autonomy and freedom and subservient to the master sex.

Sexism is woven into the texture of our lives and damages both the sexist and the target group. Not only are many forms of psychopathology produced in the victims of sexism, but sexism itself is a form of psychopathology. Traditionally, a major criterion of mental disorders is the judgement that the person is so irrational and emotionally out of control as to be dangerous to others. According to this definition, sexists (along with Anti-Semites, antigays, racists, and bigots of all kinds) should be defined as emotionally disturbed.)

Whenever a group representing an identifiable segment of humankind is singled out as the object of discrimination or of exploitation, the exploiters justify the discrimination and exploitation by claiming that all members of the target group are somehow defective or subhuman. Examples of this process abound. Whether it was blacks imported from Africa to work on the southern plantations or the Eastern Europeans long enslaved by the Nordics (which is where the word Slave comes from), the excuse was always the same: Every member of the group was seen as inferior. The Nazis' justification for persecuting the Jews sounded like the English arguments for excluding Eastern European Jews half a century before. We need not review the whole sad sorry historical litany of the endless exploitation of humans by humans except to underline the one common feature - that subjugated people are said to be different in kind and that the difference is a defect.

Individual members of groups that are the objects of prejudice and are mistreated tend to live a powerless, pathological existence. Understandably, members of the group often accept the prejudiced view of themselves. Social learning theorists point out that symbolic models portrayed at home, on TV, and in books and magazines are important sources of sex stereotyped attitudes. The descriptions become self-fulfilling prophecies. Members of the group begin to live and behave in ways that are expected of them, and they become caught up in self- perpetuating behaviour, thereby reinforcing the prejudices.

Psychologist Phyllis Chester (1973) eloquently describes the result:

Women are impaled on a cross of self-sacrifice. Unlike men, they are categorically denied the experience of actual supremacy, humanity and renewal based on their sexual identity -- and on the blood sacrifice, in some way, of a member of the opposite sex. In different ways, some women are driven mad by this fact. Such madness is essentially an intense experience of female biological, sexual and cultural castration, and a doomed search for potency. (p.31).

Whether this woman's defect -- her fatal flaw -- is explained on the basis of Freudian chauvinism (penis envy), on observable physical differences (the weaker sex), or on historical guilt (Eve caused the Fall), the result is the same. We see profound and debilitating suffering in the victims, acceptance by some of them of the values and beliefs of their oppressors (see Morgan's Total Woman, 1973), and widespread learned helplessness and despair. We also hope to see a spirit of resistance and revolution emerge that gathers strength through mutual support, encouragement, and the enlistment of significant numbers of defectors from the oppressor group..