“Erasure” and Male Domination
Two things stood out for me at the 2021 Contemporary Women’s Issues Workshop:
Diane [Balser] talked a lot about “erasure”—how sexism and male domination make females invisible, beginning in the womb. She said that girls are “erased.” No wonder it’s so hard to stand up, speak up, think, have our voices. In my women’s support group, we’ve talked about “writing ourselves back in the equation.”
The second point was how male domination is present in every institution. When I think about education, religion, politics, the military, the police, the economy, pornography, I see that male domination has prevailed in them and affected every female in thousands of ways every day, every hour, every second. All of this has been held in place and reinforced by the mechanisms of sexism: violence, the threat of violence, internalized oppression, and sexual exploitation. Couple this with our other oppressions, and it’s a recipe for complete erasure. It’s staggering to me. We are heroes. Every single one of us!
Oxford, Massachusetts, USA
Reprinted from the RC e-mail discussion list for leaders of women
(Present Time 204, July 2021)