“The patriarchy strikes back”, launched this week the secretary general of the UN, António Guterres, before the Commission on the status of women of the international body.
The speech delivered in Doha popularized the key elements of UN Women’s latest report on gender inequalities in the world. The analyzes it contains show that the progress of the status of women in the world is not only progressing less rapidly than before, but that in many respects we are going backwards. The report calculates that at the current rate, it would take us another 300 years to see equality between men and women on a global scale.
Several contextual elements are cited. The pandemic, of course, has weakened the global economy. And when poverty and hunger increase, women, who are more vulnerable, are particularly affected. Climate change, which is already being felt, is weakening entire societies, and therefore necessarily those whose status is the most precarious within them.
These upheavals are also accelerating a global migration crisis in the face of which we are not all equal. It is already dangerous to cross thousands of kilometers piled up in pick-up trucks or makeshift boats — it is even more so when you are a woman. And if there are more and more people crammed into refugee camps around the world, the problem of sexual violence in these camps will worsen just as much.
But this decline in the condition of women is not linked only to a decline in the material conditions of, say, existence. It is also, of course, the fruit of organized political movements. Much has been said, with good reason, of the deeply patriarchal regimes that are rampant in Iran and Afghanistan. Closer to home, access to abortion for American women has also been profoundly shaken over the past year. And we feel, almost everywhere in the West, online as elsewhere, that anti-feminist movements are getting stronger and stronger.
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Why these setbacks and this weakening of achievements, then, here as elsewhere, and now? The list of possible factors could be very long.
First, waves of rights advance are most often followed by periods of backlash. For example, after the #MeToo movement in the West, many feminists who had seen others were already on their guard. We suspected that men of great notoriety could not see their careers collapse without themselves, or the “system” in general, counter-attacking.
Millions of us have been socialized to see certain men as “untouchable” under the pretext of their social role – and we don’t get rid of the effects of such socialization by shouting scissors. The phase of denouncing the “exaggerations” of feminism was about to come: at what stage in the development of feminist movements has it not come?
Then, it only makes sense that patriarchy strikes back as the world goes through economic, climate, political and health crises all at once. In times of emergency, humans tend to withdraw into their little universe and anchor themselves in their reassuring certainties as if their lives depended on it. The ability to adapt to changes — which includes changes in mentality — is a muscle that needs to be worked on, and which can therefore also be worn out.
Finally, the backlash will be all the stronger where political or media actors decide to exploit this fatigue of adaptation to make quick gains. When influential people decide not to help people accept women (and LGBTQ+ people, and “diversity”, and people of immigrant background, etc.) in society in their new place, but to feed the fears and anxieties that change always generates, then the populist right gains momentum.
I insist on these factors here when we could have named many others, in particular because we can clearly see how they can be at work in a host of cultural contexts. This is because the temptation seems strong among many to present the decline in women’s rights as an exotic phenomenon, the product of societies that do not share “our” values. If we dwell on the UN Women report, it will then be mainly to conclude “that we are lucky in Quebec”, without pushing our thinking further.
This type of political positioning is of course easy: it requires no introspection or self-criticism, in addition to ignoring a set of local issues. However, we feel that there is still a long way to go here, that the achievements of yesterday are still fragile and that the nostalgia for the patriarchy of yesteryear guides the way in which we seek to silence many women who disturb in the public arena. .
With the current state of the world, the last thing anyone should encourage is complacency.
Anthropologist, Emilie Nicolas is a columnist at Duty and to Release. She hosts the podcast Detours for Canadaland.