Schwalbe - Male Supremacy & Narrowing of Moral Self
Schwalbe - Male Supremacy & Narrowing of Moral Self
Schwalbe - Male Supremacy & Narrowing of Moral Self
Moral Self1
Michael Schwalbe
2 Such generalizationsfit reality only loosely, since they ignore local variations
in what boys and girls actually learn about how to evaluate th eir com petence and
m oral w orth. N onetheless, th e dom inant culture o f gender in th e U.S. can be
safely said to prescribe different criteria o f self-evaluation for w omen and men.
Some em pirical evidence for this can be garnered from research on self-esteem
(Schwalbe an d Staples 1991) and from various writings on m en’s lives (see Brod
1987, Kimmcl and M essncr 1992).
SCHWALBE: MALE SUPREMACY 33
right nor wrong; it is simply the o ther’s feeling. Role taking of this
kind requires a willingness to let the other affect us emotionally, to
not hold the other at a m ental distance. In this way the facts o f an
other’s feelings can become the facts of our own existence, and we
can then give them full weight in our search for a solution to the
moral problem at hand. It is a key point of Noddings’s argum ent
that connecting in this way is necessary to practice an ethic o f care.
* M any men may also resist ro le taking vis-a-vis w omen because th e dem and
to role take rem inds them o f th eir powerlessness in th e workplace, w here they
must tak e th e perspectivesof th eir bosses in o rd e r to avoid trouble (see Schwalbe
1986:92-98,130-135; 1988b). M any men may thus experience role taking as an act
42 BERKELEY JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
allowed the senators both to feel for him and with him. His
perform ance allowed the senators to engage in projective, inferen
tial, and receptive role taking all at once. In that m om ent he
becam e a fellow man about to be figuratively castrated because of
an irrational accusation (cf. hooks 1992).
represented in the act that caused the pain, but only after the pain
is felt and accepted.
W hat this can do is to pit a m an's love for justice and for
a specific woman against his own masculinist self. T here is no
guarantee that this will produce a thoroughgoing transform ation of
the self. But it can create the tension necessary to start the process.
My point here is that the masculinist self, with its own ingrained
love of justice and desire for women, contains the seeds of its own
destruction.
Conclusion
self and the balancing point shifts. W hat previous analyses have
suggested is that women and men, im bued with different selves,
operate with different balancing points (Gilligan 1982). Pragm atist
ethics, joined to M ead’s social psychology, shows us how much more
complex the story is.
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