By Chandrashekar (Chandra) Tamirisa, (On Twitter) @c_tamirisa
Theorists of non-violence, best known among them Johan Galtung of Norway (a former professor of mine), have categorized various forms of violence in a society.
Two typical ways in which violence, besides the very obvious physical violence, is perpetrated are structural violence and cultural violence.
Structural violence has to do with the political and economic institutions of a society whose governance mechanisms in relation to the social makeup engender the determinants of the violence because institutions of society are instruments of enforcing social order.
Cultural violence, a more fundamental impingement of individual space, violence by definition establishing the primacy of individual liberty over social order, is about the subliminally accepted codes of conduct among an aggregation of individuals (or society) subordinating alternative behaviors or the notion of the availability of choice among cultures to individuals.
Physical violence on any members of a society is often the overt symptom of cultural pathologies and dysfunctional behaviors of a society’s political and economic institutions.
Men and women have naturally evolved, for the purpose of survival by biology, to perform certain basic functions surrounding child bearing and rearing, and universally all societies separate male and female roles as such, building cultural life and institutions of society on that elemental substrate.
Technology has liberated both men and women to cross function except where such behavior is biologically neither possible nor feasible: the cultural upbringing and institutional conditioning of the male and female to prepare for producing the offspring and help care for the female until the new borns can survive childhood mortality. Homo sapiens has the longest rearing period to adulthood in the animal world. The biology of the institutions of political economy and hence of ideology is, therefore, all male.
More women in the life of the public square is changing cultures. Confined before to the household, the capitalization of child bearing and rearing has unshackled women to use their time more productively in the life of the society, hitherto largely occupied by their men. Abigail Adams would rather now use her advice for her husband John for herself.
Women have greater choice among occupations and male companionship just as men had the freedom to engage in before, polygamy or prostitution. Cultural preferences to constrain women, enabled by technology, are fading and, therefore, cultural violence on women is declining.
Institutions of political economic governance of societies take time to change and women are caught up in this transition of the transformation of the gender of institutional structures from male to androgynous, from separate bathrooms to unisex.
The battle of the sexes in the polis, from national capitals to aesthetic sensibilities, is producing a culture of sexual manipulation in the pursuit of power. The men are using ambitious women as their agents of soft power and women are using their sexuality more than their minds to rise in their new found freedom, subordinating their dignity for structural gains, buying into the mirage of leveraging beauty and brains for maximum personal gain. Structural violence on women is substituting for the cultural.
Wisdom, however, has neither sex nor gender.
