Indeed, the ontological bond between man and woman entails not equality, but diversity in creation and the resulting difference. Modernity has destroyed this nature of relations between man and woman: the qawwam position of man by dethroning him as the head of the family, women’s submission to men by introducing certain socioeconomic arrangements, and the difference between them by inserting the principle of equality into constitutions.
It must be noted that the strict domination of men over women is the product of power-oriented technological developments, the imperious power of the nation-state and modern civilization, which is based on crude interventions into nature. Before the advent of modernity, woman surely underwent certain grievances, but these were not part of a systematic injustice maintained through cultural patterns, but similar to violations of rights and freedoms in a general sense. Modern civilization has a male-dominated character due to the concentration of power and domination inherent in its nature. The argument that the male-dominated culture dates back to ancient times is a superstition invented by social scientists of the last century.
With the formation of modern technological and economic centers of power and modernity feeding on them, a male-centered culture came into existence. Now, as a response to this development, there is a shift toward a female-centered culture. Before the advent of modernity, religions and ancient traditions were human-centered despite the existence of rights violations. Today, as we move towards a woman-centered dominant discourse and culture, we face the risk of losing our human-oriented perspective. The problem is not about the victimization of women or men, but of human beings. Neither the male-centered culture nor the female-centered culture has “human beings” at the center, but is rather occupied by a specific “gender” and “sexism” as its ideology.
Having exhausted the feminist discourse and ideology in the West, the post-feminists came to believe that the idea of a “contention between men and women” is no longer meaningful. They have started to argue that feminists should attack the ontological and anthropological resources that block female liberation. I do not intend to discourage them, but even if they invest their efforts in such attacks for several centuries to come, their position will not be much different from the current one. It is equally tragic to see leftist intellectuals work to remove injustice, poverty and global exploitation from their agenda just to purse a definition of “freedom,” like post-feminists, that will eventually lead them to liberal assumptions about democracy.
In some countries, like ours, dominant perceptions about women and laws based on them have further complicated the problem by introducing constitutional and legal arrangements on “positive discrimination” beyond mere “equality” of genders. The first legal harmonizations concerning this positive discrimination, which we voted on in a referendum held on Sept. 12, 2010, have already been made. Accordingly, if an employer hires a woman for the first time, her social security premiums will be paid by the state for three years.
One does not need to be an oracle to say that this will disrupt the traditional household- and mother-centered family structure and push women into the marketplace and demote the household and accelerate the above-mentioned process of destroying the nature of men and women. It is obvious that the household will push women while the marketplace will pull them.
It will have three important consequences:
First, positive discrimination, the encouraged trend and mandatory laws will render merits and competence inconsequential in the labor market, and femininity (being a woman only) will play the lead role in the distribution of jobs and statuses, with the resulting unfair practices, abuses and conflicts in practice.
Second, the tendency to hire women only because they are women will necessarily result in a decrease in quality in many areas, including economic life, education and services.
Third, men normally have more of an advantage than women in the distribution of jobs and statuses in the labor market due to their natural strength and advantages. Thus, more constitutional and legal arrangements would be needed in order to make the positive discrimination system really works in favor of women, which will eventually transform the political system into a feminist autocracy as a result of efforts to make the socioeconomic structure more women-friendly.
