I recently finished reading The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf. One of the most eye-opening bits is in the introduction, when Wolf gives modern reasons why women could be oppressed.

Traditional: Control the means of production

Stephen Colbert said of (then) French Presidential Candidate Segolene Royal: “I’m no Commie, but I’d like to control her means of production”. The statement was intended as a joke, but it has some truthiness to it – in a traditional culture, controlling the gene pool is important. The most direct way to control the genes is to control women and treat them as property (baby-making machines).

Modern: Stop the matriarchy

In nearly ever culture, women do more labour than men. It’s unpaid – around the house or volunteering in the community – so it never gets measured. When both members of a hetero couple work, the women still do more housework. If women directed this energy to labour that was valued by society (read: paid), they should dominate. Also, women are commonly believed to be better than men at management-level skills: networking, team-work, negotiation, multitasking, etc. So it might be a better allocation of resources to generally have female managers managing male technicians.

Late-modern: Make good consumers

Women generally make a decent amount of money (although nowhere close to men). Advertisers can exploit and perpetuate the Beauty Myth to get them to spend some of their money on beauty products. For example, in 1977 The Women’s Dress for Success Book proposed that women adopt a professional uniform to match men’s business suits – it doesn’t take a conspiracy theorist to realize that the fashion industry would do everything in their power to defeat that idea. (It has been theorized that the fashion industry has played a hand in the popularity of business casual in order to do the same thing to men.) Consumers with a lower or uncertain social status have more to gain from competitive consumption, so as long as women are oppressed, buying stuff is win-win.

I’m unable to visualize a postmodern society, so I have no idea what, if any, oppression would go on in one.