Johnson and Frye

In his chapter, “Patriarchy, the System: An It, Not a He, a Them, or an Us,” Allan G. Johnson does a nice job of delineating and describing systems and the way they relate to individuals. His analysis and explanation is clear and backed up by relevant and comprehensible examples.
Like Marilyn Frye in her article, Oppression, Johnson urges us take the blame off of individual actors and instead examine the relationships of all individuals with and within the system. That said, “blaming ‘the system’ (presumably society) for our problems, doesn’t take the next step to understanding what that might mean” (Johnson, 28). It is not enough to say that we live in an patriarchy and that it is the problem of men who have oppressive attitudes and behaviors toward women and that things will not change until men change. In fact, that is simply erroneous and I appreciate Johnson’s emphasis on the interconnectedness of all institutions and human interactions that are creating the patriarchal structure of oppression. He says, “We need to see and deal with the social roots that generate and nurture the social problems that are reflected in and manifested through the behavior of individuals” (Johnson, 29).
Johnson’s argument certainly correlates with that of Frye. She says that while we tend to recognize this relation, that “oppressing is oppressive to those who oppress as well as those they oppress” (Frye, 1), we also ignore the macroscopic view and focus on the microscopic, on individuals.
Johnson’s analogy of a corporation resonated with me as I thought about my own experiences at Colgate. Often times I try to describe Colgate as a place where there is a small circle of social acceptability and everything that does not fall within that circle is considered abnormal, weird, and taboo. Johnson says of his hypothetical corporation (which one could relate to Colgate), “You can feel yourself stepping into a set of relationships and shared understandings about who’s who and what’s supposed to happen and why, and all of this limits you in many ways” (Johnson, 30). Conceiving of a system in this way may be useful for those who are not used to looking at the bigger picture.
While I thought Johnson was rather successful at describing how “we are of patriarchy and it is of us” and that it is “an ongoing process that’s continuously shaped and reshaped” (Johnson, 43), I think that without reading Chapter 10 as he suggests, his argument is without much use. He says we need the individuals to use their participation in patriarchal society to manifest a different type of power relations and an emphasis away from male-centeredness. He says we need to change ourselves, challenge the patterns of least resistance, and make choices that will shape our systems. “Ultimately,” he says, “the choice is about empowering ourselves to take our share of responsibility for the patriarchal legacy we’ve all inherited” (Johnson, 48). Unfortunately, he doesn’t offer advice as to how.