Five - Norbert Elias and Shifting Gender Relations

Summary

‘Together with self-control and societal connectedness, a third ideal came under attack: marriage and family life, which had done so much to domesticate male violence in the preceding decades’.

(Pinker 2013)

Introduction

Pinker's stark remark can introduce an everyday topic that in long-term processes is a permanent source of contention in relations between the sexes, in political or business life as well as in romantic or sex life. In his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, Pinker (2013) very convincingly states that in Western societies we can observe a decline of violence. He uses long-term data to demonstrate that over the long-run violence has, astonishingly, declined in human civilisation in spite of wars, terrorism and genocide. Besides men, who he implies are the aggressors, women especially are conceived as central to this process; a gendered process that is worth reconstructing, not only because Pinker's thesis is rather simplistic, but because Western gender orders are subject to wide social, national and historical variations. So, although at first impression this remark seems very convincing, a more detached approach shows its narrowness. Firstly, for centuries it was mostly women who had to pay the price, with extreme self-control and subordination in marriage and public life, as the very precondition of the (male) civilising processes. Secondly, life for educated and non-educated men and women differed in many ways, as not everybody had the right to marry. Thirdly, constructing women as the ‘peaceful angels of civilisation’ neglects her story with its ups and downs of increasing and decreasing power chances. And last but not least, this construction completely ignores diverse forms of sexual orientation that took place outside of the marriage unit. This could be a first, more or less, feminist reaction to Pinker’s statement focusing on its male bias. Moreover, to argue from modern gender research, we see that gender relations have become flexible throughout the last 40 years and that traditional patriarchal gender orders have been eroded (Walby 1997; McRobbie 2009). For example, the shock of the sudden Covid-19 health crisis, at first sight, seems to have been managed in favour of the traditional model of production and reproduction that was believed to have been overcome.