Egalia's Daughters: Seeing Beyond the Cage Wires

One cage wire in the matrix of domination prominent in Egalia’s Daughters is the limited accessibility the menwim have in career options and recreational/sporting interests due to restrictive social constructions of gender. The book establishes that women are in control of everything. The reactions to certain events and punishments from wim mold menwim to be obedient and oppressed. Like Marilyn Frye mentions in her article, “Acceptable behavior for both groups, men and women, involves a required restraint that seems in itself silly and perhaps damaging. But the social effect is drastically different. The woman’s restraint is part of a structure oppressive to women; the man’s restraint is part of a structure oppressive to women.” Much of one’s suffering and frustration befalls one partly or largely because one is a member of that category. In Egalsund, the category being oppressed was that of the menwim. Just like Johnson writes too, “patriarchal culture is about the core value of control and domination is in almost every area of human existence; that socialization is just a process use to teach people how to participate in social systems.”

In Egalia's Daughters, we meet Petronius a young manwom growing up and understanding that his fate is dubious in a world that does not respect him as a person. Petronius wants to be a seawom, but unfortunately for him he cannot be one because in Egalsund menwim couldn’t be seawim. “The only menwim who go to sea are either whores or Pallurians” (Bratenberg, 1985, 10). He does not have a diving suit either and if there is going to be one for him then it’s not going to be the ordinary ones. “A diving suit for menwim- made of insulating, completely bite proof material.” (Bratenberg, 1985, 11). Being a seawom is a wom's job, and, according to Egalian society, Petronius shouldn't worry his pretty head so with arduous work:
Who said you can’t have what you want? All I am saying is, you must be realistic. You can’t have your cake and eat it too…You’ll have to stop reading all of those adventure stories about the exploits of seawom and stick to books for bis instead. Then your dreams will be more realistic. No real menwim want to go to sea. (Brantenberg,1985, p.9)

According to society, he should be excited about his new peho. Petronius does not have control of his future because of the limits of traditional sex roles. Very much like the women in our society, Petronius will be passed over for a job, or any promotion to a wom no matter how hard he may work, and no matter how deserving he may be. Petronius will have to break glass ceilings. Petronius will be paid less than a wom doing the same job. Also, he would be more likely than a wom to be criticized and scrutinized and have his competency questioned because of his gender. We clearly see this in Spinnerman Owlmoss class about nature’s injustice. Ba, a wom, outrightly disrespects him and she doesn’t even think Owlmoss deserves the position: “To Ba, Spinnerman Owlmoss was a personification of the ridiculous. Old-fashioned, spinner mannish, stiff, and theatrical. He was the late Principal Owlmoss’s son, and that was the only reason he was now standing at the teacher’s desk, holding forth”(Bratenberg, 1985, 17) Spinnerman Owlmoss also talks about how he had been prevented from learning about gardening when he was small, and why he had lost interest in it, and begun to do embroidery and to bury himself in books instead. The menwim in Egalia had been socialized to believe that they couldn’t do anything without the wim. Even though certain things they wish they could do seemed very easy, they just couldn’t grasp why the wim stopped them from doing them. And that is the thing about oppressive structure: one has to look at how the barrier fits with others and to whose benefits and detriments it works. The gardening was inaccessible to the menwim because the wim believed that they were the only who could bring forth life.

Many menwim didn’t participate in any rebellion in Egalia because they feared repercussions or didn’t think their lives were all that bad and didn’t understand the magnitude of what is happening. They had questions about how things came to be, but they just couldn’t wrap their minds around it. “Why was it so difficult to rebel against it and to become independent? (Bratenberg, 1985, 168). It was just the way things were. And for those daring enough to challenge the norms, like Petronius was, the wim were ready to make him believe that what he’s hoping to do is impossible. From as little as being denied second chances, to not having any stories about menwim in history, to the most brutal treatments of the “prick-scissors.” Because of this, the menwim were removed from history and they were no longer in any position to bring forth they change that will ensure more equal chances as their counterparts-the wim.

Bareskerry, of course, had known what would happen. It required long and arduous training to land a spear bitter. Every novice made such mistakes. But Bareskerry wanted Petronius to think that he couldn’t learn this trade. Fishing was a wom’s job, and so it’d remain as far as Bareskerry was concerned. (Bratenberg, 1985, 76)

The masculinist movement addressed the cage wire of limited accessibility to career opportunities by individually fighting for what they deserved like Petronius did with his desire to become a seawom. Even though he knew it was something he couldn’t do and there were no resources in place (diving suit) to make it possible for him to do, he still found the courage to tell his mum that that’s what he wanted, and he didn’t give in to his sisters, Ba, derailing comments or that of anyone from the society. For Spinnerman Owlmoss, he took his own time to study and understand why things came to be and he used his knowledge to educate his fellow menwim about the society they lived in. Their conscious-raising discussions helped them made a little progress. They knew change had to come from themselves because they felt where the shoe pinched the most. From providing the platform where menwims could share their own experiences, the discussions were brought into light things the menwim had never imagined questioning and also gave them the motivation that they needed in order to start a big campaign for better treatment from the wim. The menwim also decided to write their own stories and publish them for large masses and they were determined to make sure that their chronicles won’t be forgotten just like those of menwim’s from previous generations had. And the biggest step they took was running for political positions because there was no way an only dominated wim power was going to rescue them from their oppression. But there were problems. From self-doubt, being looked down upon by your own family for doing the not normal to historical failures of menwim that made everything look impossible. From lack of finances to publish all the concerns from the conscious-raising sessions to parties giving the impression of being interested in the menwim the masculist movements got their share of disappointments and price of working against an established system in the society. And just like feminists and feminist movement that’s prominent in society today, the rules and expectations in Egalia have been in place for so long that it almost seems futile that true change will ever occur for the menwim.

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Work Cited

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Allan Johnson. “Patriarchy, the System: An It, Not a He, a Them, or an US.” In The Gender

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Bratenberg, Gerd. Egalia’s Daughters: a Satire of the Sexes. Translated by Louis Mackay, Seal Press, 2004.

 

David Turnbull. “The Function of Maps.” In Beyond Borders: Thinking Critically about Global Issues (New York: Worth Press, 2006), 7-15.

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Knot: Unravelling our Patriarchal Legacy, 3rd ed. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2014), 26-47.
 

Marilyn Frye. “Oppression.” In The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory (Crossing Press, 1983), 1-16.