On Connecting Dots and Keeping Your Eyes on the Power

On Connecting Dots and Keeping Your Eyes on the Power Georgie Malone (bio) Laura Bates's Fix the System, Not the Women( 2nded.), London, UK: Simon & Schuster, 2023 Fix the System, Not the Womenis a rallying cry to reject, without reserve, the ideological linchpin of patriarchy that it is not the misogyny baked into our core institutions that is responsible for gender inequality, but rather women themselves. Whether it is a woman's choice to wear a short dress and get drunk on a Friday night, or her failure to stand up for herself and "just demand" that pay raise, there is always some reason to blame women for the harm that comes their way. Laura Bates's book thoroughly unmasks this discourse to reveal its sinister function: by blaming the women, the system gets let off the hook. Despite a long history of feminist critique of structural misogyny, Bates is unfortunately not faced with an easy task, writing for a popular audience, when it comes to convincing readers that there is still a thing called patriarchy, alive and well today, that systematically harms women. Nevertheless, she has proven herself more than up to the task. Bates's great strength is in having lifted the enemy out from the theoretical jargon and thrown light on precisely what systemicmisogyny is, and how it operates today, in such an abundantly clear and accessible manner. She takes in turn many of our core social institutions in the U.K.—schools and universities, policing, the criminal justice system, traditional politics, and the media—and reveals each to be systematically misogynist, using a straightforward formula: an institution is guilty if it displays gender pay and staffing gaps, high numbers of sexist incidents, weak or nonexistent policies to tackle those incidents, and a harmful gendered impact in its institutional output (92). This "test" for institutional sexism is clearly called for in our current political moment, since we must constantly withstand cries of "not all men," showing a persistent, [End Page 305]if not perhaps willful, misunderstanding of the meaning of systemic misogyny. Unsurprisingly, one will notice that nowhere in this test is it required that all the men within a given institution are hateful bigots. Once equipped with her test, Bates proceeds to present clear and compelling evidence that, when measured against these criteria, all the above-mentioned institutions in the U.K. are systematically misogynist. Another strength of her analysis is its attention to the intersectional dimensions at play, always bringing out the ways in which this systematic misogyny intersects with other oppressive systems, most strikingly, systematic racism. By the end of the book, she has robustly secured her conclusion that what urgently needs fixing is the system, not the women in it, and resolutely shifts the burden of proof onto anyone who would argue otherwise. The main source of the book's impressiveness, however, is not just in its presentation of a compelling case for systemic change but in its critique of the ideology that obscures the need for this very change: this is the logic of "fix the women." Bates artfully deconstructs this logic to show how it infects the way male violence is treated at every level, with the result of mystifying the systemic nature of the problem. Bates begins by showing how this ideology is learned early. She demonstrates how schools teach more than just curricula but also the rules of the social game, supplying a "very effective form of 'education'" in sexist norms, including, crucially, the norm that women are responsible for preventing and responding to male violence (25). Examples she draws upon include testimony from women teachers who are expected to withstand daily low-level sexual harassment from teenage boys, and several cases in which school-age girls have been expected to dress differently so as not to provoke harassment from fellow students or male teachers. This allows us to see that expecting women to change is a feature of the system, not a bug. When people in power say the women must change, they are not making bumbling errors of judgment, they are enacting one of the most critical pieces of the patriarchal puzzle that...