Jack Kammer argues that a diffuse female power structure, which he calls the Matrix, operates alongside patriarchy but remains largely unacknowledged. He uses historical examples like the Iroquois system and a 1974 classroom study to show how women exercise sustained influence, and criticizes modern feminism for ignoring this dynamic while framing any recognition of female agency as misogynistic.
Chapters
Hi, Coach Kammer here. Welcome to Chalk Talk #2. We're going to take a deeper look at the matrix, the female power structure we identified and named in Chalk Talk #1. In case you haven't watched Chalk Talk #1, the basic idea is that the other team harps on a big, powerful male hierarchical power structure they call the patriarchy. And they say they have only that low, pink, powerless line off to the side. We know that's not true. We know they're hiding something quite powerful. We're working on analyzing it so we can mount our offense against it. The other team tries to keep us on defense by talking endlessly about the patriarchy. They obsess about it, but they see it only as they want to see it: as a huge male power structure that oppresses women. In 1974, I taught 7th grade. I really knew nothing about teaching, and I was concerned about maintaining order in a classroom full of crazy adolescents. So the first day, I drew this chart on the blackboard. Time on the horizontal line, and something I called badness to designate disruptive behavior. And I said, "Here's how a boy is typically bad. It goes way high on the badness dimension but doesn't go very far on the timeline. He'll yell, throw something, smack somebody, do something obvious." And then I drew another line and said, "Here's how a girl is typically bad. Her line doesn't go very high on the badness scale because she's only whispering or giggling or passing notes, but it goes on and on and on along the time dimension." And I shaded the area under the two lines and said, "You can see that what I'll call badness time is about the same for boys and girls, just oriented across different dimensions. And so, I will continue to discipline you boys as I'm sure you have always been disciplined. But when I discipline you girls in ways you probably aren't used to, don't complain that you were only whispering or giggling or passing notes. Consider as well how long of a time you were doing it, and consider also how many other girls you were doing it with. I saw the boys smile and nod their heads like, "Yes!" And the girls too nodded as if to say, "Wow, he's got us!" And we went on to have a very peaceful and fun school year together. That's basically the idea of dimensionality. We're going to use it to make sure we understand everything we need to know about the Matrix. —so we can score points against it for men and boys in the game between the sexes, the most important game of all. So here's a scientist, and he's trying to understand power dynamics between men and women. And he's looking at the female power structure the way he learned to think about it. He's very perplexed because he's been around a while, and he knows from personal experience that women are not by any means powerless. He's wondering how so much power can come from such a thin little line. But he's a good scientist, so he thinks and thinks and thinks, and he comes up with a hypothesis. Instead of looking at it horizontally, the old-fashioned way, just standing at ground level, maybe we should think about what that low pink line looks like from above. And so he decides to do some fieldwork. He gets a grant from a foundation or a government program that doesn't exist yet, and he takes his video camera and gets into a helicopter and— there it is! Of course, that makes so much sense. It's not tall, but it's wide. And the Patriarchy still looks tall, but it looks like it could blow over in a windstorm.
America, and in general, and the women's movement and people who are interested in progress for women are always looking all over the world. They're always looking for models of gender equity. They never look at tribal people. Most people in the larger society don't think we have anything to say. But if they looked at the Iroquois, for example, and looked at the Iroquois people, all they see is they see that they have male chiefs. But what they don't know, because they never take the time to learn, is that the male chiefs are chosen by the women. They're nurtured from young men to become chiefs. The women install them. And a special ceremony, and the women can take them out if they don't perform their, their jobs correctly. So women have a strong role there, but if a stranger just walked in and looked at it, they would not know about the incredible role of women.
What's big in our lives? We have a bias toward thinking that traditional male power is big and important, and female power isn't. Women's game plan, in fact, is to pretend that their power is unimportant, even as they complain that their roles are demeaned and devalued. You gotta hand it to them, that's pretty clever. Here's a little story from Phyllis Schlafly, who opposed the Equal Rights Amendment because she was afraid it would cause women to lose power. She tells about a hoodwinked husband who thinks he has big power, important power, like the president and Congress do, just because he's a man. Meanwhile, he lets his wife run his life.
When my wife and I were married, we agreed that I would make all the major decisions and she would make the minor ones. I decide what legislation Congress should pass, what treaties the president should sign, and whether the United States should stay in the United Nations. My wife makes the minor decisions, such as how we spend our money, whether I should change my job, where we should live, and where we go on our vacations.
Betty Friedan started the modern women's movement with her book The Feminine Mystique in 1963. She talks mostly about the problems of women, but she was aware of and sympathetic to the fact that the situation in the 1960s wasn't good for men either. In fact, on page 379 of The Feminine Mystique, she mentioned a magazine article the year before that talked about problems facing men. Take a minute here to read a little of what that article had to say. So, with advantages and disadvantages for both men and women in both the patriarchy and the matrix, it would have made sense for men and women to arrange a swap, a bargain, to negotiate, give and take. But the whole idea of sexism is much more about how it harms women than how it harms men. It didn't have to be that way. A few years after Friedan's book came out, women started talking about patriarchal oppression and only patriarchal oppression. It was all about the patriarchy. They didn't want to hear anything about how women had power too. There was only one way to look at power dynamics between the sexes—their way. And if you dared to suggest that women had power, and weren't always nice about it, you were a male chauvinist pig and a misogynist. Sadly, most women went along with this. "Hey, if we can get an equal share of what men have without having to give up anything that we have, what's not to like?" And so, instead of engaging men in a negotiation, The Matrix sent men on a guilt trip and demanded a very unidirectional, single-dimensional approach to fairness between the sexes. And of course, fairness was not the result. The women's movement became terribly dysfunctional, and the Matrix, unrestrained and unaccountable, is still demanding and taking. What it wants.
I was about 31 years old, 1970, '69 actually, and I first began to hear about the women's movement in England, and I got very much involved in the very, very early days and was extremely unsympathetic with the views that I heard there because it was very radical basically. It was anti-family, it was certainly anti-fathers and boys. And I remember this woman standing there saying to all of us, we were housewives most of us, and of course the new family unit will be women and children and men will be expendable. And I took issue with this hugely, platforms all over England. And eventually I got thrown out.
So our friend the scientist continues to study the matrix. We still have lots to learn. Stay with us. It's gonna be fun.
