Ever noticed in human relationships how often one person or group of people have more power than the other?
It’s true on a macro level – in the US, whites have more power than others as a whole. Men have more power than women. Adults have more power than children. The rich have more power than the poor. The Global North (first-world nations primarily located in the Northern Hemisphere) has far more power than the Global South (developing nations primarily located in the Southern Hemisphere). And so on.
But it’s also true on a micro level – one neighborhood’s residents have more power than another’s, a manager has more power than an employee, etc. The power dynamics populate on down to the supermicro level – in one-on-one human relationships. You all know what I’m talking about. The relationship power struggle can be romantic – she changes her tastes to suit his or he swaps his social group for hers – or platonic, where one friend makes the decisions about where to go and what to do, while the other simply tags along.
Among friends, who often keep up a pretense of not “keeping score,” it can be seen in who extends the most invitations. Who goes to whose house? Who is put out the most the majority of the time? Who crosses bridges and rivers to visit the other? Who chooses the movie, the bar, the restaurant? Who leads the conversation? Who do the two of you talk about the most? The power dynamics often fall along class lines – when there is a class division in a relationship, whether it be romantic or otherwise, the member with the higher class gets the power. Usually without much of a struggle.
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| You can read some of this highly worthwhile book at the New York Times. |
I first learned of this phenomenon when I bought a book called “Class Matters.” There was a whole chapter on marriages formed of two people from different classes and the power dynamics of their relationships – those of the upper echelons controlled the couples’ finances, among other things. It’s interesting, once you know about this, to observe how your own friends’ and acquaintances’ backgrounds affect their personal dynamics. An inherently outgoing friend may become shy around certain others because of his or her perceived inferiority, or a naturally quiet type may become bossy and outgoing around friends whose perceived socioeconomic status is lower.
Fascinating, I tell you. Sick, but fascinating. Have you ever noticed this in your own life? At work or in a romantic relationship or a friendship? What do you think would happen if you tried to bring it up in conversation? And, to my sociologically-inclined readers, is there an official word or phrase for this phenomenon?
hmm...i agree. i'm glad someone else sees it the way i do.
ReplyDeleteWhat made you think about that?
"Class Matters" is now on the To Be Read list--thanks. Micro-level power inequality was the original meaning--before it got reinterpreted and misinterpreted and misquoted almost to the point of meaninglessness-of the Second Wave idea that "the personal is political." Women began to discover, often by meeting in Consciousness Raising groups, that what they had thought were personal problems--in relationships, at work, in their ideas about themselves--were common to all of them as woman and so couldn't be understood except in terms of unequal power, i.e. politics. (Thus when Kate Millett expanded her Ph. D. dissertation in English, about three major 20th century male writers, into a book, arguing that their books and their reputation were both expressions of male supremacy, she called the book "Sexual Politics.") I think "the P is P" probably can't be revived in just those words--it's been so bashed around that it can't be used without giving its back story, as above, and a slogan that needs footnotes isn't a very god slogan. But the insight it captured hasn't lost any of its explanatory strength.
ReplyDelete@thewritersays - Oof, I think what made me think of this (on this particular occasion, as it's a topic I weirdly think about a lot) was trying to schedule gym time with an acquaintance. There are two locations for us to choose from - one by my house, one by hers. We go to the one by her house, even though parking is inconvenient and it's out of the way for me. But, I live on the "seedy" side of town. I have no idea what her class origins are, but if we were to use the NYTimes class chart, I'd win the social class power struggle. But in this case the signifier of rank - location - is the deciding factor for how we schedule our gym classes, and I lose the friendship power struggle before it's begun.
ReplyDelete...and now I sound neurotic!!
John: Yes! I'd send you my copy only I lent it to mi madre. A library would have it, and a lot of the content is on the NYTimes web site, although you may hit a paywall at some point.
ReplyDeleteThat is a really excellent explanation of "the personal is political" - agree that a slogan with footnotes is not a very good slogan at all. Then again, micro-level power inequality may sound a bit too academic for wide use... But YES, the personal IS political, dammit! A lot of people I know IRL think I get worked up about insignificant things. But when you put them in this context, it is much easier to see those "insignificant things" as symptoms of a rigidly inflexible, profoundly unjust and largely invisible sociopolitical system.
On another note - what are the books that Kate Millett discusses? It sounds like something I'd want to check out.
ReplyDeleteI just wrote out a very long comment on this blog in which I would up looking like a dick. It's been such a long day. I may come back to it.
ReplyDeleteFor now, hello! \o/ x
wound, not would.
ReplyDeleteTired.
The beauty of the internet is that you can look like a dick, and no one IRL knows! Except in my case, where almost everyone I know knows, but I never know when they know, until it comes up in slightly tipsy conversation, and I get all uncomfortable and then think about taking down the blog, but have been doing it so long that I would feel like I was breaking up with someone I loved very much.
ReplyDeleteANYway, please come back and comment! We won't judge, we promise.
The authors she focuses on are D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Norman Mailer, though the book isn't just a study of them. Peg left her copy in New York when we moved here long ago, but she still recalls with delight staying up all night to read it and laughing out loud with recognition and agreement. A few years later Mary Gordon wrote an essay on a number of other 20th century male hotshot writers called, very accurately, "Bad Boys and Dead Girls."
ReplyDeleteThat sounds delightful - although now is when I have to admit that I haven’t read much of any of those authors - I powered through "Tropic of Cancer" and a bit of "The Rainbow" and "Lady Chatterley's Lover" but that's it. The takedown is probably more delectable for those with greater familiarity.
ReplyDeleteI would love to see someone write a book or essay slicing and dicing the current literary world's slingers of male supremacy, like Tom Robbins and his ilk.
I haven't read him or a lot of other recent fiction writers. I read some Lawrence--Lady C., Sons and Lovers, the short story "The Rocking-Horse Winner"--long ago. The story is good (and there's a powerful movie version); I don't remember much about Sons but I would call Lady C. basically an exercise in dick worship, with a side order of mystical back-to-the-soil folk-wisdom hooha. Miller I read in French editions in the late 50's, before his "Tropic" novels could be legally sold in the US; I was very young and they were (by the standards of the time) very obscene, but I don't think I read them as works of literature. But Mailer? Dick worship, rape fantasies, woman-killing fantasies--really repellent stuff, at least after about 1960. One piece of evidence for Millett's argument is that he kept being taken seriously instead of being laughed off the stage.
ReplyDeleteHere's what I have found fascinating. On one level everything you said is true, yet it's not. Often the appearance of who has power and who actually controls the power are two different things. For example, you'd think that between a janitor and a CEO the CEO is the one with power right? Yet, give the janitor a month off and see how well that CEO keeps his executive restroom clean. It works on a macro level too. Look at Coke. Multi-billion dollar international corporation and yet when a bunch of middle to lower class people got a bee in their bonnets over New Coke the corporation did a 180. It'll go down in history as one of the worst moves the corporation ever made thanks not to rich, powerful CEOs but to average people who simply all decided they didn't like the change. The dynamics of power change yes, but often that power is an illusion. More often there is a balance where if each part isn't played the entire thing goes off the rails. This is one reason I support the idea of things like a living wage. We need janitors and garbage men and waitresses a lot more than we need bankers and lawyers. And truthfully that is where the power is, in the masses. If every lawyer in the country didn't show up for work not too many people would notice I imagine, but if every trash collector didn't show up imagine the chaos! I see class, I know it matters on the surface, but I think if people really looked they would see that the real power is in the people they don't normally think of as having it. I often wonder why people don't exert their power more often. Perhaps because we are all too busy just trying to make it. Which ought to tell everyone that those "in charge" know people have more power than they do. They have to scheme and scam and go to Machiavellian degrees to keep the illusion of control- it's nuts if you ask me. Great book though. Another one you might want to check out on a similar tangent is Babara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed and The Betrayal of Work by Beth Shulman. Not precisely on topic but they give a good view of how the power structure acts upon individual people.
ReplyDeleteJenni, your sentiment is sweet but you're wrong. If that janitor didn't show up, he'd be replaced by another lickety-split. It takes hundreds of thousands of peons to have the same impact as a single high-powered CEO/hedge-fund-manager/political despot.
ReplyDeleteAmazing how times have changed. Once, every intelligent woman with literary tastes read Lawrence, and I would say he was more popular with women than with men. Now to me he is mostly unreadable except for Sons and Lovers and some of the short stories.
ReplyDeleteMy favorite anecdote about him is how one day when he was bashing Frieda's head into the wall, shouting, "I am the master," she said, "Fine, be the master if it's all that important to you."
Or that's how I remember hearing it, anyway.
The problem was that she came from the upper classes and he was a working class son of a miner, and he was asserting male authority in the crudest way. A real gent would not have had to resort to violence but would simply have been obeyed without question.
Andrew, Jenni isn't wrong, she's just far less cynical than the rest of us. Of course, I'm not wrong either, because it's a scientific fact that I am always right. Just ask my cats.
ReplyDeleteHattie, nail, meet head.
I love science.
ReplyDeleteLittle known fact: One of my cats is a medical doctor, the other is a professor of philosophy and literature, and armchair physicist. The former has a terrible bedside manner, the latter wears spectacles and carries a pocketwatch.
ReplyDeleteWho, me? Crazy cat lady?! Never hoid of it!
More facts:
ReplyDeletehttp://youtu.be/IH0lraX7Hmk
I have actually noticed this in my own relationships. I used to tend to date younger people or people that were less aggressive/assertive personality-wise, where as I am pretty dominant. It always caused a bunch of weird shit between me and whoever I was dating. I am much more aware of it now and try to check it regularly in my current relationship.
ReplyDeleteHi Jen! It seems that every time I turn around I learn of more types of power imbalances I hadn't even thought of - like the older/younger relationship. I wonder if that partially explains the appeal of the May/December romance?
ReplyDelete