Art, not Craft. Sally Cook, c. 1975, with her painting Self Portrait Five Images. Photo: Bob Fisk.
People talk about systemic racism like it’s the only thing holding people back in the United States, but women know otherwise. Systemic Sexism in America has been suppressing women and treating us differently since the cave man days (I’m assuming) because of our lesser physical strength, which isn’t even relevant in the 21st Century. This has carried over into all walks of life for women. It’s the syndrome I call the Lesser-Than Syndrome because it treats women as lesser than men in all ways that count, and it’s keeping women poor, suppressed, and not fully human.
For better explanations on this phenomena you can read the sources at the end of this. What really caught my eye about this today was an article in ArtNet about a 91 year old woman who is just now getting recognition for her art work because guess what, men crowded her out for most of her art career, with their own demands to be seen as serious artists, while she was described as a “craft person” despite her amazing paintings. That’s sickening to me as an artist, because the exact same thing has happened to me, most of my life. The men in whatever art group I was a part of were enabled, promoted, and lauded as serious artists, and the women in the group were treated as hobbyists or “crafters” and therefore to be ignored. This was true in the state I used to live in, and it’s even more true in the state I now live in, which is Georgia. In fact, one art fair in a [snobby] Georgia city rejected my art fair application because the people in charge of it literally told me that the panel felt my art “wasn’t “fine arty enough” i.e, it was too “crafty”. I was angered by that, as any professional woman artist would be. Meanwhile, men selling their carved pens and homemade watches and wood burning plaques were gladly accepted into that same “art fair” and I know that because I went to that art fair and saw the crap men were selling as “fine art”. I was then even more angered. Sexism is alive and well in Georgia in the 21st Century even at crappy art fairs. Don’t go to them.
Here is the experience of Sally Cook, the 91-year old artist finally being recognized as a real honest-to-god artist.
“For a long time, that’s how Cook viewed herself in relationship to the art world: an outsider. She felt that way in the 1950s, as a woman trying to carve out a place for herself in New York’s male-dominated 10th Street scene, and again after moving back to her hometown of Buffalo, New York in the 1960s, when the city’s insular arts institutions disregarded her charming, domestic figuration as craft.
“I was treated like a non-person,” she said …”
I know the feeling well. How many other talented women artists have been treated this way? Besides this happening to me, over and over and over again, I do think it’s pretty common. To younger artists, and young people in general, this may be an interesting story about “how things used to be” – except things are still this way in America for female artists and other female workers.
Even worse, systemic sexism is growing, not going away. Now assholes like fired from Fox Tucker Carlson are redefining masculinity as “men who rape” (see Tucker’s interview with Andrew Tate this week where they talk about how women should still be slaves to men). This attitude is where all of this Lesser Than Syndrome comes from.
More reading below.The important thing is that men and others become more aware of this because it’s a huge cultural problem for half of this country’s population. It’s not a small, insignificant thing.
Systemic sexism recognition and antisexism encourage gender equality activism: An adaptation of bystander intervention theory
Although great strides have been made toward gender equality in the United States, continued progress is needed. The current paper adapts bystander intervention theory to delineate which individuals are more likely to engage in gender equality activism. We postulated that individuals who identify that systemic sexism causes gender inequalities (i.e., systemic sexism recognition) and who feel personally responsible for advocating against these inequities (i.e., high antisexism) should be most likely to engage in gender equality activism.
Truth from a great dissertation:
Systemic racism, systemic sexism, and systemic classism are intertwining systems of oppression built into the foundations of the United States to keep elite white men in power and thus, are subsystems of the elite-white-male-dominance system (Feagin and Ducey 2017). However, systemic sexism has structural differences compared to the other subsystems. First, our society is highly integrated forcing the oppressed to constantly interact with the oppressors; Second, misogyny is arguably the oldest system of oppression permeating in most cultures and among all races; and lastly, perhaps as a result of gender integration and the extensive history of sexism, women equally participate in their own oppression. The theoretical differences were apparent in the findings of each article. The most notable distinction was that men did not filter their sexist behavior in front of women whether they were strangers or friends and family. Men did not filter their sexist behavior in front of women. For example, catcalling is typically a male- to-female interaction in a public space. Catcallers will use vulgar comments, threats, whistles, kissing noises and/or engage in “silent catcalling” such as intonations, leering, and winking to objectify women. Men use catcalling as a male-bonding experience or masculinity performance to assert their dominance over women. On the other hand, women genuinely fear sexual violence from these encounters and utilize various strategies to survive. I utilize systemic sexism theory, specifically the male-sexist frame, to analyze data I have collected from two major universities. Participants submitted journal entries over the course of six weeks noting anything they perceived to be sexist. The theoretical differences of systemic sexism lead to the acceptance of men engaging in sexist behavior towards women through commentary, catcalling, or in everyday conversation. Results indicate that men and women live very different realities.
“… every form of sexism is based on the premise that women are inferior to men… “
At a time when women are bearing the brunt of these inequities, understanding the entwined power structures of patriarchy and white supremacy has never been more crucial. Rather than copying and pasting the systems of the past — and expecting a new result — we can use this moment to create a more just, equitable, and inclusive society.
The moment to stop the vicious cycle of institutionalized sexism is now.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. For more information on the lesser than syndrome just google it. There is a lot of information out there about systemic sexism, but instead of getting better, things are getting worse.
