Young and Mackinnon

        

                 The five faces of oppression, according to Iris Young, are exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural dominance, and violence. Catharine MacKinnon immediately addresses the fourth facet of this definition various times in her article. Particularly, in the first two pages of said article where she describes the first two alternate paths to equality that stem from and dominate politics, law, and social perception, she begins the argument of how the equality of women is being set on scale where men set the norm or standard.  As she explains, “the legal mandate of equal treatment… becomes a matter of treating likes alike and unlikes unlike,” of which “the sexes are defined as such by their mutual unlikeness.” Simply put, gender is a social construct, and this concept of equality, which accepts alikeness, and sex, which accepts unlikeness. Its contradictory nature leads to the evolution of two distinct paths towards equality, one, which favors alikeness, and one that does not. The first path is that of imitation, where women are told to be the same as men. Cultural dominance is clear here. Men, their station, privilege, and right, are established as the norm and the desired goal or outcome. The establishment of this position is due to cultural expressions and history displayed and defined as superior to others’. For many years, a woman in the workplace was thought of as strange, and even now, as a norm, women earn far less than men in the same line of work. By treating this a “universal,” society accepts these culturally misogynistic traditions. Though it implies a degree of equality, it actually implies more of a parallel to “the same as,” which is most definitely not what the end goal is or should be. This path also coincides with another of Young’s face of oppression, marginalization. Women, as history shows, have a harder time at acquiring and maintain steady jobs mostly due to their gender, not their ability. Thus, a marginalization is created. In addition, in the women’s history, the fairer sex has continuously been left out of the labor market. MacKinnon’s second path describes how women should accept their differences form men. Playing even more into both marginalization and cultural dominance, to accept these differences is to accept that men establish the norm, that women remain marginalized from the labor force, and that sex discrimination actually has a substantive claim.

Throughout her article, MacKinnon points out how “man has become the measure of all things,” while women “are measured according to our correspondence with man, our equality judged by our proximity to his measure.” It is within this context that she unravels sexual discrimination as a result of two of the five faces of oppression, marginalization and cultural dominance. Her main example stems around hos women have developed the fight of equality into a discussion of sameness and difference, which perfectly display the conflict and contradiction within the argument itself.