Getting past Pyotr the Great(ly Annoying) ...and his buddies

Everywhere I look in Toronto, I see male chauvinism. From the CN Tower, to sexist ads on the TTC, to government spending on war machines, to biographies of "great men" at the TPL, there! to the ubiquitous acronyms and other military-derived idioms like "changing of the guard" (referring to Toronto's mayoral transition), "top brass", "fight", "charge", "power", "control", even an innocuous little word like "uniform". It's everywhere.

I hate this aspect of our culture, honestly. I really hate it. I'd rather be a pawn in a world shaped by female influence than a successful man in a man's world. Take Col. Russell Williams for instance, until recently the commander of Canada's largest Armed Forces base in Trenton, Ontario. Here was a man with immense confidence in the power he had acquired "rising" through the ranks of the Canadian Armed Forces--power "vested" in him by the military and by the state. A man with a fetish for "girly" pink panties, an avid golfer, photographer, and athlete, apparently aroused by violence. His father was a metallurgist at Chalk River Laboratories, Canada's premier nuclear research laboratory (Wikipedia, 2010). This man is no "freak". He is an entirely predictable product of the implicit norms around gender division. Last year, Col. Russell Williams was a quintessential successful man. In reality, he was also a shell.*

After confessing, he expressed a desire to shield his wife from as much of the fallout of his crimes as possible, repeatedly referencing "my wife" in a pathetic attempt to sound normal. "My only concern," he said, "is how upset my life is right now. I am concerned that they are tearing up my wife's brand new house." Col. Russell Williams defends himself as a materialist, mostly concerned for himself and his family. Indeed, what could be more normal?

The peculiarity and absurdity of male-dominated culture was highlighted again for me recently watching an episode of A&E Biography about Pyotr Alexeyevich Romanov, aka Peter "The Great". A man hailed as the founder of modern Russia, Pyotr is remembered mainly because his boyhood fascination with war games was allowed to develop unchecked, giving him the military strength as an adult to wage war against various neighbouring politically entities, including Sweden and his half-sister, Sophia. Little reason is given in the documentary for his war mongering, beyond a fascination with materialism and conquest for their own sakes.

Pyotr Romanov is an extreme example of masculine ideals made manifest. Such unchecked power is thankfully unheard of in modern Western democracies (though certainly not in other parts of the world). Western men today have to negotiate at least to some degree with women about how to allocate resources, what constitutes legitimate decision-making process, appropriate decorum, and so on. But it's not enough! Male domination is crippling our culture, and our species. It already brought us once to the brink of self-annihilation through nuclear warfare. Of course, as a man, my joking admonishment for women to "take over the world" is itself a masculine perspective. What I really want is to live in a world where women are equal, heck, even more than equal with men. I'd take that over the status quo. Where are all the women who want this too?

The trouble is, I suppose, that there are reasons we've reached this equilibrium of dominant patriarchal societies becoming ubiquitous the world over. Might makes right, history is written by the victor, victor's justice, and all that. Time and again, women are beaten by their more physically powerful male counterparts, whether it's Sophia and her half-brother Pyotr, or the extinct indigenous peoples of the Amazon basin by the Spanish (more).

So how do we get around this perennial domination of women by men, and of female cultures by their patriarchal rivals?

Anyone?

*See the shallowness of letters written by Williams to the parents of the murdered women.