"Oppression" by Marilyn Frye

“Oppression” was written by Marilyn Frye originally for The Politics of Reality in 1983. The writing style of this essay is formal, but not dry by any means. The thesis of this essay is that the word “oppression” is often misused and that men are not oppressed and also gives examples of how women are oppressed. She states that it is perfectly acceptable to say that a group of people are not oppressed and still acknowledge their feelings and sufferings. She says that groups that are oppressed are in a double bind which she defines as: “situations in which options are reduced to a very few and all of them expose one to penalty, censure or deprivation.” She uses the example of young woman and sexual activity to illustrate the double bind; young women who are sexually active are labeled as loose or whores, where young women who are not sexually active can be labeled as frigid, uptight, or automatically assumed a lesbian. Frye goes on to give more examples such as the way women dress; women are either accused of advertising their sexual availability, or not caring how they look depending on how they are dressed. She also discusses the double binding situation of rape. How if a woman is sexually active and is raped, she obviously enjoys sex therefore enjoyed it, and if the woman is not sexually active she is “repressed and frustrated” and enjoyed it as well. Frye then compares a bird cage to oppression, saying that we need to step back and take a macroscopic view to see the oppression. This is all important to the field of women’s studies because it fights back to the claim that men are oppressed too, and it really illustrates how women are caught in this oppression.
The one issue in this essay that stood out to me as a problem was the example of how a young woman’s sexual activity, or lack there of, effects what people say about her. If she is sexually active, than she is called a “whore” (or something to that effect), and if she is not sexually active she is frigid, cold, or maybe gay. This is something that men do to women all of the time, it is just another one of those double binding situations. Nobody wants to be identified and labeled because they are or are not sexually active. It is the same as in the example that Frye gives with how women are judged on the clothes that they wear. If a woman is wearing something revealing she is called “loose” if she is not wearing revealing clothing she is called “unfeminine.” What I feel is the worst thing about this is that we women sometimes do this to each other. If we are around a young woman who is more sexually active than we believe is “right” then we sometimes might call her a “slut” or something along those lines. We are all most likely guilty of thinking like this at some point in time; as much as I would not like to admit it, nor am I proud of it; I know that I am guilty of this. I believe that this is very significant to Women’s Studies. Part of the point of Women’s Studies is to educate and try to end the use of stereotypes and generalizations about women, made by men. Let me just ask one question: how can we ever expect them to take us completely seriously and treat us the way we want to be treated when there is so much horizontal hostility among us women?