This post continues the series that started here and has got here. I’ll be honest; I don’t know how long this series of posts will go on for, it’s taken on something of a life of its own in my head. The topic of this post is about attempting a ‘materialist’, i.e. “class-based” analysis of sexual oppression on its own terms.
In a patriarchal society, ideological men have ideological sex with ideological women. This relationship has the character of a trade, a voluntary (well, somewhat) interaction which nevertheless exhibits opposed interests. This trade, the most distinctive feature of which is that one of the traders is themselves also the commodity traded (they ‘give themselves’ to the other), allows us to analyse patriarchal society in class terms – in terms of the shared interests based on groups with similar endowments of ‘sexual resources’.
