lumière des étoiles

The Myth of Scarcity, Part 1
2003-02-27 3:13 p.m.

Why do girls fight so much? A couple years of "study" and years and years of friendships, good and bad, might have helped me figure out the answer. Here's part 1 of an essay I wrote thinking about it.

The Myth of Scarcity. It’s what drives most bias and consequential oppression. We’ve all encountered it. It’s that person complaining about his Hispanic neighbors, proclaiming that “the immigrants are taking all of our jobs”. It’s that person who gets irritated at the idea that “all our tax dollars go to welfare mothers”, or that “there are no good neighborhoods left” because of the (fill in the color/ethnicity) moving in. It puts out there the idea that we have very few, and vanishing, social resources left and we, individually or as a “group” (read: race, class, or sex), must fight to retain control over them. It pits person against person, no doubt – some say by design, some say by nature.

I first discovered the phrase in a book by Suzanne Pharr I was thinking of including in a course I teach called Politics of Sexuality. It’s title, Homophobia: A Weapon of Sexism (1997) was alluring to me, as it seemed to promise a new perspective about the far-reaching consequences of sexism, something my students usually think only affects women when they first arrive in my classroom. The theory, The Myth of Scarcity, seemed easy enough to apply to situations like the ones mentioned above. I had created my own classifications for instances when The Myth of Scarcity was the leading cause of oppression or social injustice, and was happy to realize that I was far removed from its mentality.

Or was I? Far from the University is my world of everyday. I am a 25 year old adjunct professor with a Master’s Degree, ever-changing plans for the pursuit of a Ph.D, and no idea what I want to do when I grow up. Aside from the fact that my career involves academics, I never considered myself that different from my friends. We share the same interests, hobbies, and ideas. Most of my friends, male or female, consider themselves feminists, and ask about the material I teach. We’ve often spent hours discussing the institutions and ideology that stand in the way of the goals of feminism. There is a force, however, that often drives itself between us, causing numerous fights, miscommunications, and distance. I never paid that much attention to the source of it before, chalking it up to personality flaws (mine or theirs), past emotional trauma (mine or theirs), or the natural act of “growing apart”. While all of these are very real issues that affect female friendship, there is something that cannot be ignored, and that is The Myth of Scarcity.

Sure, it makes sense that this Myth is what drives racism, bigotry, and xenophobia, considering the fact that some people honestly believe that they must protect, in the interest of the “survival of their own” or some other such nonsense, what little there is to go around between us. How it could be a destructive factor in my female and male friendships, however, never really occurred to me until I recently.

...more to come! WHO AM I, ANYWAY?