Question

Philosophy question

Use 3-5 sentences to explain Marilyn Frye's analogy of oppression as a bird cage? How does she use this analogy to describr micro vs. macro views of oppression?

Answer 1

Bird Cage analogy:

One of the important and great work of Marilyn Frye's is "oppression". According to Marilyn Frye's ,women always need to face double binds from a patriarchial society. She also explained the women's oppression just similar to a bird cage.Whenever we look at a single wire in a bird cage, we fail to watch other wires, but when we move back our step and observed it very clearly, we are able to find all wires.

In this analogy , she explains that viewing a single wire i.e microscopically is a small view of oppression. Instead of that she prefer many wires, ie macroscopically. When we macroscopically observe, we can clearly view that , in a patriarchial society, women need to face multiple forces and barriers which make them to restrict their lifes in a society.

From the above birdcage analysis , we can summarize that the oppression towards women are not for a single matter. It contain many wires(many restrictions) which joined together to form a big restricted cage. This bird cage can be applied in the case of sexism ,racism ,classism etc.