Androcentrism (Greek, andro-, "man, male") is the practice, conscious or otherwise, of placing male human beings or the masculine

point of view at the center of one's view of the world and its culture and history. The related adjective is androcentric, while the practice of placing the feminine point of view at the center is gynocentrism. Origin of the terms of endearment The term androcentrism has been introduced as an analytic concept by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in the scientific debate. Perkins Gilman described androcentric practices in society and the resulting problems in her investigation on The ManMade World; or, Our Androcentric Culture, published in 1911. Thus androcentrism can be understood as a societal fixation on masculinity whereby all things originate. Under androcentrism, masculinity is normative and all things outside of masculinity are defined as other. According to Perkins Gilman, masculine patterns of life and masculine mindsets claimed universality while female ones were considered as deviance. Androcentrism or male centeredness, is the practice of placing male human beings and the way they view the world at the center of one's own view of the world. Sandra Bem defines androcentrism as the first lens through which society views gender. Seeing the world through and androcentric point of view can be either a conscious or subconscious decision. Androcentrism sees the male experience, their practices, values and thoughts as "the norm" and classifies everyone else as "the other." Androcentrism focuses on the belief that men and masculinity are superior to women and feminity. Another related term, gender polarization, states that in androcentric societies gender polarization takes place. This means that male and female have specific behaviors and values and that it is unacceptable to deviate from what is expected of you. This perpetuates the belief that men and masculinity are superior by keeping "the other" as subordinate because deviating from what they "should be" is unacceptable. It even goes as far as to define women in terms of how she should function in relation to men within a male dominated society and household. Women must be domesticated, satisfy the male sexual appetite and carry out reproductive functions. So how do we eradicate androcentrism? It is a matter of ending the debate of whether or not men are fundamentally the same or fundamentally differnt. Bem has this to say: "[T]he cultural debate about sexual inequality must be reframed so that it addresses not male-female difference but how androcentric social institutions transform male-female difference into female disadvantage (from her book Lenses of Gender)." Androcentrism exists in all fields of study and cultural expressions, including the arts, sciences, medicine, law, fine arts, and media. Androcentrism is the Greek word which means the conscious of placing the men at the center. This is the practice of making the masculine gender point of view

as the center to hold the view of the worlds history and culture is referred to as Androcentrism.

Phallocentrism
In psychoanalytic theory, the phallus serves as the supreme symbol of masculine power and, concurrently, of feminine lack. Phallocentrism is a term used primarily by feminist theorists to denote the pervasive privileging of the masculine within the current system of signification. The term was first coined by Ernest Jones, a British psychoanalyst, in reference to the primacy of the phallus in Sigmund Freud's theories. Freud (1965[1933]) posits a phallic phase in childhood development, during which sexual difference is first encountered. In this phase, the distinction between the sexes is figured primarily through the genitalia, specifically the penis, which Freud conflates with the phallus as a symbol of power. Depicting the clitoris as a penis equivalent, Freud conceives the origins of female sexuality in terms of the masculine phallus Phallocentrism is a term first used by the Freudian psychoanalyst Ernest Jones c. 1927 to focus his disagreement with Freud's theory of female sexual identity as being marked by the lack of the phallus, a sense, in other words, of their castration. This theory evidently deprives females of any positive sense of their own sexual organs and was seen by Jones as an unconscious projection by male psychoanalysts of their own neurotic fears about the female body. Lacanian analysis repeats with variations Freud's obsession with the phallus and its lack, and was charged with phallocentrism by feminist critics, particularly Luce Irigaray in her Speculum of the Other Woman (1974).