I don't get 'The Patriarchy'

"I am not saying any of those things"

Yes you are

"Yes ensuring healthy young is a key survival strategy."

did you know that some men believe a woman's patriarcho-constructed femininity and beauty is actually an indicator of how fertile she is, and how healthy her young will be. I shit you not.

do you get the patriachy yet or still struggling with that one?

you're rambling Himalaya. Why should theory have to be compatible with evolutionary origins? Take a look around at the world today. WHen you say patriarchy is NOT strength + choice are you saying men are sub-human, that they have no volition of their own, that they are guided by their penises, that morality only exists in women?

Look at my posts about Oyster pearls

The title of this thread is "I don't get the patriarchy"

Look at my thread about oyster pearls then apply some critical thinking about what a patriarchy might be.

Other than that, can't really help you. It's not MY fault that you don't get it.

You won't be the first person not to understand what feminists are bangin on about, and you certainly won't be the last.

You don't get the patriarchy. You don't understand the concept.

Can't help you with that, sorry.

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i'm so angry at that. Because of the dangers, they were low on the social ladder

the patriarchy are just so confused aren't they. When men risk their life it's a positive, when women do the same it's a negative

"As a result of the dangers, many of the divers were low on the social ladder, or even slaves."

Compare this to the minisucle physical achievements men have made, such as kicking a bloody ball about, and who then receive lots of social rewards, resources, and kudos for it. If men had been the ones to dive they'd have been feted as kings. Because it's women, and anything women do must be defined in the negative , they were devalued to nothing as women always are.

off topic but has anyone here ever heard of Japanese Oyster pearl divers ?

Almost all oyster pearl gathering has historically been done by women. You'd need highly developed lungs, and lots of muscle to stay underwater for long periods of time while you searched for the oysters in deep sea water.

"Traditionally, Japanese pearl diving was done by women who were called "Ama" (above, left). The word ama literally means "sea woman." This Japanese tradition dates back 2000 years. As recently as the 1960s, Ama divers wore only a loincloth. Even today, Ama dive without scuba gear, using free-diving techniques. Free-divers often descend to depths of over 100 feet on a single breath. Only divers who work at tourist attractions use white, partially transparent suits to dive in."

Men, obviously, reaped the profits for their work.

In cultures where men fish and women weave, fishing is more highly valued. IN cultures where women fish and men weave, weaving is more highly valued.

A large part of evolutionary biology is about looking at how species use energy, as thermodynamics underpins all ecology. Much about why species develop one way or another, and variation within species is about energy tradeoffs. So each species has to make decisions, both at a genetic level and in its own decisions at a conscious level on how much energy to spend on the different activities of acquiring food - searching for it, choosing which types of food to use, preparing it, transporting it, and then it has to balance those costs against the energy to stay alive and the energy invested in raising young, birth spacing, breast feeding and so on.

In Western countries, we tend not to worry about this, because we have energy from fossil fuels or the work of other people, so don't have to balance our energy trade offs -our energy doesn't come from our own work. Everyone else in the world does have to manage their energy trade offs or they die. Sustainability for people who live in a subsistence existence is based on their ability to have access to a broad resource base. Outside sources will frequently come along and say - you don't need this 1 acre of woodland, cattle dung, that particular field etc, when actually removing someone's cattle dung means they will die, because their management of the ecosystem is so finely balanced.

So evolutionary theory is used in 2 ways. It allows us to calculate exactly what the energy consequences are going to be for women if the government restricts their choices in particular ways, so that advocacy groups can attempt to prevent this when it is harmful. This particularly applies to women because it has such a damaging impact on their birth spacing and breastfeeding. Often the consequences of this are to the woman's own body, as well as to the health of her children.

The second way it is used is that evolutionary theory is applied to the specific individual environment a woman farms (and most farmers are women), so that we can predict what the ecological consequences will be, and how evolution will change plant and animal communities to make the woman's life unsustainable, if the government removes certain resources which to non-farmers seem trivial.

SGM, evolutionary biology does not try and define out social structures as natural. They clearly, by definition, are not natural. They are socially constructed. It is evolutionary psychology that attempts to try and justify social structures as natural.

I should clarify that male dominance is extremely important now, but the spurious theory that male dominance is determined by genetics is of no relevance to life now.

Dittany, yes, it is not the case that women have underdeveloped muscle. Having more muscle doesn't make men more capable of all work - women have the energy to keep on working over long periods of time because they can use higher fat deposits to conserve energy.

I don't think men have evolved in a certain way so that they can dominate women. It is true that in many other species males have qualities to help them compete for mates, feather displays, antlers, muscle and so on. But this isn't all about dominating females - it can be used to attract females. As humans are most similar in their level of sexual dimorphism and traits to species that use sex for social reasons, it could be that the male body has traits that appeal sexually to other males. You could speculate on many reasons, but we do not actually know the answer, and certainly cannot say that men wanting to dominate women is about genetics. In fact, most anthropologists tend to speculate the other way, and claim it is more connected to the rise of complex societies.

I don't think evolution is particularly important to feminism when looking at the UK. But I think that understanding energy costs and trade offs, which are central to evolutionary theory are really important for looking at women's access to land, women's food entitlements, women's reproductive freedoms and women's child rearing choices in less economically developed countries. Because wider and sometimes global structures are a threat to these women's choices and there has to be a focus on the material reality of these women's lives and bodies and the material reality of the agricultural ecosystems those women are attempting to manage sustainably. That is actually the focus of much work in evolutionary ecology. That is why people are funded to research these areas. Hardly anybody cares about some issue over human male dominance - it is a side show of evolutionary psychology, and people in related evolutionary disciplines generally ignore ev psych, and also because this male dominance thing has no practical application or relevance to life now, so what is the point of it?

The fact that some people like to get into arguments with feminists over some ev psych theory that is mostly ignored by other academics is not a reason for feminists to come to the conclusion that understanding much of the scientific concepts of evolution are not actually of specific value to women now in very real ways.

An insanity gene, I guess, Dittany. While I agree that this thread has got bogged down in evo-speculation, it was started by Himalaya, so I imagine s/he is genuinely bothered about whether male supremacy is an inevitability or a choice. Lots of people do share the assumptions made here: is it possible to ask for anti-patrirachal action without addressing those beliefs?

Himalaya: I'm taking issue with the idea that we know much about human evolution, or about human culture going back more than a few thousand years. Therefore, I don't think it is terribly meaningful to base our analysis of modern day social structures on these things when we know so little about them.

And I struggle to see what relvance any of this has on discussing the existence and nature of the patriarchy today. Hence, why I was interjecting to try to move the debate away from a discussion of evolution 101, and back on to the topic that this thread originally about.