Hi, I am Hully's DS. Hully said I could ask you a question!

OK, I'm going to take my courage in both hands and post in FWR for the first time, don't squash me please...

Just in case you want a slightly different starting point and perspective, HullyDS.

The biblical view that the various (bible believing) churches I've been part of have always taught and I've studied is that humanity was created male and female to be in perfect harmony together. 'The fall' when they chose to disobey the one command God had given was both an undermining of this perfect harmony in the incident itself (Adam promptly blames Eve for 'making him' eat as soon as God comes looking for them, she blames the serpent even though people were given stewardship of the animals etc) and then it was a part of the judgement God made that relationships between men and women became selfish and conflicting. So the 'battle of the sexes' in Genesis 3:16 terms is "Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you."

I realise that quoting the bible as if we should actually pay any attention to it is rather inviting ridicule here, but hey ho. And you're 14, so it can't hurt to know that some people (rather a lot of thoughtful, intelligent people I know too) think otherwise.

Anyway, so in a nutshell, the biblical answer to your question would be, because the general human condition that we now endure is for women to seek domination and control over men and for men to seek rule and power over women. As a few people have noted, human history does involve examples where each side has been the more 'successful' although western history largely shows male 'success'.

And yes, 'religion' and its institutions have been fully involved and instrumental in encouraging such subjugation, including christian structures, particularly of women. But that's just because christians are still flawed and fallen human beings, just knowing we're forgiven and awaiting a redeemed and perfect world when we will no longer have to endure such a condition.

OK, that's it. And please, this is just a contribution, not an invitation for jeering.

Still no answers from dadsnet!
What, no 'Suffered? The minxes enjoy it' ??

Another possible reason is life expectancy. The risks from childbirth were high, especially without contraception + you would want to have lots of children to ensure some survived childhood. Women who are living shorter lives full of children, or working hard to survive cannot develop any talents/cannot move outside the home easily/ cannot demonstrate their skills in the same way as a man. It is only the truly unusual or driven women who make an impact on history-those who chose a different path or who had unusual circumstances. Thinking of famous women from history a lot of them were extremely rich, or childless or broke society's rules.

So then it is easier for the other sex to generalise and assume that women are not important/have fewer skills, as there is little evidence that they have.

9. maintain power structure during war and conflict through maintaining order of society and industry.

10. a subservient group, ie woman, in history have been precived to be required to maintaing order and structure through carrying out all of the above roles to benifit the strenghth of men.

8. provide welfare for the dominant power structure

1. to maintain the power structure of a dominant structure or population (men)

2. to increase the benifits of a more dominant power structure (men)

3. increase the population of a dominat power structure

4. allegience of a more dominant power structure

5. serve gratification a more dominant power structure

6. satisfy desires of a more dominant power structure

7. increase financial gain of a more dominant power structure

hmmmm

This may have already been said but the fact that we get pregnant and then care for children has meant that we've been a bit shackled. We are out of action for quite some time and tied to our children meaning that we can't travel. Our ability to bear and nurture children has led to men trying to figure out what their role is, given that we do the really important stuff like procreation. So they needed to come up with something that made them look useful, so putting themselves in charge of everything else seemed like a good idea. Many women have gone along with this because they have been programmed to believe it's best for everyone. Patriarchy is basically an enormous cult.

On an entirely different point, I would also clarify with your teacher if they believe sexism no longer exists because the way that question is phrased seems rather odd without a particular timeframe.

I know he won't see this until later, but I do think it's important to add that 'the past' is not one 'sexist' event; masculinity and femininity have been imagined in different ways in different times and places. In some of those times and places - England between 1915 and 1918 springs to mind - ideas of masculinity were probably more destructive than ideas of femininity. A lot of what many people now see as 'the past' is based on ideas about the late C19, which are often based on generic ideas about 'the Victorians' and bear minimal relation to the complex realities of the era. It's not very difficult to argue that for some women, the late C18 was a better time than the late C20, and there's a strong strand of popular feminist history that harks back to a pre-industrial past as a time when women's strengths were recognised and respected more than they have been since. These are all contested discourses, but they do exist - 'the past' is not a steady progress from sexist darkness to the feminist dawn of the 1960s.

Because before contraceptives, most of a woman's adult life was taken up with being pregnant, feeding infants and raising children, giving her far less time and attention to devote to power games and tribal politics. Its easy to assume that women have sole responsibility for children when they have to nurse them for the first few years anyway.

Because gaining power historically often involved bloodshed and risk, and women had made huge investments in raising their children and were less inclined to risk them. Men can produce more offspring for far less energy, with multiple partners, women cannot, and therefore have to protect those she has. So she can't take the risks.

Because, as has been said above, once you have a concept of ownership and inheritance, men need to control women to ensure that it is their offspring that they raise and pass their land to.

Arse - have to go - guests here - will check back later.

Good points BOF & Eleanor.

Also, until recently paternity could not be proven so it made complete sense in a patricrchy to limit women's movements, lives & sexuality to ensure a line of descent.

I always said a matrirchy would be easier to maintain.

ah! no probs

sorry, did I say something wrong? it was a comment to Eleanor's comment

btw, Stalin was not acting on ideological grounds, he was totally power hungry and was executing anyone who posed thread to him regardless of ideology.

if you want to given an example of ruthless ideological revolutionaries from Russia Lenin and Trotsky are your guys

Oh damn.
Missed it.

I'm still waiting for HullyJr to dish the dirt on his Mum... in a kind and loving way obvs

Aw, really, Hully? I was just getting into that

I like the points you've just made, Eleanor.

isn't the reason that as men started accumulated personal wealth (coming from communes to more fragmented units), men didn't want to spend their wealth raising other men's children (obviously not knowing it)

hence all the violence and desire to control

I don't think there are 10 key points.

There's only one AFAICS - because throughout recorded history, men have wanted to maintain control and power over women so that they could have better lives than them and feel themselves superior to at least one other person in the world.

They have been able to do so, purely and simply because women are on average smaller and less physically strong than men, so they can exert violence against us if we don't toe the line (and frequently do). Also part of the same species, kinship groups and communities, oppressed women have interests that are genuinely bound together with those of their oppressors, uniquely for any oppressed group.

Oppressors have always used fellow-feeling "we're all in this together" rhetoric to convince the people they oppress, that they're not really oppressing them, they're all on the same side (so if you can get the worker in the field or factory, to identify with the squire or the industrialist because they're English, French or whatever, more than with the worker who speaks a different language in a different country, who is being oppressed by a squire or an industrialist just like the one who is oppressing you except that he speaks French, then you can persuade them to kill each other in industrial quantities instead of killing you. Patriotism was invented for just this purpose.)

Women otoh, have genuine crossover interests with men - we have children, families, communities and values in common. So it is much harder for women to identify their oppression and much harder for men to recognise when they are being oppressive - particularly when that oppression is hard-wired into people's culture, psyche and lifestyle. And it is also much harder and more complex, to overthrow - in a sense, it would have been easy for the working classes to simply execute all the capitalist industrialists had there been a revolution (as Stalin attempted and as the French revolutionaries attempted). Women could just steal down to the kitchen in the night on an appointed date and murder all the men we live with, but we don't, because we don't want to because we love them. Uniquely, the group that is oppressed, loves the group that oppresses it, invests in it and shares DNA with it. And of course, the oppressers love the oppressed back. That makes the overthrow of that oppression, much more complex than with any other oppressed group IMO because sorting out what is systemic oppression and what is just two people organising their private lives, is so much harder to spot.

Everything else is HOW, IMO.