do you believe in the patriarchy?

GothAnneGeddes Thu 14-Jun-12 13:32:42
Men are inherently "this" and women are inherently "that" has always been a tool to oppress and restrict women. To me, it's a restrictive way of thinking, so I doubt it can ever be a tool of liberation and pointing to a better future.

Which is why defining things as the patriarchy is particularly unhelpful rather than looking at the world as having a lot of unequalities, within which lots of different groups fair worse than others. Every time you insist on using generalisations and insist on defining the patriarchy, you actually end up constricting yourselves rather than actually addressing inequality.

Men are inherently "this" and women are inherently "that" has always been a tool to oppress and restrict women. To me, it's a restrictive way of thinking, so I doubt it can ever be a tool of liberation and pointing to a better future.

GothAnneGeddes. There's some truth in what you say that the institutions of patriarchy represent a certain type of male that rose to the top, but patriarchy also survived at the personal, domestic level and relied on men lower down the social spectrum.

I certainly wouldn't say that women are necessarily a softer, caring sorts, but I do think they are different to men and that a world shaped around them and their preoccupations would be different to the one we have in some fundamental ways. What those differences would be is largely speculation, although we can look to quasi-matriarchal societies and families and all-female institutions for some clues. I suspect a female political and philosophical world would be a great deal more subtle and complex than the male version, but not necessarily any more pleasant.

Goth,

I don't understand how people can lightly dismiss what seems to be termed evo-psych. It strikes me as such an obvious and huge influence on everything we do. It also seems that we have been "civilised" human beings for a nanosecond in terms of our genetic evolution and it takes a lot longer than that to change what is natural.

As someone pointed upthread, natural does not mean right or fair, and it is the job of a decent society to moderate our natural instincts via laws and a strong moral code. However, to deny our monkey forefathers have any influence on our behaviour seems to counteract both intution and evidence.

of course it's a fact unless you water down totally the meaning of the concept of biological evolution.

Nickname - This is where I get uncomfortable, because what you're implying is that men are essentially macho, aggressive and women are the softer more caring sorts. Which is really evo-psych in patriarchy-blaming clothing.

IMHO, men having been generally physically stronger and not sidelined by having children, have managed to wangle themselves into a position of power in society and the behaviour you speak of doesn't spring from maleness, but from power-holding (and power-keeping, i.e subjugating anyone who might take your power from you).

Any situation where you get one particular group over-represented will necessarily reflect their perspectives and preoccupations. Whether that's primary schools being institutionally skewed towards female, left-wing thinking; the police force until the Macpherson report at least, being skewed towards white right-wing thinking; or whether it's politics, higher education, science, business, medicine, law, art, philosophy, religion being skewed towards male thinking.

And when those aspects of society are skewed towards male thinking for thousands of years while they are actually developing, in most areas of the world, you get a world like the one we have where we have hierarchies, awards, competition, uniforms, institutions, mechanised violence, adversarial politics, segregated roles, criminality, scientific use of animals, space travel, religions with dictator gods who think like men, and so on. The world would be a completely different place if it had been skewed towards female thinking since its inception.

Dittany -

I didn't ask anyone here to 'consider white male perspectives'.

I offered two recommendations of books that I thought were relevant to a particular point in the discussion because of their content.

Nobody said, 'thanks that interesting', or 'I disagree with what he says because of xyz' or 'I haven't seen that book tell me more'.

I guess plenty ignored it, which is absolutely fine.

Those people who did respond to the book recommendations pulled me up because they were written by white men, or dismissed them on a cursory reading of a blurb 'because it looks like a cousin of evo psych' (not direct quote, but I can't be bothered to go find it - so shoot me).

I extrapolated from this that those folks (and others who didn't say 'wait a sec') think that this is a normal and reasonable to respond to a bit of content that someone has brought to a debate.

I don't. I think it is constricting.

The thing I really don't get about The Patriarchy as an explanatory theory is how it explains difference accross countries.

I mean there is a spectrum in how good/bad it is to be a woman in different countries from the most oppressive to the fairly enlightened (with room to improve everywhere).

When you look at the indexes that are put together on this by The UN and the World Economic Forum which put together data on a whole lot of things that we all agree matter - women's health, political participation, education, employment, wage equality etc... Its not a huge surprise which countries come out on top, the Scandinavians, with the rest of Western Europe trailing, followed by North America and Japan, Eastern Europe, Asia and then Africa with Middle Eastern countries and failed states/conflict states coming last.

The thing is this is pretty much the same order you get when you look at most other international rankings e.g. of human development or economic competitiveness. Their are a few outliers - Lesotho scores highly, the US pretty poorly compared to their economic rating, but mainly countries that generally have their shit together on things that might be considered important to the patriarchy, like economic competitiveness, also do relatively better at women's human rights and economic empowerment. Countries where women's health and human rights are poor are generally not so nice to live in full stop (and its not like loads of men are moving there).

If patriarchy equates to power, I would have thought there would be a relationship between the most powerful and successful countries (who would have the most 'effective' patriarchies) and the ones where the patriarchy is most successful at keeping women down. Instead it is the other way round.

Himalaya keep posting.

Himalaya, please don't think twice about sharif your viewpoint, I for one, find your posts interesting.

Beachcomber -

I think we are talking past each other because we have such different frames of reference.

I said Beachcomber -I don't think its a good idea to snort at ideas without reading them just because the race and sex of the person who wrote them.

You said - Ok Himalaya, it seems that you don't see why feminists might snort at white male dominated institutions, awarding prizes to white males, who write about white male dominated power structures, from a white male perspective.

No. Feminists just snort because they are sexist and racist. Nothing to do with being a bit sick of constantly being asked to consider white male perspectives of white male dominated power structures.

... Which I took to be an answer to the question I asked.

.....I didn't say anything about feminists being sexist and racist.

Anyway, I brought up the books - way near the beginning of the thread as what I thought was a constructive contribution to a debate in which SAF had said that it is a fact that economies don't evolve, and biology has nothing to say on economics, and I wanted to point out that there are other respected opinions on that question, so it may not be as much of a fact as she thinks it is.

Anyway, I guess I'll think twice about recommending something that I think is interesting and relevant next time after the reaction that got. It certainly didn't feel like an open minded (or frankly even polite) engagement with ideas.

I

I

Of For The Love Of God.

I am not snorting at the research/books/writing. I am not excluding myself from engaging, I am not telling girls stuff is not for them. How rude. Again.

I'm not snorting at all actually.

I am suggesting that feminists might snort at "white male dominated institutions, awarding prizes to white males, who write about white male dominated power structures, from a white male perspective."

Is it so very difficult to understand my posts Himalaya? Is the above sentence in bold (a direct quote of what I said earlier) unclear or obscure in some way?

Quite honestly I'm getting a bit tired of how you seem to put things through a special filter that transforms them just ever so slightly in order to make them look a bit irrational and ever so slightly barmy.

Which is a shame. I think there is an interesting discussion to be had about the insidious and pervasive nature of patriarchal culture. I think it could be interesting to discuss why lots of people don't wish to see that we live in a patriarchal society - or certainly prefer not to have it discussed.

But all this strawfeminist crap and veering off into every subject under the sun, apart from how patriarchy manifests, is just as tedious as fuck.

Beachcomber

I do see why feminists might be tempted to snort at research by white men. But I think it is a mistake for the same reason as Dreaming. Why exclude yourself from engaging with the content of a ton of areas of knowledge and inquiry that have been and still are male dominated - science, technology, maths, medicine, economics etc...?

If a teacher at school had told me that all that stuff isn't for girls I would have been . I don't think feminism should tell women and girls the same thing.

As to your question about why it could possibly be relevant to our discussion about The Patriarchy - the Patriarchy is a theory for explaining a whole host of historical, economic, psychological and political phenomena, to me that means all kinds of other stuff we know and think and learn about these fields are obviously potentially relevant as they are both trying to understand and explain the same subject: people.

Gotcha Beach -- I see where you're coming from

Larry, did you even look at the paper Beach linked to? It's a solid academic article, I can't begin to fathom how you can say it's not supported by data or logical argument. The author even did field research in the DRC. There's pages of supporting papers cited.

The problem I have with the 'favouring one's story' argument is that it covers all manner of sins. You can be lazy and not even look at evidence right in front of you and then say, 'hey it's not me, it's my cognitive biases'.

neurological pathways are made not born. they're socially conditioned if you like.

And who is 'she', the cat's mother?

Your quote (above) is merely someone expressing a perspective, with zero data or logical argument to back it up.

Right. Larry.

What was Kahneman's idea again?

Does he expand on it by describing how people often dismiss ideas, by making rather silly comparisons about assertions that the moon is made of cheese or crisps are to blame for heart attacks? I'm sure there is a name for this phenomenon. Seems like it would be right up his street.