do you believe in the patriarchy?

Hotheadpaisan-

I agree there is no justification.

It is you (and the mysogynists) that are linking natural causes to moral justifications.

There is no link.

Hotheadpaisan-

I think it is a huge huge shame that "natural" had become such a loaded word.

But I am not going to erect mental roadblocks to say that trying to understand the world, people and societies in a naturalistic way is forbidden because it might show that there is a justification for oppression or violence or injustice.

There is no justification for oppression, violence or injustice.

There is no reason not to study the nature of human beings.

The question about political representation is different to the question about participation as policy makers.

Women have equal and fair political representation where their votes count equally, where they have equal access to the ballot in practice and to petition their representatives.

Women MPs do not "represent" women in a political sense. Just as male MPs should not think that they only represent their male constituents.

Women in many countries do not have equal involvement as policy makers and legislaters. This is probably due to the same mechanisms which prevent women reaching the top of many other professions in equal numbers - I.e it is about the glass ceiling and work/ motherhood issues more than equal political representation.

Both questions are important but different.

Hotheadpaisan - I haven't said anything about "not natural" if you mean me?

People defending injustice as part of the status quo etc... say "it is natural. It is unnatural for women to work, vote, lead whatever...." so I understand why feminists take the position in opposition to this.

But I think people take the wrong position in opposition and end up backing themselves into a corner where they are defending the idea that what is natural must be fair and vice versa, which has no basis in fact and as you say is draining and pointless (and unnecessary).

All kinds of things are recognised as natural/human universals but not
good - murder, cancer, taking too much risk, jumping to conclusions, nepotism, in group-outgroup discrimination. You are falling for a fallacy if you fall for the sexists' reasoning about 'natural' being a justification.

SAF -

I am not sure what you mean by human beings did not evolve the capacity to be 'murderous'.

I know that murder is a legal term which has changed over the years as to who is in the "in group" whose life is protected. I did not mean that a particular legal definition of murder is encoded in our DNA of course.

But human beings have evolved the capacity for intraspecies violence with lethal force (what I mean by "murderousness" - killing others).

If you think this capacity - which is universal across human societies and some primates - isn't the result of evolution I am truly puzzled as where you think it came from?

See what I mean? The word seems to mean quite different things to different people.

Beachcomber you say the idea of patriarchy encompasses the way that human beings, societies and economies evolve.

SAF you also believe in the patriarchy but say that societies and economies don't evolve.

I think these distinctions are quite important - not to prevent people working together on issues they agree on - but to clear in our thinking and understanding of the world.

we haven't evolved a capacity to be 'murderous'.

society doesn't evolve.

economics don't evolve.

a lot of social darwinism going on here.

(that was to Beachcomber) :-)

"It is contradictory to argue that the current state of affairs is the natural order, but concede that it is unfair."

Why?

Take an example outside of feminism:

Human beings have evolved to have the capacity to be murderous. This is adaptable to different contexts, but it is part of our nature.

Nevertheless it is not fair to the person being murdered (!) and so we say it is morally wrong.

You can't look for fairness in nature.

I don't really argue that the current state of affairs is 'the natural order', which you are right sounds like a justification (and bit Victorian), but it is natural -as in arising from human nature, and I think deeply intertwined in it (...where else could it have come from....?).

I don't 'concede that it is unfair', because this sounds like normally you would expect things that arised from human nature to tend towards fairness.

SAF - "whatever the roots of patriarchal oppression are does nothing to justify the continuance of it now."

Indeed - but it is worth trying to understand the roots I think, because it can only help to understand why things are the way they are and why they are hard to change.

The point is to combat injustice and inequality, not defend a particular theory about why that injustice and inequality exists, surely?

Sorry, I don't see how a single word (which clearly from this thread means different things to different peopl) encompass the how and why of attitudes and structures related to everything from breastfeeding to prostitution and from make-up to nursing. And with the same word covering the how and why of these issues in the UK, Saudi Arabia and Vanuatu, and since human beings first started to dominate each other (possibly before they were human beings...) up till now.

Which is why to me it seems very like the concept of 'god' - something that is patently obvious to some people and not to others, even when they are looking at the same things and ascribing 'good' and 'bad' to them in roughly the same way.

First of all, that single word does encompass evolution of human beings, economies and societies. That is why it is a useful world - it is a (relatively) complete and global concept. Or certainly that is how I use it and it is how I understand it to be used in feminist analysis.

Answers to my own questions are as follows;

do you think women have equal status - no I don't (see porn, prostitution and trafficking for evidence of women as the sex class, plus grooming and beauty practices for evidence of women as 'decorative/objectified/faulty in our natural state/socialised to perform femininity, etc. Plus lower status attributed to female dominated professions, the institution of marriage, the focus on PIV, the constant fight for women's reproductive rights, rape culture, gendered violence, the status attributed to the social constructs of femininity and masculinity.)

do you think society is male dominated - yes I do (see above and below.)

do you think gendered violence has been eradicated - nope, and this one is a biggie.

do you think women have fair and equal political representation - no I don't, see stats from previous link to the LFN, plus look at how female politicians are presented/attacked in the press (Harriet Harman, Segolene Royale, Angela Merkel to name a few).

do you think the working world is male dominated and structured for men - yes I do (see debates on breastfeeding, childcare, glass ceiling, women's pensions, maternity leave, representation of women at board level, proportion of world finance held by women compared to proportion of work done by women, lack of real equal pay.)

Am dashing this off in a rush so have no doubt left plenty out. And we haven't even got onto the politics of housework nor really touched on gendered violence.

Beachcomber - (in answer to one of your earlier posts) I think the OP was clear - it was about the concept of patriarchy - which I think is different from inequality, sexism, violence etc... and more than an umbrella term.

So to your questions - 'do you think women have equal status?' 'do you think society is male dominated?' 'do you think gendered violence has been eradicated' 'do you think women have fair and equal political representation' 'do you think the working world is male dominated and structured for men?'

My answers are

1. legally yes in most secular developed countries
2. yes, but less than it was
3. no
4. in most countries yes
5. yes, but somewhat less than it was.

I guess your answers are no, yes, no, no, yes (not trying to put words in your mouth , just guessing). So we agree on 2, 3 and 5, and in some countries 1 and 4?

I see that these things are wrong and need to be changed. I just don't see them as part of a phenomena that can be explained with a single word that is separate from the evolution of human beings, economies and societies.

likewise there will be interesting theories and historical/anthropological perspectives on racism - it has little bearing though on whether we should accept it now or it justifies it now. whatever it's roots we are tackling and getting rid of it. the same can and must happen with misogyny and male supremacy.

Me too

i'm lost as to what your point is himalaya - you seem to still be arguing against a straw man. i don't think feminists argue that patriarchy is a natural state or a solely social construct. the arguing of either/or binaries in theory is pretty passe and i actually don't get what it has to do with believing their is a patriarchy or not? feminism doesn't massively concern itself with origins of culture as far as i'm aware - i am familiar with this stuff because of doing my first degree in anthropology. does it actually matter what the historical roots of patriarchy are? we have little in common with our first ancestors and the structures and systems we live in bear very little relation to those we started out in. everything changes and develops and moves forward - whatever the roots of patriarchal oppression are does nothing to justify the continuance of it now.

I'm going out, not ignoring any replies.

The natural order argument against feminism, is that the current state of affairs, is a natural order, and not one influenced by human laws or intervention.

It is the natural order that men have higher status than women.

The natural order is neither fair nor unfair. It just is.

'Fair' and 'unfair' are human constructs.

It is contradictory to argue that the current state of affairs is the natural order, but concede that it is unfair.

Himalaya -- so you agree that inequality exists?

Do you agree that this inequality primarily benefits men?

If so, that's really all that 'patriarchy' refers to -- an unequal social order which primarily benefits men.

We can have a reasonable debate about the causes of this how this social order came about but to deny that it exists in the first place is just bizarre.

I think that debate is a bit of a distraction though. There is no one cause of inequality, there are many, and yes sure we can include physical features if you want, but it is how humans deal with and assign value to those physical features that tends to really have an impact.

To say that something is a social construct does not mean there are no physical aspects of it -- race, for example, is largely socially constructed, even though people do indeed have different shades of skin colour. But various societies interpret those differences very differently. Men and women may have different physiological attributes but it is what we make of those differences that helps determine our place in society.

Beachcomber

'the natural order' is no guide for morality, or the way we should seek to organise our affairs.

Cancer is part of the natural order. That doesn't mean that we should tell oncologists and cancer nurses that they are misled in thinking that treating and preventing cancer is a good thing. We don't say they should down tools and let people die early and in pain, because to do otherwise would be to buck 'the natural order'.

Are you arguing that feminism is about trying to return the world to 'the natural order'. I don't think it is. I think it is about making the world fairer. The natural order is not fair.