do you believe in the patriarchy?

My Dad is an alpha male - when I look at him and how he expects to be treated, listened to and how he treats my step mum, it makes my blood boil. Thing is - my sister has a lot of the similar personality traits I can see in my Dad - but what is seen as "bad" in her is seen as good in my Dad.

Personally, I think arrogance, overbearingness, an inability to listen to other people, an inability to admit you're wrong and an ability to ignore other people's feelings and ride roughshod over them is a negative personality trait, regardless of sex.

I still don't know why my step mum stays with my dad.

But is so insidious. Those Alpha Males were brought up probably mainly by women. Women who expected one thing for their sons and something a bit different for their daughters. I know I was encouraged to get an education and a career - as it would help me attract one of said Alpha Males.....

I think the term 'patriarchy' is getting bandied around in a way that it just becomes a meaningless filler word. Dito 'political analysis'. I prefer the much derided strive for equality as it's more tangible than talk about some not-nearer defined post-revolutionary world.

Women have children and women nurture and feed children. I don't have a problem with being defined as mother first, I chose to have children but I am also worker, partner, daughter, feminist, woman, socialist........

I wonder why in recent years women are being encouraged to breast feed? I agree nothing seems more natural but some of the argument made in favour of breast feeding are quite nonsense. Just wondered what others thought.

The recent thread on equal parenting was very interesting and certainly threw up and debated a number of ways business and parents could change so the woman was not always the one sacrificing her career for childcare obligations.

That's just one area where society can be challenged and values / attitudes modified.

I think the patriarchy is very complex about who dominates whom and I think it is much much more than a simple statement than men oppress women.

And to link it to slavery - did all white people oppress black people? Who was part of the system?

You've got alpha males - those who think they're top dog, who give a shit about no one else and keep the systems the way it is.

Anyone who is not alpha male is dominated and their values and worth are not recognised. Unfortunately society seems to value alpha males and they and their values are kept in place.

Too much infighting amongst the rest leads to alpha males keeping their place.

Society needs to develop ways of tackling such values and developing a new set of values which values all and sees value in all.

Inde, I don't think men and woman are the same. We are quite clearly two biological sexes.

Quite evidently we are different; women carry and bear children - that is the main difference, and in feminist analysis, it is the foundation of our oppression.

There is no need to do Nazi experiments to find out the truth of femininity and masculinity. A trip round the world or a flick through a history book, clearly show that what is considered to be feminine/masculine has varied considerably throughout history, and varies geographically and culturally. We are clearly dealing with social constructs.

Anyway, we are just back to the argument that it is the natural order for men to oppress women (an argument people used to make about black slavery).

Sorry I am a bit late on the thread but I really must take up Larry on his comment Generally, girls do better at project related work and boys at exams under time pressure. Is that due to conditioning or biology?

I took the 11+ in the 1950s. It was a sudden death exam. Grammar schools allocated 50/50 places to boys and girls. To get into grammar school girls had to achieve higher pass marks than boys. Why? Because otherwise there would have been a higher proportion of girls in grammar schools than boys as a higher proportion of girls passed this exam under time pressure than did boys.

On the OP's point. Yes, of course we live (still) in a patriarchal society. I have always chosen to put two fingers up to it, and if the patriarchy thinks I am behaving inappropriately for a woman then the patriarchy can go to hell.

EatsBrainsAndLeaves

The same is often true with humans. Although the acronym swmbo is often used partially as a joke, it is not completely joking. It is rarely the case IMO that men are completely dominant in a marriage and sometimes it is the female who is more dominant. It's not a healthy relationship if one person always calls the shots. I would say that my marriage is pretty equal and if my wife wants something she always gets her way in the end.

bluegrass -actually not in every species is it the largest and most powerful animal who dominates. Even with pets, my small dog totally dominates my much larger labrador. An animal has to have the desire and personality to be dominant. In some species that seems to have to go alongside being the largest e.g. gorillas, but not in every species

And I like to think that 100 years from now, we'll look back at all this talk about cavemen and hunter-gatherers and cringe, just like today we look back at social darwinists justifying racial subjugation with their cranial measurements.

We seem to have overcome plenty of other evolutionary hard-wiring just fine. Does anyone really think it's impossible to eradicate gender inequality because of our primitive lizard-brains?

Going back to something Sigmund said:

'Why are you calling it patriarchy, if it means society? I would suggest that patriarchy only means society from a feminist viewpoint.
For the rest of us society=society.'

But simply calling it society and leaving it at that is not very useful society only refers to the relationships, institutions and norms that humans create for themselves. The word doesn't tell you anything about the character of that society about its power balances, degrees of freedom, who benefits and who doesn't. Without knowing about such things you can't really understand the nature of society.

So I am just curious, for people who don't accept the concept of patriarchy, how would you characterise society then?

whether women are feminine because of expectations/pressure or through choice??

Some of it is socially conditioned but equally nature must play a part. I was a dress wearing (my mother liked ditsy dresses) tree climbing, stick waving terror who started fights and played with the boys, so despite her efforts to make me feminine, I was/am what I am, or rather who I am.

Every species seems to demonstrate that larger, more powerful, more cunning individuals will seek to dominate others for the larger share of resources, mating rights etc. It seems only humans have developed a complex system of morality by which individuals are expected to suppress behaviour we consider unacceptable. Individuals are required to monitor their own behaviour, tame it where necessary and face punishment if they don't.

Thank god we do this, and as the decades pass we continue to attempt to refine and improve our journey away from our animalistic natures. Unfortunately though we have been "animals" far longer than we have been thinking, moral creatures. As long as people continue to exercise free will, as long as it is physically possible to rape, murder, attack steal from or otherwise exploit other people then it will continue to happen. There will always be people who choose to transgress and throw off what they see as the shackles that human civilisation imposes (all the better if they can reap the rewards without accepting the obligations)

I don't think human nature will ever completely change I'm afraid, at least not in any comprehensible timescale. Of course that doesn't mean we should ever give up the struggle to escape from the worst of our animal natures and work towards the most just society we are able to create.

Beachcomber
I appreciate that you are posting what is generally the feminist viewpoint ie that Men and Women are only different by conditioning. I also appreciate that it is a genuinely held belief and could be true. I think the only way we could prove it for sure is to carry out cruel nazi style experiments where children were brought up devoid of anything that could influence them including human contact.
I don't believe it is true though and I don't think that most people, men or women do. For one thing I think there is an evolutionary advantage to making the sexes have different brains just as there is with most animals. Even if male and female brains didn't develop differently in the womb there is also the effect of hormones like testosterone.

Class, as in classification women are both a class and a class within other classes.

Economics and class are far more determinate in social relations. Whether that be as sex class or economic class. The term patriarchy is abstract and misleading and leads women to always see men as having little socially in common with them.

When some feminists talk about women being expected to perform femininity( what ever that is defined as) they also point out that women as a group are both similar (biological determinates) and different (social determinates) ie women are all very different.

I share just as much in common with working class men as I do upper middle class women. I share biology with women and experience my life in social relations similar to that of my male working class counterpart.

If life experiences and access to wealth, equality and power should NEVER be determined by biological sex, then we have to move away from using patriarchy as an abstract term which sets people apart based on biology but it also sets them apart socially. If sex is only biology and therefore women should be equal to men, then our social relations need to be based on something other than just sex. Ie the term patriarchy actually works to define differences based on sex when in actual fact we need to move beyond that. Just my opinion of course

So "patriarchy" refers to all of us. It's not a group of people. It's not men. It's a bunch of ideological underpinnings. You have them. I have them. We all have them. It's not a group of white males. It's not a single white male. It's not an organization. It's a whole, deeply entrenched system that informs and shapes how we think, how we interact, how we see each other

So patriarchy is a socially conditioned state, a state imposed upon and by all of us, male and female?????? It isn't patriarchy at all..........it is class.

Class sets women apart from men but also sets all women apart from each other, so whilst as women we are biologically the same our social experiences will always be quite different and that is mostly dependant upon the class to which you are born. Sex and biology is an inescapable fact but class is a totally social construct which can with will, be smashed.

(not that there is anything natural about surgery, cosmetics etc of course but men do make more convincingly 'feminine' specimens than actual women don't they?)

I read the passion of new eve when I was far far too young for it and ever since 'femininity' has been synonymous with something that men are naturally better at than women, what with it being Their Thing not ours.

finallyfeminism101.wordpress.com/2007/05/10/faq-but-men-and-women-are-born-different-isnt-that-obvious/

Masculine and feminine traits have been culturally placed in opposition to each other, and claimed to thus complement each other and result in harmony when men and women are constrained within the accepted sex roles. Masculine roles differ across societies, but are always portrayed as not only different from but also superior to the feminine.

Gender essentialism is the assumption that women are naturally like this, while men are naturally like that, and nature made it so and anyone who deviates from that pattern is a freak. Most commonly it comes in the form of ?women are naturally submissive and men are naturally dominant?.

Plus wiki is not too bad on femininity although it doesn't explore the masculine/feminine hierarchy in any depth.