Why has it always been a patriarchy?

Most animals are matriarchies and packs are ruled by grandmothers.

Which animals do you mean, here?

Of course dominance is a normal and natural behaviour. Humans are a competitive species.

Yeah none of these societies thought men were women or didn’t know females give birth. I’m not suggesting here that “the binary is a white supremacist construct imposed on colonized people” like nobody knew who made babies before white people or whatever nonsense nor that “all Indigenous societies were peaceful utopias until colonization” as if there wasn’t male violence. Having women’s political spheres didn’t eliminate violence against women - but what I’m contending here is that there’s nothing natural or normal about male dominance.

I was suggesting that the idea that male dominance and violence is “natural” (and therefore that we can’t do anything about it and that men “need” to be aggressive) is a fallacy - and based on the co-rise of anthropology and evolutionary biology at the same time as colonialism/race science. At the same time as in the age of “reason” humans are being categorized into hierarchies based on race, these scientific disciplines are also emerging. So those who were interested in suggesting Africans were “naturally” inferior were also categorizing and labeling nature while also engaged in imperial conquest. Observing animals became a vehicle for naturalizing what were in fact very human constructs. This is why we are taught that animals structure societies based on dominance and aggression and that strong males are naturally the leaders of packs - it’s a projection of colonial age ideals onto nature. And it’s not supported by how animal society actually works!

I hope that makes sense!

Fascinating thread.

I wonder are there any theories about why womens bodies stayed smaller than men's throughout evolution?

Matriarchy is,of course, predicated on maternity. Societies in which mothers are highly esteemed and valued. This, of course, does not nullify male patterns of behaviour and male roles, though.

It all sounds fascinating, but depressing to have the living nature of belief and culture desiccated by academic scoffers.

My own feeling is that many of these things are stories which describe the stars and planets and that explains some of the similarities.

Yes, this was a very popular theory amongst German scholars in the late 19th and early 20th century. It's not taken seriously in academia now, which is a shame, because as you say there are LOADS of parallels (see also the Odyssey, with the witch Circe who is related to Helios, and the huge role she plays re the underworld etc).

Likewise the theory you mentioned (I think you implied) about goddesses morphing and getting demoted each time (e.g. Mistress of Beasts gets demoted to Demeter gets split out into Hera, Athena and Artmeis, gets further demoted to Hekate, all the way down to the Virgin Mary) is also German and 19th century in origin, called Gestalt Theory from Gestalt Psychology, also now not taken seriously, which again I think is a shame as it does have some evidence to recommend it.

I now remember that in addition to not being bright or reilience enough to complete my DPhil, I also HATED it because academia takes all the fun and magic out of these wonderulf figures and myths!

I'm actually not going to give my thoughts in full if that's OK

I appreciate what you have written here though, thanks.

I can’t read Greek, so have only read translations or seen the comparison side by side.

My own feeling is that many of these things are stories which describe the stars and planets and that explains some of the similarities. It’s interesting that the greatest elongations of Venus are around 9 months apart, so it would tie in with ideas of pregnancy. Venus goes from being the ‘evening star’ to being the ‘morning star’ and I wonder if this ties into stories of being taken into the underworld - Persephone, etc. Ishtar - I think is tied in with Venus. The Romans called Venus - Lucifer ‘bringer of light’ and it is interesting that Lucifer was later synonymous with the devil, when Christians were in power in Europe, trying to purge pagan beliefs.

So you would like to see greater support for pregnancy and maternity, maybe enabling women to stay at home and look after their child/ren if they'd like to; and maybe also more flexibility in work situations that might enable women to be both employed and able also to combine that with a family?

For many women who would like to stay at home when their children are young, and who also maybe have caring roles for grandchildren and/or elderly relatives, having a partner/husband who can take on the burden of earning an income is an obvious solution........which then leads us back to 'the patriarchy' doesn't it?

Sorry, correction, in wolf society male and female have equal power but older female wolves are often leaders - but the notion of dominance (leading to abusive training methods with dogs under the idea that in packs aggressive males have to fight and win their position) is a total myth. Wolves are very collective and play together, the idea of dominance was a myth created by men. Elephants are deeply matriarchal. Male dominance is rare in nature and animal societies do not tend to be based on aggression and hierarchy. Gorillas are very gentle too.

Animals aren’t patriarchal at all. Most animals are matriarchies and packs are ruled by grandmothers. Mothers stay very close to their babies, and young males are on the outside of the pack and have the least power while they grow. This is true for most primates, wolves, whales, even lionesses control the pack.

The reason why people believe gorillas etc are patriarchal and therefore male dominance is “natural” is because biologists were male and they observed according to their biases. Once women became primatologists and so forth they recognized the actual dynamics.

It’s also not true that hunter/gatherer societies were “naturally” patriarchal because men have more strength. In fact, because food resources are scarcer, these are the most collective societies with the most equality - far from the strong male hunter being the most important, foraging and gathering and other tasks (which contribute more food than hunting) are so important that these groups are extremely egalitarian as the welfare of the group depends on the collective. Again, it was racist and colonial male anthropologists that imposed their own views of society onto living hunter/gatherer groups and reasoned from that bias. In fact, class and sex power division seems to come with settled agriculture - as surplus accumulates and people have more than necessities power and class come into play as an elite class can stop labouring and creates a worker classes, and wealth and power are protected through the male line leading to the reproductive control of women and subordination of women as a class.

In many (not all) Indigenous societies around the world, women control land (the association between land, women, and fertility.) Many groups had women’s councils and government with their own sphere of power - in Mohawk culture, the women decide when to go to war, for example, and matriarchal clans define society. Colonial governments did their best to destroy women’s power to destroy the nation - the Cheyenne say “a nation is not broken until the women’s hearts are on the ground.” Stripping women of land, political power and installing men only chiefs was an important part of colonization and suppression.

Because they can

Please explain more.

I'm actually not going to give my thoughts in full if that's OK, because I'm too lazy to summarise 80 years of scholarship in a MN post, and also because it's been 30 years since I started my DPhil on the Mistress of Beasts (Potnia Theron) and I didn't finish it, because I turned out not to be clever / resilient enough to finish a DPhil.

But basically it used to be thought that hunter gatherer societies were matriarchal and worshipped fertility goddesses, the Venus of Willendorff was always pulled into this. That's where the Potnia Theron came in. And then, the thinking went, as societies transitioned to agriculture, they became patriarchal and started to worship male gods. And people would say all sorts of things like you can see traces of this in the Gilgamesh epic (Ishtar journey to underworld - the shepherd scenes) and in the Hera-Zeus dynamic in Book 14 of the Iliad and all that stuff. It was also thought that you could draw a fairly straight line from the Potnia to Ishtar, Inanna, Artemis, Athena, Hekate, blah blah blah. Walter Burkert and Mircea Eliade were the best known proponents of this (although Eliade was always seen as a maverick and a bit unserious in academic circles), also Martin West East Face of Helicon? Anyway, say in the last 30 years postcolonialism has taken off and that whole way of thinking is now regarded as a very reductive and western centric way of looking at things, I mean sure cultures interact, and West and Lane Fox are very good on the dynamics you mention (Lane Fox's book on the Greeks' Western colonies and how this influenced Homeric epic is AWESOME) but the idea that one thing turns neatly into another is seen as very very simplistic and kinda patronising if that makes sense.

With Sappho - I don't know if you know Greek and so I don't know if you've read the actual fragments or just seen the translations. The fact is that the Sapphic corpus as it is in the original Aeolic Greek is so fragmentary and disputed that it's impossible to know what or who she was. They may've been love poems to other women, they may equally have been lyric songs to teach young aristocratic girls how to sing and dance (an important part of civic society in that place and time) and that's why they were praising each other. I prefer to see her as a lesbian (and Lesbian!) poet but I also know that concepts of sexuality back then were so different to what they are now, and we really know so little about female initiation and socialisation rituals in 7/6 C BC Lesbos, that it's impossible to say for sure. I also personally think that a lot of what we THINK we see in Sappho's poetry is actually backformed from Catullus if that makes sense?

Anyway, as I say it's been a long time since I've read / researched academically in these areas and I am sure someone cleverer and better informed than me will be along shortly to correct me and update you with some more useful info!

I've got 'sapiens' on my rather alarming TBR pile.

I'd suggest Mary Harrington's latest book, or her essays, perhaps. She talks about tech and the impact its had on sex relations.

Rites not rights

I think you mean the Thesmophoria?

Yes, you are right.

one set of gods morphing into another set between different cultures is a very outmoded and in fact patriarchal way of looking at things.

Please explain more.

It is obvious to me that where there is word of mouth, there will be changes to legends and so on. The Vedas are really unusual because they are still sung in the identical Sanskrit for thousands of years. But otherwise, Ceres was taken from Demeter, but demoting her a bit. The explanation of the seasons - eg- someone being taken into the underworld and there needs to be a bargain for their return, etc, would suggest some word of mouth. These advanced, Bronze Age civilisations traded with one-another, why would there be no exchange of ideas and retelling of earlier myths with the slant of the modern norms of the times?

For example, people translating Sappho initially changed she/her into he/him because they couldn’t imagine she would be writing love poems about women. Egyptians whose culture developed with Sumerian influence, originally thought of Ma’at and Hathor performing certain rights - weighing the hearts of the dead, etc, then that became Osiris’s job. The constant would have been the stars and their explanations for the Milky Way and Sirius being so bright, but they absolutely, must have borrowed from earlier or other cultures to explain them.

Yes. It was a partial parody of Euripides' Bacchae.

Have you read the Lysistrata? The women of Athens go on a sex strike to try to stop the endless war with Sparta. Spike Lee did an adaptation of it called Chi-Raq. Lots of food for thought there about patriarchy, sex and violence.

All our extant Greek and Roman comedies play with ideas of sex and gender in sometimes very subversive ways. Theatre has always done this - the modern pantomime dame is an attenuated descendant of this tradition.

Aristophanes took the piss out of the women-only Thesmophoria in Thesmophoriazusae https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thesmophoria where a bloke dressed as a woman and sneaked in.

@potniatheron

Tyrtaeus, the world's first gangsta rapper

That's amazing, I'll be using that the next time it comes up!

I think you mean the Thesmophoria? The Eleusinan Mysteries were dominated by male priest castes (which, ironically given this thread, were handed down patriarchally).

I would also like to say that your characterisation of one set of gods morphing into another set between different cultures is a very outmoded and in fact patriarchal way of looking at things. Scholars in this subject haven't thought that way since Walter Burkert. Yes there was a Mistress of the Beasts (a Potnia Theron) but evidence suggests there was a Master too.

I’ve been looking into this a bit more. The Eleusinian Mysteries were women-only festivals.