What’s to be done about the patriarchy?

What you seem to be doing, though, is turning a negative personal experience into a generalised and wider structural issue. If it was structural.....all people would have the same experience.

When you say "structural" are you referring to the fact that males tend generally to be bigger, faster and stronger? And that women have the potential, and most often do, go on to give birth to children which they have carried in their womb?

Are you perhaps suggesting that biology itself is structural oppression?

What would all this mean for children? Sorry, you only have one parent, you have no right to a relationship with your father.

And if you're a boy, don't think you'll ever grow up to live in a family the one in which you spent your childhood. Your future is rootless sperm donor I'm afraid. Oh and you'll need to leave the commune once you hit puberty. As you have no father to take you in, I guess that means being self-sufficient from 13/14?

It is only a problem because it is being positioned as a problem in the context of an over-arching political ideology, which defines the facts of the female body as an oppression.

How are you defining " the structural oppression of the patriarchy"?

How do you move beyond differences?

And this is the crux of the problem

@Iwasafool Its great that the men you know are safe but this thread isn't about your household, its about a structural problem.

Google 'women killed for saying 'no'. Look at the Tickle vs Giggle case in Australia - women are no longer able to meet without a man being present and lesbian groups that exclude men are now unlawful.

That's a very sad inditement and I don't believe equality is impossible to achieve. Equality doesn't mean that we all act the same and make the same choices, equality means we've moved beyond the structural oppression of the patriarchy.

It is great that we can make choices if we want to? I always worked when my children were young, my choice, I have friends who chose not to work outside the home, their choice. I don't like the idea of being told what to do, you can't date men, you can't have sex with men, you can only have children with a sperm donor. None of those would be my choice and living in a commune would be my idea of hell.

Well I don't defer to the men in my life, DH and sons, and they have never been violent.

Would it be all women co-operating and being supportive or would you end up with an alpha female being as dominating as any man? I've lived with a small group of women and yes there are advantages but to be honest that was after divorce and when I remarried it was great living with someone I loved rather than people I generally got on with. However supportive the other women were they were never as committed to my children as their father was.

Of course not all men make good fathers but then I don't suppose all women make good housemates.

Women defer to men because men become violent if we don't.

You can never have true equality ( which is purely conceptual and idealistic) whilst we exist in a human bodily form.

I honestly think we've come pretty much as far as we can, in the West, when it comes to 'equality'. Even in countries with fantastic, cheap state provided childcare ( such as Denmark) - women, generally, tend still to make different choices to men.

People have tried that. I did that as a young single parent; but inevitably there comes a desire, certainly in male/female relationships to create a family and set up some kind of home and family unit. You could still do that within the context of a larger community, though. Such communities do exist.

I don't associate only men with the patriarchy. Patriarchy to me is a system composed of structural inequality that would still exist even if women lived in female only communes. It's like thinking having an allotment means you no longer live in a capitalist society.

The only way to overthrow patriarchy, in my opinion, is to have equality of the sexes. That means manifesting socioeconomic changes that bring about structural change.

That's an inherently negative and rather depressing view of men and the potential of male female relationships - granted, though, it is obviously the experience of some women.

It might seem rather philosophical, but none of us are really independent: we all exist in a web of inter-related need.

why should those legal changes be considered? to allow women to have full independent control of the lives

when men have legal control of their offspring they can restrict the movement of women and have continued ongoing access to women, for abusive relationships that means no real exit for women until children reach the age of 18

I agree, it's a radical idea and I agree that men would not stand for it, in fact, the mere mention of it would have a great many men and women vehemently opposing it

I mean it more as a thought experiment tbh, in the way that if women were to really just step away from patriarchy it would only work if all births were the result of sperm bank donations, or if men no longer had access to controlling women through legal control of the children we bear

we can't just step away from the patriarchy if we bear children with men and the men know those children are theirs, because then we are tied to those men for 18 years

All of the above reflections represent the exact same process many older women have already been through. It seems pertinent that 'feminism' is still saying the same sorts of things....and that nothing much seems to have changed.

I've come to the conclusion that once we've gone beyond equal civil rights in law ( which, in the West, we now have) most everything else comes down to differences in culture, personality, choice and so on - and are based on individual circumstances.

There are two sexes. Women are the sex that become pregnant and give birth - and as a consequence tend to have most direct involvement with small children and babies. I cannot see this changing anytime soon. Personally not keen at all on transhmanist visions of the future in which babies are incubated in factories and brought up entirely by the state.

Males tend to be bigger and stronger.....this is why we have sex segregated sports - so that women and girls can have a more equal playing field in which to excel and be the best of their sex.

Such biological realities do to some extent determine our potentials and our options. The job of good government is to create as level a playing field as possible, whilst accommodating differences as much as is practicable.

This has always boggled my mind why more women don't live together share households children ect seems such a obvious win win.

So, end the patriarchy and replace it with…a matriarchy? As a woman, I’ve had my fair share of oppression, but I’m not sure how going from one extreme to the other will help. Plus the legal changes you’ve mentioned will never happen, and in fairness, why should they? We’d be aghast at men for petitioning or even entertaining the blanket removal of all of our rights in a particular area. Its balance we need, not bouncing from extreme to extreme.

Women could still do it, but only via using donated sperm from a sperm bank. Otherwise, you end up tied to a man for 18+ years.

Women could still have children and do so either alone or preferably with other women. Living together as friends, supporting each other.

I often wonder why more women don't do that. It's really hard as a single person to buy property in much of the world now, why do women not make good friends they'd be happy to live with and buy property together?

yes, it originated in South Korea because the misogyny and sexual harassment / assault there is so rife and awful

4B is the eschewing of the following 4 things which all start with a "B" sound in Korean language:

1. No dating men
2. No marriage to men
3. No bearing children
4. No having sex with men

As South Korean women can now be educated, have jobs, buy their own property, they no longer need to marry men to ensure their survival. As South Korean men drenched in violent online porn are increasingly horrible to women, the women have had enough.

The other interesting thing about the 4B movement is it's able to spread because of the internet. Prior to the internet women had small real life groups, mostly centered around their children. Now, we can all join together in places like this and discuss what's happening in our lives. And when we do that, we learn of the commonality of our experiences with men.

Women need to build alternative structures that don't disadvantage other women. There's more to this than 'just hire women'; it involves a deliberate change in attitude, and consciousness raising.
I've said this elsewhere; women are not encouraged to mature, and we also need to learn to disagree without rancour.

Is the 4B movement the Korean women's movement?
Could you elaborate on it at all?

If women refused to marry men and refused to bear their children then we don't enter that vulnerability.

The vast majority of women wouldn't do that though, as they want to have children and don't want to stay single for their whole lives.

I dont think the left will ever end the oppression of women on its own though.

The left struggles against rules as they are seen as oppressive so the left will always refuse to accept limits on male sexuality and realistically, liberation and even safety for women will only come when men accept limits on their sexuality.