I don't get 'The Patriarchy'

[Himalaya]

I am your basic feminist, in the equal pay, equal rights sense, but not in the sense that I've read a lot of feminist theory (ok, I'll admit it, hardly any)

Quite often on these threads I read about 'The Patriarchy' as an explanation for unequal treatment of women and attitudes towards gender, and I just don't get it...

It seems to indicate that men as a group (all over the world, and throughout history?) have acted together with the intention of surpressing women - la conspiricy theory rather than consideration of underlying factors like biology (the 'genes eye' view of unequal costs and benefits of 'investment' in offspring by men and women) and the impact of class and economics etc...

But maybe I'm reading it wrong?

I can't think of any situation where a minority isn't kept a minority by an ultimate threat of violence. The situation of Apartheid in South Africa is based on violence, but white people are not more muscular than black South Africans. Homophobia involves gay bashing, but straight men are not more muscular than gay men.

So I cannot see that somebody's body shape has anything to do with a human's decision to use or fail to consistently challenge the use of violence by the group they belong to.

If there was some connection between relative body size and violence, tall people (me and my brother for example) would be violently attacking short people on the street, or supporting other tall people who do, or justifying short-bashing by others by telling short people they were flaunting their lack of height and making themselves into victims. But we're not.

It is ultimately a ridiculous theory.

Women are a majority. As are South African Blacks.

Actually, I don't share the view that female rule would lead to world peace & loveliness. But I totally believe we deserve to find out.

Great posts Herbex
yes HImalaya is arguing that we need to look at evolution because that then explains male dominance.

Which I find interesting to say the least because men have always believed they're the ones who have true insight into the human condition. Men believe their art is important and women's is trivial. that their thought is relevant and women's are not.
Is it true that men cannot understand that cruelty, exploitation and using violence to uphold the patriarchal regime is wrong and should be stopped at once? Why aren't they throwing their hands up and saying "FUck evolution, I no longer want to be a member of a group that has treats humans so cruelly."

How can they hold the moral high ground in any other area of life?

How can we trust anything they write or say? They have no agency, according to Himalaya, and cannot be held accountable. They are born to be oppressors.. but then how can they ever understand the full complexity of the human condition?

Actually their insights over the millenia have been pretty narrow and stunted, not to mention wrong, so one thing is for sure: if a person belongs to an oppressor group it harms their sense of morality- their concept of right and wrong

Milly, LOL "Tall people would be violently attacking short people on the street"

haha, so true.

And himalaya didn't answer my question about his beauty-healthy children connection. WHere do beautiful infertile women fit into that worldview?
And if his "theory" was right then if you plotted a graph of healthy children against patriarchally defined beauty you would find there was a causal link.
Except there isn't. Is there. A "plain" woman is no more likely to have difficulty conceiving, carrying and delivering a child than a beautiful woman.

Garlicbutter, when people refer to minorities in a social sense it is usually determined by the amount of economic, social and political power the group holds, not their actual numbers.

SGM, you were asking for stuff written that refutes the idea that men have evolved to rape. A colleague recommended a book called 'Evolution, Gender and Rape.'

It refutes the idea from an evolutionary perspective, by looking at the relative reproductive success of not raping, the benefits for women of choosing a particular sort of mate, child rearing and so on. But it is also looks at social contexts that make rape more likely, social climate, educational settings and so on, to argue for the cultural basis of rape.

The editor is Cheryl Brown Travis.

I hold out a lot of hope garlicbutter.
DId you know that vivisection, which is cutting and experimenting on live animals was common practice in male scientific communities in the nineteenth century. no man questioned it

It was only when women entered the field of science that anyone declared it was wrong. Frances Cobbe set up the British Society against Vivisection, and spent her life fighting the men in white coats. It wore down her health. They thought she was mad. But she, as a woman and human, could not accept the patriarchal worldview that harming animals was a right that humans had.

When you think about how much power men had, economically and politically compared to men it's amazing that none of them even questioned vivisection, let alone set up a campaign group against it

compared to women

No, I didn't know that about vivisection. Also didn't know a majority is a minority ... why not use an accurately descriptive word?

Yes, some people object to the term. There is discussion of that objection at Wikipedia:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minority_group

MillyR - it is indeed a ridiculous theory. It is not my theory.

I asked -why are women disadvantaged? Folks said - because men took over power through violence. I asked how were they able to do that - folks said - because they were stronger.

That is why we have been talking about that theory.

cba

Herbex and Garlicbutter - thanks for your questions.

I think we are using two different meanings of the word natural.

In everyday speech people say natural to mean good, normal, justified, the way things should be etc...

That is not what I am saying. What I am saying is that everything is natural, in that it is all part of the natural world. There is no such thing as unatural. Everything is part of nature. We are part of nature.

In nature there are emergent properties (complex systems) that are not best explained by design and or authority but because millions of individual parts interact.

It doesn't mean that everything is good or nothing can be changed. Cancer is natural. The more we understand it the better we can fight it.

Natural doesn't mean easy or harmonious. It is natural for lions to chase wildebeest. It is natural for wildebeest to run away. It is natural that bacteria decompose organic matter. It is natural that animals and plants have developed defense systems against decomposition.

Seeking to understand how biology underpins culture and the two interact is not saying that men are naturally dominant or superior or women naturally submissive. That is of course bollocks. Systems are more complex than that.

20% of people own 80% of wealth. If we have a computer, a flush toilet and can afford to educate our children up to 18 that puts are in the top 20%. How do we explain and solve that? It is an immoral situation. it isnt explained by simple morality at an individual level. It can't be that those in the top 20% are 'bad' and those in the bottom 80% are 'good'. It isn't that those in the top 20% could create equality tomorrow just by choosing to. It is a depressing that when one dominant group is overthrown, the new system is not automatically egalitarian or kind, but succumbs to a new elite holding power. Refusing to see this as any more than 'bad people choosing to do bad things' means giving up any hope of building more just systems.

Himalaya - do you think it is immoral that 20% of the population own 80% of the wealth?

Bonsoir,

Well, it is immoral in so far as many, many people in the other 80% don't have enough resources to be able to live well, healthy, keep their children alive, benefit from education and technology, make free choices etc... that is what is immoral.

The 20/80 statistic is one way of describing that situation, but not the only one.

I suppose if there was a society where 20% had 80% of the wealth, but everyone was happy with that, and able to command enough resources to live as well as they wanted to (a supremely beneficent autocracy? the American Dream?) that could be defended as moral. But that is not the situation anywhere.

Was that what you were asking?

See, I don't think it is immoral. I think it is unfortunate that wealth is distributed very unequally, but I don't think it is necessarily immoral at all. If someone is very clever and able and manages to earn a lot of money and live extremely comfortably, why shouldn't he/she have more than others? That isn't theft - on the contrary, capitalism relies on able people creating value through companies employing many people and enabling them to have jobs.

Bonsoir -

Yes, I agree it is not that any deviation from 100% equality of outcomes is immoral - but the persistence of poverty is.

Perhaps immoral is the wrong word (I guess philosophically only people can be said to have morals). I think the right word is unjust.

Do you think it is just that a child that happens to be born into a poor family, in a country with poor human rights, corruption etc... will not have the same opportunities to thrive, and to become an adult that can earn and create wealth as a child born in luckier circumstances?

But one problem is surely that it is not just down to being clever and capable.

People in the top 20% have access to better education and opportunities than the rest, so there is a self-perpetuating wealthy class.

When education systems work well, allowing good, if not equal, opportunities for all, the injustice is reduced.

That happened in France for a period, when the "social elevator" functioned. Now it has broken down, and what does seem immoral is that the wealthy blithely pick and choose and exploit the system, spurning state education until they send their kids to prépa at Henri IV or Louis Le Grand, where the state spends an absolute fortune per pupil. And it is all the more immoral when those people are benefitting from such huge tax incentives that often they are not contributing to financing those costly schools...

Currently the difference between what the wealthy earn and what those they employ earn is widening in a way that also seems immoral. As does the suggestion that companies need to lay people off because they are not making enough profits, when in fact their profits are continually increasing.

AuldAlliance - 50% of the French population attend a "private" (usually Catholic) school at some point in their school career between 3 and 18, and I don't think they are the preserve of the rich (anecdotally, our gardienne and local baker, butcher and greengrocer are all private school users), and fees are often minimal, so I am not sure that's a good example of how a better education and life opportunities are the preserve of the wealthy. Perhaps they are the preserve of clued up and ambitious parents?

Himalaya - but what is justice? To what extent is it just to take from the haves to give to the have-nots?

Bonsoir, I'd love to see the figures you quote. (I'm not querying, just curious).
There are of course "private" (Catholic) schools in France and then there are v. expensive, truly private schools. The two are not quite the same...

50% is the official Apel figure.

There aren't fully private schools in France within the system. Sous-contrat schools are all obliged to follow the French NC and teachers are paid by the state. I don't know what you are referring to, because it is immensely difficult to get to prépa if you haven't been either to a French state school or a sous-contrat private school.

I can't do links properly on this computer, but I was thinking of places like this
www.ibsofprovence.com/spip.php?article64

where fees are not minimal.

Bonsoir -

Wow, this thread has been wide ranging.

Yes you are right there is a fundamental conflict between liberty, egality and justice..... If people are free to do what they want, some will achieve more success (which creates value for others - they invent things, they bring products to market, the fulfil needs etc..) and if there is any justice they should be rewarded for their efforts/allowed to keep what they earn, but then by passing this down to their children (which is human nature to want to do) they embed privilidge which undermines equality etc...

Different countries choose where they want to set the balance I guess is the only good answer. Thats the really hard part of being a government, and why you need checks and balances.

That was my point in mentioning the 80/20 statistic. It is a sign of injustice -not so much that the rich are rich, but that the poor are poor. But the answer about what to do about it is not obvious, and not the kind of 'good guys'/ 'bad guys' logic that people have been advocating on this thread.

I wasn't so much thinking about inequality within countries like the UK and France (which is hard enough), but globally between the life chances of a child born in the Congo and one born in Europe (which is even harder).

Its clearly not just a simple case of 'take resources from the rich and give to the poor' (although some of that is needed) - its about enabling wealth to be created all over. Where there is unfairness in the system it should be tackled - like unfair trade rules, corruption, lack of land rights etc.. Where there are things that are known to work like micronutrients (that cost less than a penny a week to put in staple foods and prevent kids being born with mental retardation, birth defects etc...), getting girls into school they should be done. But there is no recipe for how to do it, or how popular revolutionaries avoid become dictators, how to get the right balance on liberty/egality/justice etc...

That's an IB school, though, AA, and making the leap from IB to prépa is immensely difficult. Wealthy French parents may well buy their children social advantage, but the IB doesn't confer educational advantage within the French system; of course, if you are French and want your child to pursue his/her studies outside France, an IB school might be appropriate.