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?

Our DHs sound spookily similar, Stewie

...not to mention our reaction to them....

heh.

Thanks all for your responses. My thoughts:

Imaculada Thanks for the definition, it always helps! Yes the dictionary definitions you give seem something like my understanding of patriarchy as a 'system of system of society or government' (i.e. with some kind of rules, formality and people in charge) - i.e. something more like Saudi Arabia. I guess this is what I was trying to get at - I am sure 'conspiracy' was the wrong word to use though!

Your own definition around cultural beliefs and prejudices seems to disagree with the 'official' definitions and be more akin to something like 'institutional racism' (unthinking discrimination, racist language etc..). This certainly exists, but not what I think of when I hear 'The Patriarchy'

HerBEX Your description of the patriarchy is of a social construct 'the norm'?

But it seems that many of the drivers underlying socially constructed gender roles are biological in origin (i.e. the costs and benefits to evolutionary fitness for a man or a woman to sacrifice other opportunities in order to raise a child are shaped by the fact that when a woman is pregnant she can't get pregnant again, whereas a man can have as many children in a year as he can afford/get away with. Hidden ovulation woman can be 100% that the child is hers and has a better idea than the man if there is a chance that it isn't his). Does thinking about gender relations in terms of 'the patriarchy' discount these kinds of explanations (not justifications..!) and why?

I agree it is the norm for men to dominate power, but the fact that this occurs everywhere (?) from Tibet, to Peru to Aborigine and Native American societies is a sign that it is not just a social construct?

To me it seems like it is the norm in the same way that poverty has been the norm for most people over the vast sweep of human history and still today, and it is only the modern inventions of science, technology, democracy that have changed that.

In terms of comparing race, class and gender effects it doesn't necessarily make sense to compare a rich black man and a rich black woman, a poor black man and poor black woman. More to the point is to compare how they got there, i.e. comparing children born in relatively similar circumstances and where they end up in life. A rich black man may be better off than a rich black woman, but if out of a 100 boys, 10 end up dead and 30 in prison and 40 on the poverty line, then you are looking in the wrong place for answers.

I guess the big difference between 'patriarchy' as an explanation for discrimination and abuse and racisim, nazism, apartheid, class discrimination is that it is possible to have completely divided societies where people and families are on one side or the other and defend their own interests though some form of in-group/out-group thing or basic nepotism. With gender it is not like that - everyone has a mother and father etc... structures of the elite will tend to favour members of the elite, rather than others of a common gender. MRIC - it is not usually marriage that gets women elite status it is birth.

This biology thing has a long and unedifying history. We recently had the joy of being reliably informed boys like blue from scanning the horizon/blue sky while hunting, girls like pink because we evolved gathering ripe berries. This works until you find out it was pink=boy, blue=girl in the early 20th century. Whatsername just wrote a book about ludicrous "evidence" for gender difference. Ask why people want to PROVE an innate difference. It's usually used to justify/excuse/explain male violence. Poor menz - tragic victims of hiormones....

"A rich black man may be better off than a rich black woman, but if out of a 100 boys, 10 end up dead and 30 in prison and 40 on the poverty line, then you are looking in the wrong place for answers"

Sorry, how is that relevant to feminism, the patriarchy etc.?

If we take 100 women, the 30 in prision and 40 on the poverty line, will be worse off than the 70 men in prison and on the poverty line. (I'm not sure what happened to the missing 10, are they assumed to be rich? And if they are, the 10 women will likely not be as rich as the 10 men and they will have been brought up to believe themselves less entitled to the wealth and they will be constantly aware of their status as a member of the sex class in the way the 10 rich men won't be.)

Is it the wrong place to focus on women rather than men?

Is this the old argument that we have to solve all the probelms men face first, before we can focus on the second, less important sex?

Doesn't the feminism section often talk about men?

I would have thought the way to make things better is through working together.

What a nice idea Satire.

I wait with bated breath for men en masse to join the fight for equality.

One at a time will do.

Have you read about kyriarchy?

Herbex - you are right it is a bit of an irrelevant detour from my opening question- but I was coming back to you on your point that the right way to think about the intersection between race and class is to compare like with like - rich black man with rich black woman - and that this then shows that 'Where everything else is equal, a woman is worse off than a man because she has a lower social status than him and is less able to function in the world becasue the world has been organised to be more likely to be welcoming to him, than to her.'

My point was if there are (as in the US) more professional/middle class women than men this isn't comparing like with like. Comparing like with like would mean comparing say 100 boys and girls born in the same neighboorhood etc.. If more of the women have higher qualifications, better jobs, better health etc.. and more of the men are unemployed, incarcerated, dead (as is the case in the US
certainly) then this tells you something about the relative impacts of race and gender on opportunities IN THIS CASE - that you wouldn't find out by comparing 1 (or even 100) rich black men and women ( it's like comparing 90 year old smokers and non smokers...it's not the best way to look at the impacts of smoking on mortality)

....that was all...

I think OP raises some genuinely interesting points. This in particular ...

the costs and benefits to evolutionary fitness for a man or a woman to sacrifice other opportunities in order to raise a child are shaped by the fact that when a woman is pregnant she can't get pregnant again, whereas a man can have as many children in a year as he can afford/get away with. Hidden ovulation woman can be 100% that the child is hers and has a better idea than the man if there is a chance that it isn't his

... seems pretty indisputable to me - no more controversial than saying 'women give birth' or 'men are, on average, physically stronger than women'. This is not to say we all have to be slaves to biology - for example, we don't these days spend our entire reproductive years either pregnant or breastfeeding (unless we want to) because we have invented contraception (and abortion for when that fails) and formula for if we don't want to/can't breastfeed.

I'm not denying that patriarchy exists or that it's largely socially constructed, but underneath all the cultural stuff there are some basic biological differences between men and women - differences which, I believe (and I realise this will enrage some of you) extend to the way our brains develop and work because of the different hormones we have (I know a couple of TG people who can attest to this).

I know a lot of evolutionary psychologists have used these biological differences to assert that the current dismal state of affairs is the way things should be because it's 'natural' but aren't we a bit cleverer than that? Do we have to throw the baby out with the bathwater and pretend that men and women are the same? I think that's ultimately unhelpful and doomed to failure. Far better, IMO, to know what we're starting with in terms of biology and build a fair society which takes account of and works with women's and men's basic differences*. That means, for example, that traditional female skills, such as care work, should be valued and rewarded as much as traditional male skills, rather than trying to persuade women that they should all be engineers or whatever ... it means that if we can acknowledge that men are, for example, generally more aggressive than women then we can find harmless outlets for that aggression (such as sport), rather than just telling them that they shouldn't be like that ... it means that we find a way for women to combine motherhood and a career without suffering the dreadful guilt they do at the moment (it sure as hell isn't trying to fit ourselves into the male-centred work culture as we do at the moment) and for motherhood itself to be properly valued.

• I think gender is a grey-scale, not a binary. Most women will be near one end of the scale and most men will be near the other. There's plenty of room for fluidity and overlap.

Dittany, I agree, I think the ball is in the men's court on a whole range of issues.

So how would men stop other men from doing it?

Personally I think for a year or two all rape, assault etc accusations are believed 100% and the men found guilty.

This would stop the men from doing it. And make other men think twice about putting themselves in certain situations where consent hasn't 100% been given.

hmm, are you a satirist Satireisbest?

Education. Men who commit those crimes have no respect for women - they won't listen to us. They might listen to other men though. I was thinking about this when I was watching that documentary about the Democratic Republic of Congo - there are women's organisations working really hard to persuade the men to accept their raped wives and daughters back into the household (which would make rape a far less effective war tactic) but what they really need is for men to persuade them because they don't listen to women.

Dittany -

'Natural' doesn't mean 'good'.

Malaria and starvation are natural, medicine and agriculture are human inventions.

It looks pretty likely that violence, murder, infanticide, rape, and generally the strong ruling over the weak are natural inbuilt behaviors (given how widespread they have been since prehistoric times and amongst our primate cousins).

Peace treaties, the rule of law, Human rights are definately human inventions, bloody good ones. Not natural though.

I am fairly confident I am a feminist because nothing that science could find out about gender differences in the human population, would make me think that equal rights are not a good thing.

If science shows that certain aspects of injustice are underpinned by biological tendencies that were at some point evolutionarily adaptive, would that make you think that the injustice was justified because 'natural'? I wouldn't.