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?

Sorry - stars in the wrong place. Was trying to highlight A and The...

Ditany

That's a straw man. I did not start this thread to promote the view that "patriarchy is all down to brain differences between men and women. That's not my view.

I am not going to meet your demand to 'proove it' because it's not my claim.

What I have argued is that a purely cultural explanation isn't enough. Culture is built by people who's behaviors and capacities are a combination of nature and nurture. Biology underpins it (and evolution is a feedback loop - culture and inventions shift the environment in which people evolve)

You've said a lot about violence but you haven't explained why male violence against women is the most important factor creating inequality between men and women in the UK today.
Why don't you want to say?

X- post

Is this, then, about a precise definition of "patriarchy" after all? To me, alice's description of a society that's sexist, misogynist, woman hating, phallocentric, in which men hold the vast majority of social, political, economic and military power, is a patriarchy. It walks & quacks like a patriarchal duck.

I'm still failing to grasp what the argument re: evolution actually is. Physical violence creates & moulds the society; it maintains the status quo and is augmented by all the other control mechanisms we see documented here in stories of domestic abuse. Financial control, the risk of extreme violence, behavioural sanctions, social constraints, sexual objectification, exclusion from decision-making, bullshitting, belittling and assurances that it's all for our own good ... as in the home, so on a larger scale too.

The purpose of the exercise I did (about "who makes money") was to personalise the general. A huge, all-pervasive, ingrained & accepted concept such as the truth of "The Patriarchy" is hard to grasp. For me, that chart made it real. I think it's rational to explain cultural controls by highlighting their expression at the personal level.

I also feel we shouldn't ignore the huge advancements made by successive governments, in amending laws to support equality instead of oppression. You'd have to be an idiot to believe that a change in law automatically changes beliefs & behaviours, though - over time, perhaps, but not until and unless "Patriarchal" thinking is rejected by a significant weight in the population generally. That hasn't happened yet.

Bit of a ramble, I don't have time to pre-draft my posts.

I would have said the UK was a Plutocracy.

Some men have all the power.

*himalaya" I agree with this:

Sounds right to me A patriarchy as a formal system in Ancient Rome, Saudi Arabia or wherever (the definition Immaculada gave early on) seems like a different concept to The Pariarchy outlined as the radical feminist view by Dittany and others as the underlying explanation to the state of gender inequality -men decided individually and as groups to dominate women through violence.

it's kind of what I've been trying to say re: the difference between Patriarchy as a Theory and Patriarchy as we find it outside of the seminar.

Your concept of "patriarchies" (maybe you'd like to list them by type as you seem to think there is more than one) on the other hand does nothing for us politically - in fact its an obstacle to clear thinking.

I don't understand why this would be an obstacle to clear thinking. It's not that hard to accept that the execution of a political system differs depending on the location. But your suggestion is a good one, so here's a few Patriarchies off the top of my head:

Religious Patriarchies: the Catholic Church, the Coptic Church, certain Jewish sects, the main four branches of Sunni Islam, Shi'ite Islam, some branches of Buddhism, etc.

• women can't hold positions of power (priests, Popes, Imans, Rabbis, Llamas) and the dogma of the religions codifies male dominance and provides a theological justification for it.

Corporate Patriarchies: big business basically, though also the public sector where it closely apes the private.

• women are discriminated against in terms of pay and conditions. Lack of consideration of the value to the corporation of child-raising.

Domestic Patriarchies: individual familes/clans.

• individual or small groups of men dominating individual or small groups of women through direct physical or sexual violence.

Physical Patriarchies: sports, science.

• the prioritisiation of male athletes over women, the sexual segregation of sport, the justification of the same on dodgy scientific grounds

Entertainment Patriarchies: popular culture

• the reduction of women to sex objects in music, film and art; the assessment of a woman's worth based on (male defined) concepts of beauty; the paucity of opportunities for mature women

There are many more. Some of these overlap and interrelate. Some women will be under the proverbial thumb of all of these; for others (say single, non-religious women in the UK with no interest in sport) most of these will be in the background and wont affect them on a daily basis.

To me, in my opinion, breaking the Patriarchy down like this, rather than being the obstacle to clear thinking you claim, allows women (and men) to target those areas of the Patriarchy they find most pressingly objectionable. I mean all of them are objectionable, but what would the point be of complaining to your (male) boss about the portrayal of women in popular culture? Realising that it's not one Patriarchy, and that not all men are involved in all Patriarchies, I think could be helpful politically when campaigning against a specific issue and targeting that campaign.

Satireisbest - I agree. A Plutocracy is about right.

MrIC, I agree with your breakdown of how pstriarchy functions in terms of religion etc but plutocracy does not account for the treatment if women. It does not explain why women in poor countries and households are doubly victimised by their sex/ gender.

Plutocracy only covers the political consequences of power and finance. It doesn't cover gender-based patriarchal constructions. After all, in a plutocracy women could hold all the power. It is only because of the patriarchal systems in place that they don't.

I agree SGM - my comment (actually satireisbest's comment) was restricted solely to the UK (not poor countries) and then only to a certain definition of power - political and macro-economic, not domestic and micro-economic. I'm completely with you only the limitations of Plutocracy as an explanation.

I'm a bit late coming to this thread, but I wanted to come back to some of these points about evolution.

I have taught Human Ecology, and the Selfish Gene and Jared Diamond's books were set for seminars. I do not teach from a feminist perspective, and there were no feminist books on the reading list. Despite this, I have never heard any student come out with the points about rape and male sexual conquest based on their reading of books on evolution. I think people on this thread are bringing their own sexist ideas to these texts that having nothing to do with what is actually in the texts.

For animals to move into new niches, they frequently have to change their genes to such an extent that they have speciation occurs. This is not the case with humans. Our genes have given us a unique ability to adapt through culture. It must be clear to anyone that there are vast differences in how people live and raise children all over the world, even just looking at societies which have low levels of complexity in their organisation. Most of this has nothing to do with genetic difference and is almost entirely about cultural adaptation. So the idea that there is one 'natural' way for humans to raise children doesn't make sense when nature/evolution has given us a huge capacity to use culture to live in a wide variety of environments and survive.

Another issue is that many cultural patterns don't survive. It may very well be that many of the most patriarchal societies are going to collapse, as social injustice is so heavily linked to environmental and cultural mismanagement.

It is not the case that men who impregnate lots of women have the best chance of passing on their genes. This is not the case for humans or for many other species. Human babies are born with their physical development in a far earlier stage than the young of other species. Much of the development that would happen in the womb in other species is happening after birth in humans. They also have to be looked after for many more years than the young of many other species. Investment in young humans is huge. A man who impregnates many women, particularly against their will, is unlikely to see his children survive, unless under exceptional circumstances. Fitness is defined by passing your genes on to the next generation in individuals who themselves can reproduce. If you rape a whole load of women, have kids who cannot be fed due to lack of support for those children, the children will die and you are unfit in evolutionary terms.

At the time of evolutionary adaptation into our current species, people lived in small kinship groups. It would have been no advantage at all for men to go around raping or otherwise impregnating lots of women that the group could not afford to feed the children of. It could mean the death through starvation of the entire kinship group. In non-industrialised and non-agricultural societies, the average birth spacing is 4 years, so the idea that men go around constantly impregnating women in such societies is obviously ludicrous.

And we don't live in the past - we live now. We should use the evolutionary advantage of having the ability to modify our lives through culture to create societies that give children, both boys and girls, a decent opportunity to live and make environmentally sustainable choices. I cannot see how patriarchy or raping women is going to achieve that.

Strangely enough I've been studying the definition of patriarchy for some ;time now.

The term has changed markedly in recent years. The problem in defining a "thing" is that some people then load that term with a structure, and give it organisation.

In its most extreme form, to be found in the feminist community in the US, the patriarchy is a Global Patriarchy - given form and structure as a genuine conspiracy against women, to repress them in all walks of life, all societies. Generally-speaking, this is represented in the form of a statement such as;

"See how men suppress us, rape us, deny us basic rights..."

The conspiracy theory about the Patriarchy as a global conspiracy can be traced to notably, one book; The War Against Women, by Marilyn French, first published in 1992. The book described global organisations, intent on the control and suppression of women.

Since 1992 the conspiracy theories posited by The War Against Women have evolved. In US universities, the Patriarchy is often seen as a global organized structure - with deeply-rooted connections with against conspiracy-theory object - 'The Illuminati'. Wars (such as Iraq) HIV, earthquakes...anything and everything can be attributed to either The Patriarchy or The Illuminati.

In the UK, the idea of global conspiracy of The Patriarchy as a means for the mass suppression of women first came to light in the Cleveland scandal of 1987, even before Marilyn French's work. A number of pediatricians and social workers determined that vast numbers of daughters were being systematically sodomized by their fathers, without leaving any internal injuries or signs that couldn't be detected without a special test - called RAD - Reflex Anal Dilation. The conspiracy theory that resulted determined that most, if not all women, have been raped anally by their fathers.

The Global Patriarchy theory led in turn, in the US and UK to the Recovered Memory Therapy scandals of the 1990s, which involved tens of thousands of women being led to the view by their therapists that they had been abused by their fathers, often in satanic covens. Thus the Global Patriarchy gained a religious element; the idea that many men, particularly fathers, are actually secret satanists.

So to "get" The Patriarchy requires, at its extreme end, so huge leaps of imagination. Imagine a combination of the David Ickes 'Illuminati' and SPECTRE - from the James Bond movies you see on telly on Sunday afternoons, and you are pretty much there.

One of the issues with addressing what patriarchy is stems from a lack of study. Courses offered in the US will look at women's experiences or perhaps more widely, gender studies. What they generally do not do is set up courses called 'the white supremacist, patriarchal, predatory consumer capitalist society.'

This means that the actual experience of being white, male and comparatively rich - including the psychology of that and the huge benefits it brings are not actually well studied. That is why Robert Jensen has written books like 'The Colour of the Race Problem is White.' People tend to focus on the problems of minority groups and then think that is it the minority group and their behaviour that is the problem. We need to start to teach people more about the behaviour and experiences of privileged people, or their privilege will not be recognised and dealt with.

I think Orsinian's account of the sexual abuse cases is highly misleading, and some of the children who were returned to parents in the wake of those scandals have come forward as adults and said that their parents did abuse them.

Hang on a minute ...

I've just read that link dittany. Are you assuming that because I am pointing out differences between men and women, that I think the current state of affairs is not a problem - that women are not oppressed and that the patriarchy is a myth? If so, you couldn't be more wrong. I haven't read Christina Hoff Sommers' book but just having read the bits quoted on that website I would like here and now to put vast swaths of distance between her position and mine.

Do I believe in the patriarchy? HELL YES!!!

Do I believe that women are oppressed? YES!!!

Even here in the present day west? YES, ABSOLUTELY!!

Is this oppression rooted in male violence? YES!!! Even when the connection is not obvious.

Is patriarchy cultural? YES! - but not entirely. There are biological aspects that aid its perpetuation, and more importantly, can explain how it came to be in the first place.

Should we be working to change this shitty state of affairs? ABSOLUTELY!

Where we differ is that by insisting that male violence is purely cultural, you are only prepared to look so far back for the root causes whereas I am prepared to look a lot further back.

Is that because I am seeking to justify male violence? ABSOLUTELY NOT and you won't find a single post by me which attempts to do so. The reason I want to look further back into prehistoric, pre-cultural times is because I believe that the better we understand the roots of the problem, the greater the chance that we can actually change things.

Yes, Dawkins can be, and frequently is, a complete arse and is being one in this case if he is backing this woman's stupid, dangerous arguments. Lots of scientists, while they may be very good at hard science, are completely useless when it comes to making statements about society. Nevertheless, The Selfish Gene, along with The Blind Watchmaker, Climbing Mount Improbable and The Extended Phenotype are incredibly useful books which greatly enhance the lay understanding of how genetics and evolution work (and this thread has proved that there's a dire need for more lay understanding of these subjects). I'm more than happy to throw the rest of his books in the bin, including The God Delusion (not because I disagree with his basic premise - that god doesn't exist - but because he doesn't really say anything else either useful or interesting about it. The book is a boring rant and not a patch on Daniel C Dennet's on the same subject).

I'd like to take issue with this- 'This is the feminist section. Feminism already understands patriarchy as a socially constructed. If POP and Himalaya want to take issue with that, which they have done, by claiming that science proves differently then they need to demonstrate the science.'

You are saying that the view that patriarchy is entirely socially constructed has some sort of privileged position on this topic and that whereas Himalaya and I have to back up our claims with piles of references, you don't have to bother! If you really believe that you'd better get on to MNHQ to put a statement to that effect at the top of the feminist section. Until then, feminists with differing views on this point will continue to assume they are here as equals, and I will continue to think you are not answering objections to this claim because you have no answer.

BTW, I find your views on TG absolutely fascinating and am left wondering if you view F2M TS and those with the misfortune to have been born of 'indeterminate gender' (who, until recently, were just arbitrarily assigned a gender by doctors, causing untold misery when they got it wrong) with the same level of hatred.

POP, there is no such thing as a human pre-cultural time. Culture came into existence before we did, and it is unlikely that our species could have evolved without the pre-existence of that culture.

Milly, your recent posts have been fascinating. You've prompted me to make connections between observations I hadn't bothered to examine until now. Thank you - you must be a great teacher!

Last night, I was thinking about how our understanding of societal and evolutionary norms are defined by male precepts - until very recently, that is; feminism is getting somewhere! Milly's remarks on the idea of mass rape as a quick means to a cultural end highlighted (for me) that I'd taken the idea on board as logical, whereas its only real logic is that of the "mighty penis"! Like most ideas generated and executed by the penis, it's dumb and ineffective.

On a personal note, my surname is directly traceable to the Saxon 'invasion' in Kent. Traditional history says the Saxons went around raping and burning but, archaeologists have found, it was more a matter of moving in and creating a blended society with blond children. The logic there is far sounder, from an economic and a genetic point of view.

While I'm backing away from the "What is patriarchy" debate for now, I do want to point up that male supremacy is deliberately maintained in secretive ways, even now. Men make deals in the gents' - this is true! It's the primary reason why some companies introduced mixed-sex loos (in the 80s, iirc.)

yes, MillyR, I am referring to pre-human times.

How does referring to pre-human phenomena support your position wrt humans?