Victims of a "matriarchal society".....ahem.

[InmaculadaConcepcion]

New book discussed in The Guardian

My immediate take on it was the same as Julie Bindel's as outlined in the article.

All I think that's being proven here is that a patriarchal society can be bad news for men too. As if we didn't know that.

I read the article on another link earlier and honestly thought 'what a load of shite'. What really hacked me off were the Jo Brand joke and the reaction to the oven cleaner ad. Jo was telling that joke about 25 years ago, and she's now married. The ad was clearly written by someone aiming for irony and achieving the opposite.

These kind of books always get more coverage and are taken more seriously than the equivalent feminist ones.

This book is getting a huge amount of publicity.

Based on that review, it looks like a bit of a joke to me.

We do not live in a matriarchy or matriarchal society. We live in a patriarchy.

I've heard people say that families with no resident father are matriarchal. They are in the sense that the woman becomes 'head of the household', but a family is not an entire society.

Even if a single mother is a radical feminist and raises her children in the most feminist of parenting styles, the mother and children are still living in a patriarchal society. It even applies when the absence of fathers occurs on a huge scale. For example, the societies that fought World War II were patriarchal before, during and after that war.

One observes the old chestnut being trotted out of boys doing less well at school being as a result of discrimination against males. Has anyone thought it could be because the wee buggers aren't so good at sitting still and listening? (Speaking as the mother of four adored boys.) And any that are good at sitting still and listening tend to get called "gay" and "nerd" and get beaten up. By other boys.

I always thought it was because boys know they don't need to do so well at school. They'll still get better paid jobs than women at the end of it.

Or maybe it's because boys have always underachieved academically (for whatever reason) and girls used to underachieve even more at school, but nowadays - possibly with the help of stereotype lift (expectation: girls do better at school because they're better at sitting still and listening...so that's what they do) girls are closer to fulfilling their true academic potential.

Of course as Nyac rightly points out, that doesn't mean girls' potential will continue to be fulfilled beyond the classroom.....

Annie, as a mum to a DS who is streets ahead in science and regularly gets called "gay" or "geek" by his male classmates, I agree with you wholeheartedly.

Part of boy culture is to look down on learning as being "for girls", more a symptom of embedded casual misogyny than matriarchy.

books like this will get more coverage , it's saying something relitively new, look how much coverage 'the female eunach' got back in the day when that was radical.

boys are undoubtably more disruptive in class than girls and it doesnt suprise me attall that girls are doing better than boys in education, i allways had the feeling during my schooldays that girls were just cleaver academicaly, ( but then i'm deslecxic so allmost everyone seemed cleaver to me ). and like annie and messy say, lad-culture at that age does them no favours.

i donty agree with nyac though, the very thought that the boys are thinking "we dont have to work, these girls will never do well in the workplace so we can just goof around now" is laughable .for a start i doubt the boys see it as a boy-girl competition and women are doing so well in the workplace these days ( yes theres a glass ceiling etc but it's not the 1950's anymore)

there is a huge male underclass of unemployable hopless cases, no woman will take a second look at them, they turn to alcahol and crime if not drugs and society tries to forget about them. there are appaling consequences for not listening in class.