do you believe in the patriarchy?

[bejeezusWC]

A poster on another thread said she views feminism as the struggle against patriarchy. That is how I view it too. I believe that is considered the rad fem stance?

Another poster said she didn't believe in patriarchy

I don't geddit

Why/how are women so unequal if not for patriarchal societies? WHO has been oppressing us?

Please tell me what you think, if you don't believe in patriarchy

Oh, be fair, Abigail. In mediaeval Europe they defended their wives by locking them in metal knickers while buggering off to rape other men's wives & break stuff for years at a time. That was only the posh men, of course. The poor ones defended their families by making the kids do the most dangerous jobs.

I've always been very slightly confused by how, in the Stone Age fantasy, the blokes managed to spend their time out in forest hunting parties and simultaneously defend the family cave from wolves. Did they have jeeps and rifles, so they could pop out for a couple of hours and come home with a skinned deer?

Why do 95% of dating ads from women specify "tall" as a desired characteristic (and I say that as a short man). Why are there so many threads on here where women speculate whether they could possibly date a shorter man? Is it really all conditioning? I don't know a single parent who brings their daughters up with the idea that tall equates to desirable. It strikes me as far more likely to be due to an inherited desire to be protected. If it is all nurture and societal pressures, I really don't see them in this area. Tons of films have short guys with tall women. So, the media is not to blame.

I would love to hear an alternative explanation of the above, other than evo psych??

Larry, where are you getting these ideas from? These are really sweeping generalisations you are making.

Nice layman's article in National Geographic:
news.nationalgeographic.com/news/pf/66610441.html

'Some research has suggested that the practice of dividing labor according to sex dates back as far as two million years. But the new study suggests the changes didn't occur until the upper Paleolithic period, which lasted from about 45,000 years ago to 10,000 years ago. "We argue that the typical patterns of labor division emerged relatively recently in human evolutionary history," Kuhn said...

As in hunter-gatherer societies of the recent past, men likely hunted large animals while women gathered small game and plants, enabling a more efficient use of available food sources. When small game and plant foods were scarce, women and older children were often involved in other vital activities, such as producing clothing and shelter...

The scientists point out in their study that gender roles were not always the same in early-human cultures, and there's nothing that predisposes either sex toward certain kinds of work. "That women sometimes become successful hunters and men become gatherers means that the universal tendency to divide subsistence labor be gender is not solely the result of innate physical or psychological differences between the sexes; much of it has to be learned," the authors write...

The findings, he added, should not be taken as a justification for the separation of roles for men and women in contemporary society. "We shouldn't look to the remote past for clues about how we ought to behave today," Kuhn said.'

In a nutshell: the fact that modern humans developed a sex-based division of labour may have given them an evolutionary edge over earlier humans, and perhaps this helps explain the embedding of patriarchy in early human societies. But this division was not based on physical characteristics, it was learned behaviour.

Just look at world records across the sports Larry. On average a woman's world record is about 10% less or slower than men's. It is a pretty well known fact. Take athletics, swimming, rowing for example. Weightlifting could be different as it requires much stronger upper body strength - I don't know much about it and I am not going to check as I am on my phone. For those areas requiring stamina women are even closer to men e.g. extreme marathons etc. If men are 50% bigger and stronger then it isn't translating itself into measurable terms. The doping argument is a bit erroneous and can be countered by the fact women's participation in sport no way matches men's. If more women competed then maybe gaps would be even closer.

As for defending families. If they weren't creating the violence in the first place then no defence would be needed.

garlic re: metal knickers etc

If men were the defenders of the family why were they the hunters which meant being away from the homestead for hours/days at a time? Surely it would have made more sense for them to stay at home to help defend?

Abigail,

I said stronger, not faster. Clearly, it takes less strength to propel a lighter body. In fact the strength required is proportional to the square of the speed. And stamina, again, is a completely different area and, due to women having more fat and being lighter, they are able to perform better in ultra events.

Pure muscular strength isn't the only requirement to "defend families". Speed, agility and stamina are also necessary. I am not a historian or anthropologist but I am pretty certain that all wars/fighting did not come down to arm wrestling and chucking heavy boulders at each other. Flight would have been a much used defence for example.

Oh and "strength" has been traditionally described in patriarchal terms, i.e. men as the default. Even I am doing it.

At the gym, they call 'strength' power and 'endurance', which is another facet of strength, endurance.

I was jolly interested by your quote, dreaming. It reminded me that humans discovered agriculture during the Palaeolithic. This development meant people had to settle (to grow stuff in one place) and had more children due to more readily-available carbs. It's possible that this marked the start of our continuing problem with labour division: women were tied close to the homestead, doing babies and 'nurturing' tasks such as farming and house-building.

If the settlement wanted things brought (or fought) from elsewhere, men were more likely to be free to do it as women would be encumbered by babies. When they started trading with other settlements, same thing - leading to Men being In Charge Of Business while Women Tend The Home.

I'm not labelling any of them lazy or stupid. Farming by hand was a bastard job: they all, men and women, died with degenerative bone conditions from the work. The development of homesteading could easily, though, have marked the beginning of the blummin' patriarchy. 25,000 years. It's had a fair innings now, wouldn't you say?

Yes, the first step is recognising it and naming it. Hence feminists use of patriarchy/patriarchal society/male supremacy/male dominance/female oppression.

For me, this naming of the status quo as an oppressive one, is very very important. It is actually a massive step in women's history and in the raising of our consciousness.

And we have fought so hard for it. Hence why I find this thread disconcerting.

abigail, you have mentioned a few times now that "men create the violence ", "create wars etc"
if women had been as powerful as men and men were as sujegated as women for the last 2 milion years , things would be different, but do you really think the world would be a less violent place?

And I think the idea of the institution of marriage as being a sort of benevolent partnership is flawed.

There is lots we don't know about the history of patriarchy, but we do know that marriage was an oppressive form of male dominance enshrined in law.

www.historyofwomen.org/marriage.html

www.historyofwomen.org/wifeselling.html

www.historyofwomen.org/wifebeating.html

Which of course, reminds me of this quote;

Marriage as an institution developed from rape as a practice. Rape, originally defined as abduction, became marriage by capture. Marriage meant the taking was to extend in time, to be not only use of but possession of, or ownership.
Andrea Dworkin

Marriage as an institution developed from rape as a practice. Rape, originally defined as abduction, became marriage by capture. Marriage meant the taking was to extend in time, to be not only use of but possession of, or ownership.
Andrea Dworkin

if this is true how did sexual selection shape our species? or did primevil women chose there rapists?

It is likely that all of us are here only because of rape, somewhere along our lineage. How sobering a thought is that?

It is also highly unlikely you would have to go back that many generations either Rulers .

Religious institutes would be another thing on my hit list. They uphold the patriarchy and add to the oppression of women.

Larry, in general evolutionary biologists don't believe in evolutionary psychology as a discipline. There are lots of disciplines that look at the connection between how people behave and environmental and evolutionary factors. Understanding how the human brain has evolved and how people adapt doesn't have to involve evolutionary psychology at all, and generally doesn't for most people.

anthropology for a start which i did my degree in.

So is evo psych compatible or incompatible The Patriarchy explanation?

Who cares?

Is homeopathy compatible with the idea of a patriarchy?

What about the idea that the royal family are lizards, is that compatible with the idea of the patriarchy?

Dog grooming, fish fingers, the planet Mercury, double glazed windows, are these compatible with the idea of a patriarchy?