Quoting Bret: “Patriarchy is a myth. That is not the same thing as saying there is nothing patriarchal, patriarchal structures can exist. But a long standing conspiracy of male against female does not make evolutionary sense.”
I agree with this as a concept in general, that no species can survive where power over the mate selection process is maintained by one sex only. Which sex holds more power in the mate selection process is open to evolutionary forces, however I do not agree with the follow-up leap he makes here:
“But the idea that this is society wide and that we are defending structures that put us at advantage is preposterous, logically.”
No it isn’t. If one sex is benefitting, in terms of who has more power in the mate selection process, of course individuals of that sex are going to work to support that system. And that’s where we are today, 10,000 years of patriarchal social systems privileging the power of mate selection to males over females (patrilineal families, marriage, slavery, etc.). And we’re done with it, we are clearly done with it, as such a power imbalance cannot hold within a species for too long, or the species will die out, or kill the planet as in our case. For a rather fascinating and concrete example, I offer mallard duck reproductive morphology. It is a physical record of the evolutionary twists and turns over which males and females have battled for advantage in who gets to decide to mate with whom.
I’m not a biologist or a scientist and I could of course be completely wrong or over generalizing, but I can hear the counter argument being that many males fail to reproduce entirely under the current system, while a much higher percentage of females do. I don’t think that matters, I think these biologists have their noses so buried in minutiae they fail to perceive certain social reflections (especially misogynistic ones) of the biological mechanisms they study.