Let's Talk about what Patriarchy Is

[Goosefoot]

So, we had a brief exchange about this on another thread, and it was suggested we move it to its own discussion. I'll copy and past the relevant posts to show what the idea for the discussion is - no expectation that anyone must lay claim to them and of course people can expand or clarify if they want. I'm alternating the font appearance between different quotes.

Can people not see the correlation in the application of identity politics across different groups. This is no different from women claiming theres some kind of oppressive patriarchy. It uses group identity to form a narrative that is both destructive and destabilising to society as a whole.

Patriarchy is still in literal existence in places on this globe.

It's within some women's living memories, being given the vote for the first time. Some women are imprisoned for not confirming to patriarchal religious law. Etc.

Patriarchy in those pure forms is much diminished in the West, it's true. But in some ways the attitudes towards women under patriarchy have just migrated to things like porn.

It very literally still exists in the House of Lords.

However, patriarchy can just be a system where men, for whatever reason, hold most positions of power. You don’t have to believe that all men are involved in a plot against women to observe that a society is patriarchal.

I think patriarchy gets tosses around too liberally.

If you want to apply it to ancient Roman law or more modern versions of the same, yes, it's functioning as a clear and technically useful word that denotes something specific and definable.

But the ways it's used most of the time by western feminists it just means some undefined and often mysterious set of somethings that result is the disadvantaging of women in some way. It reminds me a lot of what Adolph Reed says about the term systemic racism or even just racism - it's just a name you apply to an effect, but it doesn't tell you anything useful about the cause or mechanisms surrounding it. Because it's abstract and unfalsifiable it lends itself to fuzzy thinking. And it doesn't at all lend itself to suggesting solutions or alternatives.

Can you start another thread on this please?

I'm quite interested in teasing out what is patriarchy, what is prejudice against women, what is an inability to socially and economically value caring, what is woman-hatred etc.

Oh yeah actually that's another great example. Previous case law established that you can't consent to harm (R v. Brown), and that case was about BDSM. So even if someone said they consent, if you harm them, you are breaking the law.

But that doesnt apply to women in rape and murder cases. If you are a woman, a man can say you consented to be harmed or even killed and that's a defence. Despite previous case law saying it shouldn't be

I gave a few examples of how societies could have developed differently if there wasn't the patriarchy. I see those have been ignored.

So many concepts of "common sense" or "it's just the way it is" really aren't. They're deep seated systems that have developed as part of ensuring men's lives are easier, more flexible, more power etc.

To use the women of child bearing age being viewed with "suspicion" in the workplace. In a non patriarchal society, those women would be seen as more important. They're able to bring life. Their value would be significantly higher. The skills they gain would be more valued.

The only reason you think it's perfectly reasonable to discriminate against them is because you've bought into this idea that working requires complete focus, no breaks, and that it's reasonable to expect employees to put work before all other considerations. You can't see that its socialisation because it's bloody worked so well.

Surely the onus would be on me to prove why I thought you gifted it to me though, rather than on you to prove you didn't!

The onus in both instances would be for the prosecution to establish you had criminal intent. For some types of crime that's easier than others.

It's pretty rare for someone to agree to let them break into your house and take your valuables, to the extent that it would take a pretty bold person to try to convince a jury that they had a reasonable belief that you wanted them to do that. On the other hand, it's quite common for people to consent to sexual intercourse, and so the defence of "I thought she consented" had a better chance of being accepted by the jury.

Having said that, there do seem to be many cases where juries seem to be willing to accept quite unbelievable defences in rape trials.

Its not something we've allowed thats just the way it is! its biology.
It's really not. If we were to start again from scratch with the aim of not putting women at a disadvantage society would look very different. Governments are continually making policies which (possibly inadvertently) disadvantage women, often because women are not part of the decision making process.

@QuentinWinters
I found the Secret Barristers blog about the 'rough sex defence' pretty informative:

thesecretbarrister.com/2020/07/03/the-truth-about-the-governments-claims-to-have-ended-the-rough-sex-defence

@Justhadathought

Why do you think that it's the case that caring for young children, one of the most important jobs in our society and the job which has the most significant long term economic impacts, is financially unrewarded

Going back in time, that is probably down to the fact that a family was an self regulating economic unit - dependent on hunting, gathering growing crops, animal husbandry & exchange of produce - and not on wage labour.

Women with small children are more tied to home and hearth, and it is the men that go further afield in search of food, resources, opportunities etc. And so a duality arose. women in the private sphere, men in the public sphere. This then became codified and enforced in most societies, and still is in many today.

Yeah, this is the thing I find with these conversations. Being the carer of children has not always been "financially unrewarded". Because it has not always been the case that people expected or got or even thought about earning a financial reward for doing the work of like.

The most basic life-work includes growing food, feeding people, building and maintaining a home, clothing people, caring for children. For much of history these things were rewarded in terms of you got to eat and had a place to sleep, your children grew up without falling in a hole or being eaten, and joined you in your work. Receiving pay for this wouldn't make sense, you receive the direct benefit of the work.

The reason domestic work hasn't tended to be given a wage, or for that matter working on your own car or growing your own veg, is because that simple relationship is still in force - you are essentially paying yourself, you do the work and get the benefit.

It's why I think it made sense intuitively to people when looking at changes to rules for women around banking, or divorce, that the non-working wife was entitled to half the household, because she was in essence working for the family and so an "owner" just as if she had contributed half of the income. And spousal support from that perspective was a bit like a sort of severance package, except that the family wasn't seen fundamentally as a sort of business partnership, but more a kind of pledge of loyalty in the ancient or medieval world, which can't really be renounced quite so easily.

@QuentinWinters

Ok here are 2 examples which fit the criteria of structural as built into our legal systems. 1) Women have to get permission for a termination (in the UK) or it's illegal inmany parts of the world. Pregnancy in all cases puts a woman's life and health at risk. There are no circumstances where men need to get permission from someone else for a medical procedure to safeguard their own health.

2. "Reasonable belief in consent" is a legally defined defence in rape. It means the offenders perception of a crime (who is always a man) is given precedence over the victim (who is usually a woman). The onus moves to the victim proving they didn't consent, rather than the offender proving they did. There are no other crimes where a defence is "I believed it was ok".

Re # 2 - intent is something that has to be established in most crimes, so I am not convinced this is accurate. While murder or battery wouldn't accept that kind of argument, it's not that hard to imagine someone showing that they reasonably thought they were supposed to take the neighbours car being accepted as a defence against theft.

Re #1 - pregnancy is unique medically which is why it is treated uniquely. Western culture for hundreds of years believed that a foetus was, morally speaking, a person. Abortion than means the end of a life of a person, which was seen as quite serious. So yes, the legal difference came out of a difference in men and women's biology, but what's your solution, to pretend their biology is the same?

To say any effect, social, moral, economic, political, that results from differences in male and female biology, is a kind of discrimination or systemic oppression - aren't you just saying, female biology is wrong?

aren't you just saying, female biology is wrong?
Only if you insist the binary has a right (male) and wrong (female) end. That's patriarchy.
In a non-patriarchal society we would accept it's necessary for society to procreate and not penalise women for being the ones who biologically bear most of that burden. So we would trust women to judge for themselves whether the physical and mental risks of childbirth and parenthood were too much for them.

In a non-patriarchal society workplaces would be structured to accommodate childcare (by both parents). So not 9-5 full time jobs with 80+ hour weeks necessary to be seen as a success.

@OldQueen1969

Are you deliberately missing the point? Of course presumption of innocence should not be removed. But there have been many rape cases where men have been treated leniently or found innocent even in the face of incontrovertible evidence, even video footage. There have been many cases where men have been considered more important than the victim due to their status and because it might negatively impact their future. Do you not concede that the scales are tipped fairly heavily in favour of the accused in rape cases? While the victims have to prove they didn't "ask for it"?

Absolutely not! The scales are fair as is our legal system. It is only right that proof and evidence is required if your intend to remove someones freedom from them.

@BlingLoving

I gave a few examples of how societies could have developed differently if there wasn't the patriarchy. I see those have been ignored.

So many concepts of "common sense" or "it's just the way it is" really aren't. They're deep seated systems that have developed as part of ensuring men's lives are easier, more flexible, more power etc.

To use the women of child bearing age being viewed with "suspicion" in the workplace. In a non patriarchal society, those women would be seen as more important. They're able to bring life. Their value would be significantly higher. The skills they gain would be more valued.

The only reason you think it's perfectly reasonable to discriminate against them is because you've bought into this idea that working requires complete focus, no breaks, and that it's reasonable to expect employees to put work before all other considerations. You can't see that its socialisation because it's bloody worked so well.

Those aren't really examples though. They are values you'd like to see, good ones IMO.

But the question is, how would they work?

If we have a society and we know that, say, 80% are going to have something like a 10 year hiatus or partial hiatus in their career due to child related work, how could we set up a society so they were not disadvantaged? And what do we mean by that word? Maybe we expect that households with children will usually have something more like one or 1.5 paid "careers" rather than two, and try and make that stable for families, and also find ways to make it stable in care of marriage breakdown or a death.

We might have to just accept that would mean stats on male and female outcomes were different. Would that be "patriarchy" given that it's an attempt to have a woman centred system that values caregiving.

There are a lot of possibilities, but t's not necessarily all that easy to imagine that any of them would actually erase differences in outcomes, no matter how woman centred they were or how they valued caring.

I thought the rough sex defence was about murder not rape?

Re # 2 - intent is something that has to be established in most crimes, so I am not convinced this is accurate. While murder or battery wouldn't accept that kind of argument, it's not that hard to imagine someone showing that they reasonably thought they were supposed to take the neighbours car being accepted as a defence against theft.

No one said anyone has got to accept it, thats a matter for the jury, but someone can still use any defence they like and should have the freedom to able to do that. At the end of the day if its believable or not is down to the jury and they will decide whether they think he's truthful or lying. Thats due process. Its something we pride ourselves on as a nation and are the benchmark legal system that most countries look up to.

No ones said female biology is 'wrong' it simply is what it is and you have a choice with how you go about things. Not everythings fair or just, nor should it be.

There are a lot of possibilities, but t's not necessarily all that easy to imagine that any of them would actually erase differences in outcomes, no matter how woman centred they were or how they valued caring.

We shouldn't try to control the outcome in these situations, its a dire way to do things that leads to bad results and has done time and time again. We should ensure everyone has an equal opportunity and let the cards fall where they may. Thats the only truly fair way.

I think patriarchy is definitely related to the extent a woman has bodily and reproductive autonomy, the opportunity for economic autonomy, and the ability to keep all those things no less than a man after she and he reproduce together.

Plus the safety to move around freely without threat of harassment or harm from males any greater than that which males going about their business face from females in said same society, and facing no greater risks and disadvantages of any kind in a society than males face, such that Caroline Criado Perez's book Invisible Women would not need to have been written.

There are a lot of possibilities, but t's not necessarily all that easy to imagine that any of them would actually erase differences in outcomes, no matter how woman centred they were or how they valued caring.

The fact that women give birth and a baby is dependant on them for the first few months of life, believe it or not, is not a concept of the patriarchy. Its unbelievable the wilful ignorance of some. I really do worry for the future of mine and others sons.

@Antibles

I think patriarchy is definitely related to the extent a woman has bodily and reproductive autonomy, the opportunity for economic autonomy, and the ability to keep all those things no less than a man after she and he reproduce together.

Plus the safety to move around freely without threat of harassment or harm from males any greater than that which males going about their business face from females in said same society, and facing no greater risks and disadvantages of any kind in a society than males face, such that Caroline Criado Perez's book Invisible Women would not need to have been written.

Really it didnt need to be written.

Do you think men have designed it so that many more of them commit suicide? How about so they drop out of school more & get lower grades?

Why would they design it so that more women got university spaces? They would surely make it so much more women are in prison than men but thats the complete opposite.

You would think it would be of benefit to them also to make sure it was mainly women who risked lives doing the dangerous jobs, yet thats nearly all men. A definite winner would be to ensure than tens of thousands of women were wiped out during wars...Nope, again almost entirely men dead there too.

Just how exactly are men setting up this system to just benefit them. If they are then looking at the above we really dont have anything serious to worry about as they wouldnt be doing a very good job at it and seem to getting it the wrong way round.

I agree with blingloving that the world would look so different if designed by women for women that we can hardly even imagine it.

On a large scale, I doubt we would have nation states. Or the armies needed to defend them or invade other nation states.

On a small scale, what idiot who had ever looked after small children would design houses with staircases for toddlers to tumble down or pavements running alongside roads but no barrier inbetween pedestrians and moving vehicles? My world would involve sensible design to reduce the state of semi-permanent heart attack involved in trying to keep toddlers alive.

@Antibles

I agree with blingloving that the world would look so different if designed by women for women that we can hardly even imagine it.

On a large scale, I doubt we would have nation states. Or the armies needed to defend them or invade other nation states.

On a small scale, what idiot who had ever looked after small children would design houses with staircases for toddlers to tumble down or pavements running alongside roads but no barrier inbetween pedestrians and moving vehicles? My world would involve sensible design to reduce the state of semi-permanent heart attack involved in trying to keep toddlers alive.

When I first went shopping in a mall that had dedicated, lockable individual baby changing and breastfeeding rooms, with an adult toilet in there too, my mind was blown. It felt like a gift, I was somimpressed and delighted- it made shopping with a small baby so much easier. It had never occurred to me to expect something like that. And then I thought what a shame, that parents (and especially women) don't expect to be catered for like that .

So we would trust women to judge for themselves whether the physical and mental risks of childbirth and parenthood were too much for them.In a non-patriarchal society workplaces would be structured to accommodate childcare (by both parents). So not 9-5 full time jobs with 80+ hour weeks necessary to be seen as a success

Isn't that where we are now at? Many women now choose not to have children, or they prioritise other aspects of life over and above motherhood, and end up leaving it very late, or not having any. It is quite common now for women not to have their first child until their 30's........just at the same time when they may be achieving progress or stability in their career.

Personally, think this idea that men have just the same feeling/maternal instinct towards newborns and young children, or else they should( in the interests of equality) is a funny one. No doubt some do; and no doubt some women do not feel any strong impulse towards being with their baby or young child - but I'd guess that most women do.....because it is genetically programmed and hard-wired to kick in after childbirth. It's tough for women. I agree!

I agree with blingloving that the world would look so different if designed by women for women that we can hardly even imagine it

Is it not the case that in the few matriarchal societies that do exist, or have existed, that motherhood is the supreme goal; and that women tend to be single mothers ( maybe taking lovers) and assisted in childcare primarily by sisters and other women of the community? : www.townandcountrymag.com/society/tradition/g28565280/matriarchal-societies-list/

No ones said female biology is 'wrong' it simply is what it is and you have a choice with how you go about things. Not everythings fair or just, nor should it be.
You seem pretty determined that women should be disadvantaged! It's not really true that you have a choice though - if everyone made the choice not to have children that would be the end. What you are actually saying is that you recognize that society will always need children to survive but you also think it is acceptable that women lose out by providing them. If we wanted to create a society which was fair we could do - physically giving birth and babyfeeding are tied to biology but they are also work. We could choose to reward this work but we often don't. That choice is not because of biology, after all we spend money on all sorts of things as a society - why not this?

@QuentinWinters

aren't you just saying, female biology is wrong? Only if you insist the binary has a right (male) and wrong (female) end. That's patriarchy. In a non-patriarchal society we would accept it's necessary for society to procreate and not penalise women for being the ones who biologically bear most of that burden. So we would trust women to judge for themselves whether the physical and mental risks of childbirth and parenthood were too much for them.

In a non-patriarchal society workplaces would be structured to accommodate childcare (by both parents). So not 9-5 full time jobs with 80+ hour weeks necessary to be seen as a success.

You really don't understand how economy and capitalism work do you?

In this non-patriachal society, just exactly how do you intend to monetise the 16-18 year dependency of offspring as thats what would need to happen.

Its not 'the patriarchy' thats responsible for setting hours, thats simply the rate of efficiency that needs to be maintained to maintain a competative advantage in the market place! Its not some guy that sits there looking down on women thinking "haha if i set more hours i can stop all those women with kids from working". Lordy lord.

@QuentinWinters

Oh yeah actually that's another great example. Previous case law established that you can't consent to harm (R v. Brown), and that case was about BDSM. So even if someone said they consent, if you harm them, you are breaking the law.

But that doesnt apply to women in rape and murder cases. If you are a woman, a man can say you consented to be harmed or even killed and that's a defence. Despite previous case law saying it shouldn't be

I think we can all be mature enough to understand that some people enjoy BDSM that is considered violent to most and that practice can result in some noticable injuries and multiple bruises.

Should the people who partake in this be treated as criminals in this case. If so we'd have to lock up all the women who do dom work. Not a good stance.

I fucking can't with this thread, the way that total idiocy is interspersed among all the interesting thoughts and ideas and the idiocy is wrapped up in a big shitty bow of condescension is too fucking much. As if anyone needed more evidence of patriarchy.

Yeah, I've pretty much given up too.