A couple of weeks ago, Adiabat objected to my use of the word, “patriarchy”:
[ballgame:] I largely reject the notion that if something is done under a patriarchal system, then “patriarchy” deserves the “credit” for it”
[Adiabat:]… Are you not just picking and choosing examples to support your position and ignoring or denying the things which do not[?] I mean, this is just built into your definition of patriarchy: if things happen in a society which “devalues the average woman’s macropolitical agency” then by definition it is a patriarchy. Yet if society does something which increases the average woman’s macropolitical agency, you deny that patriarchy in necessarily involved or that it tells us anything about society. Do you not see the tautology that is present in your definition: You know that a system is patriarchal if it devalues the average woman’s macropolitical agency, and if something devalues the average woman’s macropolitical agency then it is a patriarchal system.
I find Adiabat’s objection here to be more rhetorical than substantive, but I think it’s worth responding to because I have the sense that it’s not entirely uncommon, particularly among those who identify as MRAs. (I don’t know if Adiabat identifies as an MRA, and I’m not suggesting he was being ‘merely rhetorical’ in voicing his objections.)
For starters, I haven’t invoked the concept of “patriarchy” in my writings here very often. I agree with many critics of academic or gynocentric feminism that the concept frequently appears to be ill-defined, and there does appear to be circular logic in the way gynocentrists use “patriarchy” to deny the existence of female privilege. That is not the same as saying their definition patriarchy itself (or mine) is inherently circular. The circularity comes from the way their definition of “patriarchy” is dependent on their definition of “privilege” … which itself is dependent on their definition of “patriarchy.” (My exchange with Tigtog at Feminism 101 provides some illustration of this.)
There’s nothing circular about using the term “patriarchy” to describe certain negative aspects of a social system, however. Saying that “patriarchy” should get “credit” for positive aspects of a society which is patriarchal strikes me as rather nonsensical. It would be like trying to give “racism” credit for the positive things that happen in a racist society. During the American Civil War, the North was still very much a racist society. Should we be obliged to give “racism” credit for the fact that thousands of white Northerners fought and died in a war which was ultimately about curtailing the institution of African American slavery?
“Patriarchy” is a bit more complicated a concept than “racism,” in my view. Wikipedia defines it this way:
Patriarchy is a social system in which the role of the male as the primary authority figure is central to social organization, and where fathers hold authority over women, children, and property. It implies the institutions of male rule and privilege, and is dependent on female subordination.
My definition is a work in progress (and already revised from the one I posted earlier in the discussion with Adiabat):
Patriarchy is a system of rigid rules and expectations around gender that unjustly overvalues certain qualities and undervalues others. Typically, dominant males are overvalued, and the average woman’s macropolitical agency is significantly constrained. (Patriarchal societies also frequently devalue the average man’s emotional value and possibly his micropolitical agency, though I don’t know whether this is necessarily a hallmark of patriarchy like devaluing the average woman’s political agency is)
I think the biggest difference between my definition and the way many gynocentrists use the term is that they appear to believe that patriarchy is rule by ‘class men’ over ‘class women.’ I see patriarchy as generally characterized by a male dominance hierarchy, with a mixture of privileges and disprivileges extended to women and non-alpha men.
The way some gynocentrists use the phrase “the patriarchy” creates the impression that they see it as a kind of binary, with any given society either being part of “the patriarchy” or having (someday) successfully overthrown “it.” I see “patriarchy” as a kind of conceptual archetype which is unlikely to ever have been perfectly embodied in a real society. Instead, societies are patriarchal to greater or lesser degrees.
Moreover, within societies there will be dynamic tension between forces having conflicting views and expectations about gender and ‘patriarchalism’ (just as with racism, classism, and many other parts of the social system). So it’s not surprising at all to simultaneously see parts of society advocating rigid patriarchal sex roles, while other parts deliberately (or even inadvertently) advancing ideas and technologies which undermine those roles.
With this in mind, it’s perfectly appropriate to categorize some aspects of a society as being “patriarchal” and not to do so for other parts. In a later quote, Adiabat says:
I’m not saying that Patriarchy should get the credit for everything that happens under it, I’m just asking for some credible, fair and objective system for assigning credit, or blame, to it instead of what I see from feminists, which seems very shallow and *shudder* postmodernist. I’ll ask again, what are your criteria for claiming that patriarchy is responsible for something (or not)?
This seems like a pretty fair request to me. Reasonable people can debate whether my definition, or Wikipedia’s, or some gynocentrist’s is up to the task. As I’ve noted, my definition is a work in progress based partially on my intuitive grasp of gender dynamics, and I wouldn’t blame someone if they thought it a bit too vague for their taste.
But then Adiabat adds:
If the criteria is whether something is because of patriarchy is whether it “devalues the average woman’s macropolitical agency” then the tautology comes into play.
As I’ve pointed out, the claim that there is tautology at work here is without basis.
This comment thread is the “No Hostility” thread. Please read this and this for the ground rules. The “Regular Parallel” thread can be found here.
So I think the problem is one of
1. whether one believes that “class membership” is a valid analytical category.
2. whether we define privilege in terms of class membership even if the class member in question exists in an individual position of relative disadvantage to the rest of society.
For those who answer “yes” to both, then it is logical to employ the concept of The Patriarchy.
Mandos, I think trying to use “class” (at least in the quasi-Marxist sense) to analyze the complex dynamics of gender obscures far more than it illuminates.
I think the weakness of your second point can be illustrated by a slight rewording:
… i.e., “You’re privileged, even though you have it worse than the people who aren’t” tends to suggest there’s something deeply wrong with the way the concept of privilege is being deployed.
Make a list of all the advantages men have over women in a society, and another for the advantages women have over men.
I claim the first will be longer (or more compelling or more serious or somesuch). This leads to one possible definition of patriarchy, that it is the difference in length of the lists.
The mistake (which you correctly point out to tigtog) is to declare the first list “privilege” and the second mere “advantages”.
Welcome to the blog, Sagredo.
If we confine ourselves to the US of A of today, and don’t distinguish between organic (genetic) advantages and culturally-assigned ones (a much trickier task than I think most people realize), I suspect that you would, in fact, be wrong, and that women overall actually enjoy a higher quality of life than men do. (You may want to take a glance at my wildly popular
female privilege list if you haven’t seen it, although I don’t include organic advantages in that list.) Let me hasten to add that this isn’t something I expect you (or anyone) to agree with, but I do think the issue is considerably cloudier than most gynocentric feminists acknowledge.
However, let me also extend to you a heartfelt “Thank you!” for recognizing that this comparison is relevant to assessing the fairness/unfairness of our gender structure. My experience (and I suspect the experience of many other commenters here) is that most mainstream feminists simply assume that men overall are privileged by looking at a few arenas where men have an advantage (i.e. percentage of each gender that occupy leadership roles politically or in companies), and then discount female advantages as being merely “benevolent sexism” or whatever.
Actually doing such a comparison would be an arduous task to carry out, of course. Women in this culture are given much greater cultural latitude to form intimate, non-sexual friendships with members of their own gender than men are, for example. I’m not sure how one would even go about measuring this, much less assign a value to it that might be used to compare to, say, man’s lower risk of being sexually assaulted by a stranger when walking the streets at night.
Partially for this reason, I’m not sure a detailed comparison of men’s and women’s relative advantages would necessarily be appropriate to incorporate into the definition of “patriarchy” (though I do think such comparisons are edifying when evaluating the notion of ‘universal male privilege’).
Why? What is your supporting evidence for this claim?
Nevermind, ballgame has it covered.
Sagredo: I’d say that even if the men’s list is bigger, simply looking at the length of a list isn’t enough. An analysis of the impact that each item on the list has would be necessary.
For example, women have a greater chance of having a good lifestyle without having to work a day in their lives, compared to men. This may have a greater impact than the fact that more men are in the top jobs. Who has the greater privilege, the man who works to 20 years to reach a position where he has to work 60 hour weeks to enjoy a luxury lifestyle or the wife who enjoys the luxury lifestyle but has to do none of the work, and has time to pursue her own interests? These would be counted equally in the list method given above but I know which “privilege” I would prefer.
I there have been cases where “racism” has produced positives (even if still overall negatives), generally such cases are termed ‘paternalism’. This is particularly in colonial times where the ‘natives’ had their culture trampled by a racist policy in order to civilise them. The positive outcome of better education or wealth in some way has to be attributed to the racist policies that produced them. The fact that in a postmodern world we might choose to value their culture over the materialist gains doesn’t take away the particular positives or change what caused them. The same is quite possible for the “patriarchy”.
Class base analysis can provide a useful framework for identifying and understanding particular social or cultural traits. I.e. explaining the behaviour of X to Y because Y is a member of class Q, or even considering the broader pattern and impact if such behaviour is systemic. However it is a mistake to assume that one can objectively determine an overall value for something as vague as a gender or racial class; which can be at best modelled as something of an opaque dynamic multidimensional continuum. In attempting to formulate a method to value or compare such things, one must make subjective value judgements when considering how to relate all the elements. Also, different social or cultural traits may rely on slightly different definitions of the classes making any direct comparison or combination increasing the already significant uncertainty (this is the same reason it’s difficult to come up with any inclusive definition of masculinity or femininity).
This is all very vague.
I hate the term “patriarchy” for the same reasons I hate “original sin.”
I’m sorry, no. That would lead to the odd result of saying that, e.g., MLK wasn’t a member of an oppressed class because he himself was better off than many white people.
I suggest that class can be clarified by thinking about it in Bayesian terms—ie, that it can be conceptualized within a probabilistic framework. Say we have group A with trait X, and group B with the complement of X.
Then we can say that a member of A is class-oppressed in relation to trait X if members of A in general are likely to be at an economic or social or political disadvantage than members of B. That is, A has a prior likelihood of being oppressed if all we knew about A was trait X.
This is how we can say that MLKJr was a member of an oppressed people, despite the fact that he had a college education.
It’s hard to say that a man is class-oppressed in comparison to a women on gender lines, even if said man is at an overall disadvantage to said woman. Where we see “Bayesian” oppression, we are likely to see actual social systems creating that oppression.
Mandos, I fundamentally disagree with you here.
Are you saying that Martin Luther King was better off than a significant number of college-educated white males of his time? I don’t think so … he had to put up with an enormous number of disprivileges that white college-educated men did not.
As I noted earlier, I don’t agree with the way you’re using “class” here, but playing along for a minute: men (of the same economic class, sexual orientation, and race as a comparable set of women) suffer significant social disadvantages compared to those women. They are more often treated as expendable and subjected to treatment which kills them dramatically more often on the job and results in numerous adverse health impacts away from it. Therefore, by your definition, men are oppressed (along at least some vectors) compared to women.
Now, one could make an argument that along other vectors, women are oppressed … as in, say, their lower numbers in executive board rooms. But the fact that privilege and oppression go in both directions when it comes to gender simply goes to my earlier point that “trying to use ‘class’ (at least in the quasi-Marxist sense) to analyze the complex dynamics of gender obscures far more than it illuminates.”
I think Patriarchy is a poor term and should be avoided. First of all, it must be differentiated from patriarchy, the traditional word used to denote “male head of the family” societies. Patriarchy, with a capital P, has a much broader scope and refers to a broad system where power and all of its advantage is primarily held by men. At that point, the word as is commonly used carries a heavy value judgement. Once someone buys the argument that there is a broad Patriarchy, it’s perfectly reasonable to infer that if men hold all the power, most of the world’s problems are men’s fault. And that this is an unhealthy imbalance with no built-in offsets (i.e. women and children first, men die in war, hold dangerous jobs, go homeless, etc). If men hold all the power, then by definition, any privilege held by anyone else simply doesn’t count. Moreover, this broader scope discounts the effects of wealth, class, race, religion, or any number of possible suspects. I don’t think it’s been undeniably demonstrated that the greatest source of concern to society is maleness, not any of these other things, to the point where we could accept Patriarchy as the reigning social order in the world.
At this broad scope, it is a much, much worse fit than the simple term hierarchy. The word hierarchy is much more neutral and allows us to model a society where different factors are important when forming the social order. Feminist discourse itself offers proof that the word Patriarchy is a terrible fit. Feminism has come under increasing amounts of criticism for being incapable of addressing issues such as white women being racist against minority women, rich against poor, etc. It’s tough to address these issues if someone is primarily concerned with the ways in which men have all the power.
Moreover, just to double-down on Patriarchy, there is a new term floating around called Kyriarchy. This word is almost a self-parody. The premise of this term is not to throw away Patriarchy, but to keep the same framework and work in a huge amount of complexity and explain away any other discrepancy of power as a sort of relativist mis-alignment of power structures due to the sheer size of the Patriarchy. The basic idea is that a rich white woman can be relatively more privileged than a poor black man, but this is merely a consequence of these two individuals residing on different branches of the Patriarchy. It’s not that the woman actually did something nefarious in order to oppress the black man. It just ended up this way. Naturally, it’s still men’s fault. Occam’s Razor comes to mind…
Which leads me to my last point… the term Patriarchy is designed to be unfalsifiable, which is what led to the creation of the term Kyriarchy. Under this intellectual framework, a man is simply incapable of understanding his own privilege. Under Patriarchy, men owe their success and social standing not through hard work, but to discrimination against women. Any man who thinks he “earned” his keep is mistaken. For a social movement that seeks to empower women to think for themselves instead of being told how the world works, feminism strangely denies the same right to men through its use of the term Patriarchy.
well,
it always seems like the movie the Matrix….
That’s what if feels like, “they” talk about something you are unable to see. Just like Christians with their faith…..
Ironically, in the reading I have been doing in the manosphere, those guys bring up the matrix and talk about how they are “finally” seeing all these things……
There also are feminists who have deeper insight into the Matrix of Heteronormative Genderbinary Patriarchy, SWAB. I always thought that “matrix”, in this context, meant something vaguely complicated (I have given up on expecting social scientists and activists to use mathematical terms in a way that has anything to do with what those terms mathematically mean), until I read a text by Melissa McEwan on Finally Feminism 101 which really equated the Matrix à la Wachowski with The Patriarchy.
The word “Matrix” is severely overused …
dungone:
And you will probably never will get that level of proof, at least not from people who hold on to patriarchal theory so tightly.
But the fact that the primary concern with the ways in which men supposedly have all the power is what keeps them together. At the end of the day no matter the arguing over transphobia, homophobia, racism, disablism, fat hatred, etc… they can all rest easy knowing that they still have the common goal of fighting teh patriarchy. This is why you can see race fail after, transphobic remark, after disablist commentary, at places like say feministing but as soon as someone remarks that maybe, just maybe, men might be getting an unfair shake all the tanks circle and the unified attack commences.
I think that is also happening on the other end of the spectrum. When a man has not achieved something everything under the sun can be held up as the reason, except his gender. (My evidence of this is how men are treated when it comes to child support enforcement. Most feminists think that the ONLY reason a man is being held up to unfair levels of child support obligation is because he is not trying to get it lowered to reasonable levels. Oh and the ONLY reason a man is not in a child’s life is because he chose not to be there. Usually they chime off that men who go for some sort of custody get it 84% of the time. Funny how they never talk about how vigorously it is enforced….)
Good point.
I believe that one of the problems with defining patriarchy is that we continue to define it in terms of gender (what men are/do/think versus what women are/do think). Patriarchy is, in my opinion, a broad social system that is characterized by a variety of social, religious and economic structures that have evolved over a long time (at least 6000 years of human history). I think a useful approach in defining patriarchy is to examine these structures. I’ll summarize as briefly as I can:
1. Patriarchal religion. These are religions that are anti-nature in their essence. This means that they define redemption as an escape from or trancendence of the natural world. They tend towards monotheism, as evidenced in the big 3 – Christianity, Judaism and Islam. They are heirarchical- people are defined as closer or further away from grace or divinity. They employ intercession with divinity through a priesthood of some form. Many world religions exist that are less patriarchal than the “big 3″, some of which embrace patriarchal features to a greater or lesser extent. The discussion thread here would be to refine this definition and understand its implications to world politics.
2. A Waste Economy. This is an economy that relies on growth to sustain itself. Obviously such an economy is unsustainable in the long run. At this stage in time the global economy depends on the production of waste in various forms to create wealth. (i.e. a food production system that depends on producing hunger, a health system that generates disease, an education system that increases ignorance, a housing system that increases homelessness etc., not to mention the rampant consumption of wasteful and less useful products and the huge amount of direct garbage we generate).
3. The Dominance of Concerns of Men’s Huts. This is the characteristic of patriarchy that feminists most often address (but still often get wrong). In early tribal societies, there was always a separation of men’s and women’s concerns. In the men’s huts the main concerns were short term sustenance, protection of the tribe and identity or “status” in relation to the “other”. In the women’s huts the concerns were long term sustenance, maintenance of the tribe and internal identity or “status” in relation to the group. The social problems of a patriarchal system are due to an imbalance of these different concerns. Which isn’t to say that all men support warfare or all women support nurturing – in fact at this point in time gender has nothing to do with it. It’s just easier to use the terms men’s huts and women’s huts to explore these traditionally different points of view.
4. Patrilineage. In this age of blended families and non-traditional marriages it may seem weird to include patrilineage in a definition of patriarchy. But the need to identify one’s offspring has been a driving force in the evolution of patriarchy and is still functional in a variety of ways. Many features of our legal systems that continue to create social and economic disadvantages for women are rooted in patrilineage. This includes the patriarchal versions of family, which probably deserves a sub-heading of its own, but I will stop here.
I don’t know if this post is relevant to this discussion, or interests your readers, but I would love to be part of a discussion on its merits and flaws.
Hey, Judith, welcome to the blog. I think it would be great to have a more detailed discussion about aspects of the concept of patriarchy. Because I’m preoccupied with work-related deadline issues, my ability to respond quickly and in a lot of detail will be limited for a couple of days.
My immediate reaction to your comment is that I think you’re being very thoughtful, and I agree that — depending on exactly how one defines the concept — patriarchy’s impact on a culture can be complicated and potentially far-reaching. However, I do think that if your definition is too broad, you end up with a concept that’s too vague to be useful, and you may end up attributing to “patriarchy” phenomenon that would be more accurately sourced to other social dynamics.
So, for example, I would be very wary of analysis that subsumes the growth economy/industrialism under the concept of patriarchy.
Hi ballgame, and thankyou for your response. Yes, I realize that throwing in world economics in a discussion of patriarchy is at first glance a huge leap, especially if we use the word patriarchy to define the state of gender relations alone. Things don’t change suddenly, as I’m sure you’ll agree, and changes in one aspect of society are reflected and affect changes in all aspects of society. My rationale for proposing that the current waste economy is a logical outgrowth of a patriarchal paradigm is based on a consideration of the necessary pre-conditions for any growth-centred economy. (The opposite to growth economies, by my definition, are conserver economies, or what we would now call zero-growth or sustainable economies). There is a fair bit of evidence that for the first 2 million years of human development, most economies were conserver in nature. It is only in the last few thousand years that we have switched from the direct trading of goods and services to economies where it is possible (and acceptable) to create wealth through various artificial means that include usury, speculation, trading of “rights”, taxation, and the creation of an energy “debt”.
These economic changes are historically congruent with the rise of patriarchy, which may be argued as coincidental. I think not. They were fuelled by a number of factors that I believe are directly linked to a patriarchal paradigm. Again, I’ll summarize these necessary preconditions to growth economics.
1. The loss of women’s control over reproduction leading to a severe spike in population growth. In a patrilineal society it is a distinct advantage to maximize the size of one’s clan, if for no other reason than the biological imperitive of passing on one’s genes. But there is also the economic advantage of increasing the labour force under one’s control. I believe that untrammeled population growth is fuelled by a patriarchal paradigm. And that untrammeled population growth is a pre-condition to waste economies.
2. The change from a rural agriculturally-driven economy to an urban technologically-driven economy, while not itself a necessarily patriarchal phenomenon, was a pre-condition that was modified by the patriarchal paradigm. With the separation of men’s huts concerns from women’s huts concerns, this change became one that served primarily short-term economic goals. The possibilities for the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few rather than for the benefit of the tribe directed this change and the Industrial Revolution that ensued.
3. I believe that the development of class distinctions, including the idea that one class existed to serve another (from land barons to monarchies to states) is a direct outgrowth of patriarchal religious ideas. In every culture where such class systems developed, they were either modelled on or directly created by the heirarchical concepts of the dominant patriarchal religion. In fact, I know of no society that became class stratified that wasn’t first subject to a religious stratification. So I am boldly proposing that patriarchal religion is the direct ancestor of economic exploitation, and therefore of the present waste economy.
I am also proposing that it isn’t possible to have a serious discussion of patriarchy without including its economic repurcussions. Hmmm.. What do you think?
Judith:
I am not Ballgame of course, but I’ve been commenting here for years. So I’ll throw in my two cents.
But before I do I want to ask you two things just to clarify:
A. Are you making “patriarchy” = “andrarchy”?
B. Is it your contention then, that hunter gather tribes do not display social status markers and moreso, that women never desire such things? It would seem to me that women seem more concerned with status and mate status than the other way around.
Please clarify, thanks.
Hi Clarence.
I’m not sure what you mean by andrarchy as distinct from patriarchy so I can’t answer your first question. Please clarify.
No I’m not suggesting that hunter gatherer societies didn’t display social status markers. I’m saying that the concerns of the “men’s huts” iinclude the display of social status in relation to other tribes, while the concerns of the “women’s huts” include social status within the group. Both men and women participate in the concerns of both men’s and women’s huts in pre-patriarchal societies, and both men and women are concerned with social status on all levels.
In post-patriarchal societies two changes occur. One is the separation of men’s and women’s huts concerns with greater social value attributed to the concerns of the men’s huts. The other change is the virtual exclusion of women from the concerns of the men’s huts, so that at least initially women are excluded from decisions concerning intertribal relationships, especially conflicts, and especially when these conflicts are resolved by warfare.
By status I’m not meaning heirarchy (am I higher status than this person?), but the ongoing state of human interrelationships (where does this person fit into my tribe?).
As to what women desired a few thousand years ago I couldn’t say. I suspect that then, like now, if you asked 10 different women you’d get 10 different answers!
I believe Androcracy means that men are rulers whereas it gets conflated to the more marxist idea that men are the ruling class and women are the oppressed class.
So, yes, while many feminists rightly point out that more men are in positions of power, they often fail to include the fact that most men have little power and that the average man isn’t really much better off than the average woman and might be measurably worse off in a few areas. One incontrovertible example, men live shorter lives on average. This is where I see a one sided world view of those such as Hugo Schwyzer and Amanda Marcotte who always dismiss males problems as not real problems.
Strictly speaking, SWB, the idea that ‘men are the ruling class’ isn’t a Marxist idea. It’s a perversion of the Marxist concept of class that — in capitalist societies — views the rich as the ruling class. I realize you weren’t necessarily trying to say anything about Marx or Marxism here, but there are enough people out there (on both sides of the ‘feminism’ fence) that try to link Marx and gynocentric assertions that men are ‘the ruling class’ that I thought it warranted some clarification.
Agreed.
I might add, “… or say that the problems are things that the men themselves are responsible for.”
Ballgame-
Thanks for the clarification, I’m not as up on my political theory as I should be….
I did have an interesting argument at Lawsonry with Megan Milanese. Jesse Lawson stepped in a bit ,also–since I’ve seen it with Hugo and I was seeing it over there, I was seeing it as a they are presenting a two class system with men as oppressors/women as oppressed. Since Lawsonry does seem to be “socialist” I was confusing that as Marxism. And I think I saw Hugo identify as Marxist at one point. One thing I’ve noticed is that the commentors at Inmalafide and Sophiastry tend to be “right wing” as well as “anti-feminist” so I think that also added to the confusion.
…sometimes it seems like feminists think that men get together and plot against women whereas my experiences are that men can be ruthless towards each other-closer to what Typhone Blue presented.
——–
interesting quote:
“For Marxists, the root cause of all forms of oppression consists in the division of society into classes. For many feminists, on the other hand, the oppression of women is rooted in the nature of men. It is not a social but a biological phenomenon. This is an entirely static, unscientific and undialectical conception of the human race. It is an unhistorical vision of the human condition, from which profoundly pessimistic conclusions must flow. For if we accept that there is something inherent in men which causes them to oppress women, it is difficult to see how the present situation will ever be remedied. The conclusion must be that the oppression of women by men has always existed and therefore, presumably, will always exist. Marxism explains that this is not the case. It shows that, along with class society, private property and the state, the bourgeois family has not always existed, and that the oppression of women is only as old as the division of society into classes. Its abolition is therefore dependent on the abolition of classes, that is, on the socialist revolution. ”
http://www.socialistappeal.org/faq/feminism.html
sorry if two comments in a row is bad form but one article I stumbled onto seemed similar to a few things Judith had mentioned:
“The oppression of women did not always exist. In fact it is a relatively new phenomenon in historical terms. It arose with the division of society into classes and the emergence of class society some 6,000 or so years ago. Prior to that, in the period described by the American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan as ‘primitive communism’, neither classes, the state, private property nor the family existed. There was no domination of man over women, or man over man. As there was no surplus created, only enough to survive, there was no exploitation, which only emerged with the development of the slave empires of Mesopotania, Egypt, Greece and Rome.”
—–
“Both Morgan and Engels were indebted to the German Bachofen, whose book, Der Murrerrecht (Mother Right), provided a history of the family based upon the myths and legends of the past, which showed that women were held in high regard within the clan system. In this primitive society, sexual relations were based upon primitive mating, where conception was thought to have occurred through divine intervention. Primitive mating went through a variety of changes, reaching a phase of group marriage based on kinship. Under these circumstances, a child’s biological father was unknown, and so the line of descent was traced through the mother. This was the only way it could possibly be traced. This gave women their pivotal role within society, and determined the matriarchal character of the clan.”
—–
“However, children, who belonged to their mother’s clan, could not inherit from their father, being of a different clan in which his property had to remain. So with the new wealth came new contradictions. As Engels explained: “Thus, on the one hand, in proportion as wealth increased, it made the man’s position in the family more important than the woman’s, and on the other hand created an impulse to exploit this strengthened position in order to overthrow, in favour of his children, the traditional order of inheritance. This, however, was impossible so long as descent was reckoned according to mother-right. Mother-right, therefore, had to be overthrown, and overthrown it was.” As Engels adds, this act constituted “the world historical defeat of the female sex.”
http://www.marxist.com/origins.....ession.htm
Well, of course, but you’re not supposed to … wait, you’re a guy, right SWB? Have you not been going to the meetings?
Interesting quotes, btw, SWB. I don’t have a lot of time to respond to them in detail, but I will just note that Marvin Harris pointed out that Marx’s analysis of society had some significant flaws (along with some important insights), and one of those flaws was Marx’s analysis of the family and reproduction and their roles in cultural evolution. Of course, Marx didn’t have the advantage of the many sociological and ethnographic studies that were conducted in the 20th century.
Judith:
Andrarchy as I would use the term would be a society set up that privileges every man over every woman. Men’s desires are primary, and all law and cultural aspects are set up to advantage males at the expense of females -though this could be due to benign neglect or actual desire to subjugate. At the extremes a male begger, simply by virtue of being male, would have more social status and legal rights and protections than a Queen.
Judith:
Just a first stab at things, but I hope you realize just how simplistic that two huts stuff is. It may have some use as a metaphor, but obviously based on gene studies quite a few women , even in times of peace, were acutely aware of who was who in that other tribe.
Heck, recently it was shown via genetic analysis that members of homo sapiens mated with homo neanderthalus within the past 30 thousand years, and that’s a lot kinkier than merely finding some bad boy in a nearby tribe attractive.
Anyway, since I’m hoping you are aware of how limited your metaphor is, I shall let you farther develop it – I’m curious to see where this is going. I can see some use for it, so thanks for introducing it.
Ballgame,
Those aren’t my views, I just found that when I googled Marxism Feminism. I did think that Judith’s comments opened up the door for that though. I also think that economic systems at one level or another need to be part of these discussions…
(insert sarcastic voice here)As far as the meetings, yup, I haven’t been going for awhile now. Got really bored–It was the teleconferences where Hugo S. and Robert Jensen would hog up the discussion. In fact I think it was my desertion that caused him to blame the new generation of males failure on Pot,Porn and Playstation
Ballgame:
Have we patriarchs been paying Twisty and Marcotte on time recently? The poor dears have tried so hard and for so long to make feminism look bad, I feel the least we can do is pay them promptly.
“3. The Dominance of Concerns of Men’s Huts. This is the characteristic of patriarchy that feminists most often address (but still often get wrong). In early tribal societies, there was always a separation of men’s and women’s concerns. In the men’s huts the main concerns were short term sustenance, protection of the tribe and identity or “status” in relation to the “other”. In the women’s huts the concerns were long term sustenance, maintenance of the tribe and internal identity or “status” in relation to the group. ”
I think you are onto something here, Judith, although I don’t agree yet with this particular analysis.
For one thing, you contrast protection of the tribe with maintenance of the tribe. What difference do you see? It seesm to me that a concern with lineage is central to the continuity of the tribal identity. Further, it seems to me that protection of the resource base, which was central to this concern with Others on the part of the men, is more basic to long-term sustenance than just about any other effort.
Also just on the facts, can oyu support your assertion that men were less concerned with internal status than women? That surely does not accord with my life experience or reading of history. I think both men and women are equally concerned with internal status, within their own genders especially.
I think your analysis has the advantage of simplicity but it seems to stop at easy dualities and does not go far enopugh into the circularity of these power relationships wrt to food production, reproduction, territotial concerns and so on.
““The oppression of women did not always exist. In fact it is a relatively new phenomenon in historical terms. It arose with the division of society into classes and the emergence of class society some 6,000 or so years ago….”
Class sytems may be quite a bit older than that. That date seems predicated on the advent of agriculture – in which case it’s in error, since agriculture is at 4,000 years older. In any case, there are clear examples of forager societies that had class systesm, in California and the PNW. I think the error comes of the fallacious tendancy to generalize from extant forager societies, which are generally on poor resurce bases and tend to be structurally simple, and then contrasting them with large, complex agricultural socieites.
In any case, even if that contrast were true, it still would not adequately explain the dominance of men over women, since classes consist of both men and women, with high-status men being motivated to provide for high-status women or at least their children.
However – I agree with you that men and women had separate if coordinated interests in these societies and this could lead to the kind of division of labor and concern you are getting at.
Judith Quinlan says:
July 26, 2011 at 4:21 pm
If members of both sexes participate in both conversations, then by what criteria is one designated the “men’s” hut and the other the “women’s?”
How is the relative value attributed? Who is doing the attributing?
Who is doing the excluding? How did the excluder reach a position from which to be able to dictate who is excluded?
=
@ Pat
Yep, those same patriarchy meta-questions keep me up nights too.
@Jim
Regarding “division of labor” and the direction this thread is going in now, has anyone here read “Is There Anything Good About Men?: How Cultures Flourish by Exploiting Men” by Roy F. Baumeister?
Baumeister attempts to give alternative explanations for the phenomena which have traditionally been explained by “Patriarchy”.
In a nutshell, his thesis is that due to biological realities, cultures with “certain divisions of labour” that take into account the reality that men don’t have wombs and are therefore expendable tend to outcompete cultures who don’t.
He sees a stronger pattern of the sexes just co-operating in different ways in order to eke out survival under harsh conditions, rather than any large-scale historical conspiracies by one sex to keep the other down.
According to him, the phenomena we attribute to Patriarchy arose, rather, as those divisions of labour were write large, at societal level, as societies became larger and larger.
For me, the book has great value not because it is necessarily correct in all details, but because it acts as a kind of “existence proof” to show that different explanations other than “its the evil menz!” are possible, and to give a foretaste of what such explanations could possibly look like.
swab: You should keep coming to the MI meetings. You missed last weeks raffle and next week we’ve got a guest speaker telling us all about jam making. At least attend the box social next Saturday.
edit: non UK poster might not get the reference to the WI (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_Institutes)
“…exclusion of women from the concerns of the men’s huts…
Who is doing the excluding? How did the excluder reach a position from which to be able to dictate who is excluded?”
And tradtionally this was exactly mirrored by the exclusion of men from the concerns of the women’s huts. I am in the first generation of men who didn’t have to fight on all sides to be present at my son’s birth.
Of course that war is far form over, as the child custody stats show, or as a whole range of other barriers to male parenting in this society show.
And even in the area of childbirth the war is not won yet. My grandadughter will be born while my son is deployed, and of course the fact that his child or anyone else’s is being born has ever kept them back from a deployment. Ah, well, not everyone…….. Of course not everyone. Because despite what the Navy would inevitably say about the service obligation being paramount and the mission coming first, somehow the mission is not so important that a female sailor who comes up pregnant before a deployment is never ordered to terminate that pregnancy so that she can fulfil her obligations.
surprised this hasn’t come into the conversation yet:
http://counterfem.blogspot.com.....-know.html
What do the feminists really mean by the term “patriarchy”? When this word rolls off a feminist tongue, what does it specifically refer to? Is it possible to discover what they are talking about in terms of the utmost clarity, simplicity, and above all usability, and reduce it to a formula that will smack the nail bang on the head every time?
——-
Here is the secret: When feminists speak of patriarchy, all they are really talking about is male power. It’s just that simple. All of their circumlocutions dance endlessly and evasively around this—that patriarchy is exactly synonymous with male power, neither more nor less than male power, and that in all cases the terms patriarchy and male power may be interchanged with a negligible adulteration of meaning.
——
And exactly what is this thing called…power? That is a very good and very important question.
In the realm of human affairs, as near as we can make it, power is a substance compounded of two ingredients: IDENTITY, and AGENCY.
Identity means the sum of all factors, both mental and physical, which identify you as a discrete center of conscious awareness in contradistinction to other such discrete centers.
Agency means your capacity to either effect or prevent change through the exercise of your volition.
———–
Gentle reader, you as a person posess identity and agency. In other words, you posess power. You mightn’t think you have enough of it, but you do have some. And so long as you have some, you have freedom. Again, possibly not enough for your liking…but some. And some is always enough to get you started—enough to leaven the dough, you might say. Be glad of it, and work intelligently with it.
I don’t know, SWB. I read the whole thing; it frankly just seemed like an elaborate exercise in trying to paint all feminists as eeeevvvvviiiiiilllllllll. I mean, the notion that the phrase “sensitive male” is inherently insulting? Good grief! Not even the barest acknowledgement that feminism was a response to actual oppression (you know, like not being able to vote, or not even being able to have credit cards in your own goddamned name, etc.)? The overall effect of that post was pretty toxic and not particularly enlightening (even though I do agree that the concept of patriarchy is often ill-defined and misused by many gynocentric feminists).
“I don’t know, SWB. I read the whole thing; it frankly just seemed like an elaborate exercise in trying to paint all feminists as eeeevvvvviiiiiilllllllll.”
That doesn’t follow. Basically decent people can believe in ideologies that appear good or decent but which have some pretty probelmatic foundational memes. Ta-Nehisi Coates had a series of posts a few months ago exploring the basic decency of many if not most in the southern slave-owner class. he syas in the end that they went to war for a lot of honorable reasons to defend a society that had a great big indecency at the root of it.
That’s the case with the doctrine of patriarchy. It is itself inherently sexist, no matter how much you try to qualify it, amend it, put patches on it, for all the reasons others have gvne above. It’s inherently illiterate too.
And as for all that voting and credit card stuf – there’s a real strong whiff of Hennhy Penny to all that. Do you know the story? Where were women when all that was being put together – democracy being bled for, finacial systems being assmebled with massive trrail and error? Were women out building a society in the same way and to the same extent that men were, a la kiuku? Hell no – why should they? They didn’t have to; they “had people for that srt of thing”. And they after all the blood was dry and alll the MALE were dead and buried, it’s tiem to come along demanding to know where their share of the power was.
I mean, it’s better that women have all those rights, it makes for a bette rsociety – but a better society for men, and that’s what amkes all that better. Women are not stray dogs to be fed pity food at the back door. If they are our equals, they have to earn that equality and that membership in society way that men do, by building and protecting it, in exactly the same ways and to the same extent. It’s not a very high bar to reach, frankly. They are busy doing it already, some of them.
and Ballgame, here are a few quotes from Finally Feminism 101
http://finallyfeminism101.word.....mens-woes/
Historically, patriarchy operates through the disproportionate (sometimes exclusive) conferring of leadership status (and formal titles indicating that status) on men, a tradition characterised by casting all women as naturally unsuited to lead men, no matter what talents and expertise they might possess (unless there are exceptional circumstances resulting from intersections with other social hierarchies conferring high status that gives rare women political authority e.g. the royal lineage of Elizabeth I, or the divine claim to authority of Joan of Arc). This view of women normalises the restriction of women’s opportunities and choices throughout the whole of society via strict gender expectations which constrain individualist expressions.
————
Not all men are Patriarchs. A Patriarch is a man who has special power and influence over not just his family but also in society, due to privileges gathered through intersections of age, wealth, achievement, lineage, patronage and the exploitation of others as these attributes add to his place in the elite social hierarchy.
Non-elite men do not generally actively conspire with Patriarchs (although they may aspire to become one): the patriarchal pattern however means that subordinate men are ranked above subordinate women in the traditional socioeconomic hierarchy from which Patriarchs skim the cream, meaning that men (as a group) benefit more from the injustices of Patriarchy than women do (as a group). This does not mean that superordinate women (by virtue of lineage/wealth) do not have concrete advantages and social privileges compared to subordinate men – this is where the intersecting rankings and dominations of the kyriarchy come in.
—————–
However, despite other circles of superordination, society is still structured along patriarchal lines of subordination in nearly all forms of organisations, to the great benefit of those at the top. The male elites, the magnates (currently white, but who knows what the next century will bring?), continue to wield disproportionate influence and power over the situations of other men and especially women.
I disagree, Jim. Are you suggesting that — after reading that post — you still think that fidelbogen believes that the majority of feminists are acting in good faith?
I categorically disagree on both counts. The concept of patriarchy has been usefully applied to pre-modern societies by cultural anthropologists like Marvin Harris (and others) in a coherent fashion unmarred by the rhetorical double-dealing that some gynocentrists use when they apply it to contemporary society.
Women are the equals of men, and no one has to “earn” respect or membership in the society in which they are born. That is their due.
SWB, I’m not sure what you’re trying to get at with your quotes from FF101. Some of their observations you post here seem valid, some don’t. I haven’t read a lot of their stuff on patriarchy, but given their one-sided view of privilege, I would assume they would have a similarly distorted view of patriarchy.
Ballgame,
I’ve posted multiple quotes from multiple sources, some that would be diametrically opposed…..
I’ve read over 100 pages worth of material relating to this subject including the “marxist critiques.”
I still don’t have a working definition of “patriarchy.” I’m sure Feminist’s who are at the doctorate level of education have done much more reading and have a better grasp of philosophy than myself….
However, I think I can honestly say that I have done more reading (can’t prove this assertion) than, say the average commenter on feministe on this topic at this point….
With all this I haven’t gotten even a “working definition” to go on here…..
I can appreciate certain observations, say that society is in a constant state of change and any model used to describe it must also be. I can even appreciate it if someone says when x says patriarchy they mean q but when y says patriarchy they mean r.
Now on a parallel-there was a thread where Hugo mentioned Thaddeus Blanchette’s critique of him and even though the power structures mentioned were kyriarchy and then Hegemonic masculinity, Schwyzer never answered Blanchette when he asked for a definition of Hegemonic Masculinity. I don’t know for certain but I believe that not providing a definition would be a) he doesn’t have one. He’s very sharp so I doubt this is the case. More likely b) he does but doesn’t want to reveal it as he can always modify it to appear more superior in an argument at a later point in time.
Here is the thread:
http://hugoschwyzer.net/2011/0.....link-love/
So, I have in good faith tried to look at things from more than one perspective and even accepted that I will always have a limited viewpoint due to my life experiences and what not.
Next time I am arguing with a feminist, should I say, look give me a working definition here, I’ve already read Feminism 101, it’s problematic. If you don’t, I can’t take things you are saying in good faith anymore….
Is this a reasonable assertion on my point?
Really, just tired and frustrated at this time….
SWB, I completely sympathize with your frustration here. For being such a critical concept, feminists’ definitions/descriptions of it seem to be all over the map.
Realizing that my definition isn’t necessarily what anyone else uses, and that it may be one that you, personally, don’t agree with for whatever reason, would it nonetheless qualify as a “working definition” as you put it? Or is it too vague, from your point of view?
What it sounds like you’re looking for — and I think it’s a perfectly reasonable thing to be looking for — is some kind of definition or checklist that someone could use to determine if any particular society is a patriarchy or not. I suspect going at it that way with a feminist that you might be discussing this with would be the way to go, i.e. “Explain how you would determine if any specific society or culture was not a patriarchy.” Now, you might not like their answer. Some might just rattle off a laundry list of gynocentric criteria that would include items that were either unrealistic or unfair to men. But at least you’d have an idea of what, for them, was their ‘working definition’ of patriarchy.
Ballgame,
I can really respect that you are trying to give a definition here,
“Patriarchy is a system of rigid rules and expectations around gender that unjustly overvalues certain qualities and undervalues others.”
Now without discussing what these rules and expectations are, this has little to no meaning. I think we have been discussing them other places, including the “Nice Guy” threads.
“Typically, dominant males are overvalued”
This brings us back to I think, hegemonic masculinity or androcracy–also sounding like the PUA concept of “alpha male”…..
“and the average woman’s macropolitical agency is significantly constrained. (Patriarchal societies also frequently devalue the average man’s emotional value and possibly his micropolitical agency….”
This brings us back to the argument that the average woman doesn’t necessarily have it worse than the average man. Unfortunately often being dismissed as “what about teh menz….” Also, some general thoughts, even though many women put a great deal of effort into their appearance with things such as makeup, would it be unreasonable to say femininity just is whereas masculinity is something harshly earned and fought for?
I really do think a checklist is needed and then the argument becomes is modern society patriarchical, does it have patriarchical concepts, is that breaking down?
oh, and another link that I found interesting though do not necessarily agree with–
Mary L. Wentworth: What is Patriarchy and Why is it the Most Powerful Force in the World Today?
http://www.global-sisterhood-n.....ew/931/76/
As this paper shows, patriarchal control is not exercised in exactly the same way throughout the world. Over the centuries, the patriarchy has had to maintain its power through subjugating women in a multitude of cultures and through using varying forms of governments. The system has experienced setbacks, regained some lost ground, reasserted control after resistance to it weakened, but in a relentless pursuit for world domination by one or another of its factions, its power remains unchallenged, partly because it is not explicitly recognized. It is unusual to find a discussion about patriarchy in the account of a particular war or about war, in general, or to hear an analysis of patriarchy’s obvious role in the plight of women.
——–
Under patriarchy men and women are socialized to view themselves and the world through different lenses. While patriarchy severely oppresses women, men have been given a stake in the system, but may not recognize the price they pay for it. In trying to eradicate patriarchy, men start from a place that is quite different from women’s. It is the work of men to raise the consciousness of other men in regard to the trade-off that patriarchy requires of them.
———
Even though men are more privileged under patriarchy than women, some men are more privileged than others. These differences vary according to the culture with its particular class subsystems and, of course, the castes based on physical characteristics like skin color and sex that cannot be changed. These subsystems can also be based on lineage, on religion, or on wealth. Women within the subsystems, however, always occupy a lower status than their male counterparts. [A woman who is attached to an upper-class man has a better life in a material sense than lower-class men and women, but she may be physically or emotionally abused. If she displeases her father or husband she can find herself relegated almost overnight to a life of poverty or prostitution.] In any case, it is male privilege in all its gradations that is the glue that keeps the patriarchal system intact.
A male’s privilege begins during his mother’s pregnancy when his family expresses the age-old preference for a boy, especially if the baby is the first. In many cultures, if a man does not father a son his virility is questioned. The patriarchal system makes a daughter a liability since it requires that she be married, a status that normally affords her no long-term possibility of economically benefiting her family of origin. Male privilege also means that a son stands little chance of having his life snuffed out at birth.
NOTE: I would’ve previously disregarded the entire paragraph above as nonsense had I not concurrently been reading things like this:
http://www.gendercide.org/case_infanticide.html
——–
By providing each man with the services of at least one female, marriage rewarded men for their allegiance to, and for their willingness to fight for, the patriarchy. Marriage also successfully settles disputes among men about who has the right to which woman. Since women’s sexual activities are confined to the private realm, men are guaranteed certainty concerning the paternity of their children. Men, on the other hand, enjoy a double standard since they have access to prostitution via the public arena and tend to excuse one another’s sexual liaisons within the private sphere. With the growing prevalence of the nuclear family and more mobile families, marriage increasingly isolates women from one another, distinguishing us in that respect from other oppressed groups.
———-
When the patriarchy wants another war, it has to be able to generate support for it. At the end of World War II, a British writer interviewed Hermann Göering, Hitler’s Field Marshall, in his prison cell. Göering noted a potential snag, “Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece.” Exactly. But the patriarchal code disallows “the poor slob” from asking this question. Göering continues, “Naturally the common people don’t want war, but after all, it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag people along whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. . . . voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.E21”
———-
Our challenges today include raising awareness among men of the price they pay for upholding patriarchy and to work with them to change male culture. Another is to insure that the relationships of men and women who are living together, whether within the institution of marriage or outside of it, are ones in which women are treated with respect and as equals and in which both partners are committed to providing a nurturing and healthy incubator for the fragile young. Without this transformation within the family, women’s ability to participate in the public arena will not develop strong roots.
———
Through understanding patriarchy we become even more aware that our insistence on controlling our reproductive functions strikes at the heart of patriarchy, provoking conservatives and reactionaries into waging an ongoing struggle to turn back the clock wherever progress has been made.
“That doesn’t follow.
I disagree, Jim. Are you suggesting that — after reading that post — you still think that fidelbogen believes that the majority of feminists are acting in good faith?”
I agree that he doesn’t believe they are delaing in good faith, just not from that snippet.
“[P]atriarchy … is itself inherently sexist, no matter how much you try to qualify it, amend it, put patches on it, for all the reasons others have gvne above. It’s inherently illiterate too.
I categorically disagree on both counts. The concept of patriarchy has been usefully applied to pre-modern societies by cultural anthropologists like Marvin Harris (and others) in a coherent fashion unmarred by the rhetorical double-dealing that some gynocentrists use when they apply it to contemporary society.”
So you agree with me. I was referring to feminists’ use of the temr, as you are in the post, and not to how antropologists have correctly used it elsewhere. And secondly if the term is applied to modern society, the use is illiterate. This society is demonstrably an example of “rule by fathers” and even if we acknoledge and avoid the etymological fallacy, this society is not run by men or anyone else acting in the role of fathers or eders. For one thing men=/= fathers. For another, this is a capitalist society, and in capitalism the only relationship that matters is ownership – the relationship between the owner and zir property. That is the basis of any market society.
“If they are our equals, they have to earn that equality and that membership in society way that men do …
Women are the equals of men, and no one has to “earn” respect or membership in the society in which they are born. That is their due.”
First thing – respect has to be earned or it’s not respect. It may be courtesy. It may be indulgence. But it’s not rela repsect. (we do colloquially refer to courtesy as “respect” but most people will acknowledge the differnece if you ask them clarify.)
Secondly, the membership that I was refering to is adult membership. Adulthood also has to be earned by effort – effort to master the necesary culture, effort to contribute to the functioning of society, including all the dirty, difficlt, dangerous jobs. That’s adulthood, and it takes effort. That’s what I mean by “earning”. Of course it doesn’t apply to children. But childhood ends one way or another, whether we leave it willingly or not, and society is full of people who seem to want to enjoy their childhoods years beyond the pull date – and I am looking mostly at Boomers, but their offspring show a lot of the same self-indulgence – and turn around and demand to be treated like some kind of equals.
IMO ‘patriarchy’ is one of those feminist theory ideas that is such bullshit that it makes me want to dismiss feminism and everyone associated with it entirely. The bottom line… ‘patriarchy’ purposefully fuzzy word and no amount of insisting it be this or that is going to change this. You will never pin down the definition of ‘patriarchy’ because it’s a weasel word. If you go that that road you have simply fallen into the trap. By merely accepting the word ‘patriarchy’ you’ve lost.
tl;dr
It’s all about framing.
Jim, we’ll have to agree to (strongly) disagree about ‘respect.’ In my view, everyone is entitled to respect, though it can be lost based on a person’s (immoral) conduct. If you meet someone for the first time (and therefore they’ve clearly not yet been able to ‘earn’ your respect), it’s immoral to disrespect them (pending your evaluation of their behavior).
SWB, I think the Mary Wentworth passage you cite is a good summary of the deeply flawed gynocentric view of patriarchy, a view which turns a blind eye towards female privilege.
BG, actualy we disagree about disagreeing. We agree pretty much on this for instance, although we phrase it differently:
“If you meet someone for the first time (and therefore they’ve clearly not yet been able to ‘earn’ your respect), it’s immoral to disrespect them (pending your evaluation of their behavior).”
There is a difnenrence between the active disrespect you mention here, in the form a verb, an action, and simple lack of respect, indifference. And I don’t go out of my way to disrespect people, in fact I make an effort to appreciate them. But that has nothing to do with anything they do or even with soem worht that inheres in them. I do that as an expression of who I am. I guess it comes down this diffenrence – I see everything in terms of grace, and you seem to define things in terms of works – “entitled”, “rights”. Functionally it often works out to the same result. I grant my good behavior to everyone, mostly, and they grant the same to me, and for their own reasons. freely. It has nothing to do with what soemone has earned or is entitled to.
Now onto ” though it can be lost based on a person’s (immoral) conduct.” This is where we are saying the same thing in inverted terms. I think that failure in your duty is immoral conduct. Neglect is conduct. And adult members of a community have a duty to contribute to maintaining community, and people who shirk that duty are acting immorally. This is the ground we here have been over so many times to the institutionalized failure – prevention more often – of women to do the heavy lifting in this society. But that’s just a small part of it.
The whole culture is set up to make consumers out of us rather than grow us as citizens. Especially the last 30 years have been about ceebrating people who take as much as they can out of society in treturn for as little contribution as possible – because that’s getting the better deal, and that’s the whole pointof life. The most extreme examples of this are the libertarian Ayn Randers, but it’s much more pervasive than that
I don’t have time to go into this more, but I think we generally agree.
[...] Again, if you haven’t read it there is an interesting discussion at Feminist Critics [...]
[...] I have expressed my frustration over the concept and Ballgame had answered me at Feminist Critics. [...]
About patriarchy…..in classic feminist sence is a virtual enemy, a adaptation of a traditional term to suit their rethoric. Let me clarify…
Almust all ideologies and religions have their set of enemyes, christianity has satan…the devil, wiccans have christians as their main enemy, marxists have capitalists, nazist have jews. Josef Stalin blamed Leon trotsky when things didnt went right; Mussolini blamed also democratic spyes for his military defeat ect.
Feminism needed a enemy, they toke the term patriarchy and manipulated it into what it is now. Patriarchy is also a synonym of men, although feminism has and are slowly abandoning this line.
that’s interesting….
some will say that MRA’s are mirroring Feminists…..
is Satanism the opposite of Christianity?
It is more the other side of the same coin….
An Atheist whom refuses to even accept that framework is more of an”outsider.”
I’ve been thinking of that a bit lately and the conclusion I’ve been coming to is that those interested in greater equality should drop a framework that isn’t working–ie not discuss things like privilege or whom is more oppressed.
Old post, I know, but Melissa McEwan talks about the patriarchy being like the Matrix here:
http://shakespearessister.blog.....er-of.html
Toysoldier wrote a response, I guess originally in 2009 but re-posted in relation to a discussion on another thread:
http://toysoldier.wordpress.co.....tupid-v15/
I left a comment that many in the Manosphere have the red pill/blue pill analogy….