Sounds like you agree that what is generally understood to be the definition of patriarchy exists, you just don't like the label. — Artemis

I suppose that's a possibility. I'll have to think about it more.

Such a shallow viewpoint. Some men? Sure. Not the admirable ones.

You realize how fallacious this is? You realize what it has in common with many racist thoughts? Identity politics? Etc
— creativesoul

Some, compared to the vast majority over history, yes. — Artemis

Waffling.

The way men have tried to "protect" women has historically included keeping them in the house, telling them whom they can be friends with, what jobs they can do, not allowing them to vote, not allowing them property, and beating them when they get rebellious. If that's not disadvantaged, I dunno what definition you're working with. — Artemis

Some. Not all.

Are you now claiming the majority of all men, as in... throughout human history acted like that?

Ok.

One is more than ought be. Trust me. Plenty of otherwise peaceful men have dealt with some of the same overbearing aggressive physically threatening insecure men, like those you mentioned. All such treatment of women was and is wrong.

Now...

Other men protect the woman's right to the pursuit of her own happiness.

The way some men have acted towards women is unacceptable. Others are perfectly acceptable. There are different standards for what counts as "protecting women". Some of those you'd probably agree with. Sometimes, those standards are held by men who do not appreciate being placed into the same bag of rotten apples(your target). Such men would be your friend, one would think, an ally of sorts, unless your notion of "feminism" equals man hater.

"It is still better to speak only in riddles, allusions, hints, parables. Even if asked to clarify a few points. Even if people plead that they just don’t understand. After all, they never have understood. So why not double the misprision to the limits of exasperation? Until the ear tunes into another music, the voice starts to sing again, the very gaze stops squinting over the signs of auto-representation, and (re)production no longer inevitably amounts to the same and returns to the same forms, with minor variations." ---Luce Irigaray

but disagreement with your views really shouldn't be taken — Bitter Crank

It's not that you disagree with me--I have no problem with that--it's you beginning your response by telling me flat out I'm brainwashed. So I respond flat out you're rude.

What do you mean by "cultural creation"? — Bitter Crank

I mean the creation of cultural institutions as well as art. Cultural institutions include religion, politics, education, military organization, govt., distribution of weath (class system), etc.

I suppose that's a possibility. I'll have to think about it more. — Bitter Crank

Patriarchy disintegrated in the 20th Century but it wasnt replaced. People just blundered into trial and error, looking for a new set of rules and roles.

That means that there is an attraction for some to reanimate the corpse, for both men and women. Conservatism is safety.

Don't be a blind scientist, declaring that there is no light.

The way some men have acted towards women is unacceptable. Others are perfectly acceptable. There are different standards for what counts as "protecting women". Some of those you'd probably agree with. Sometimes, those standards are held by men who do not appreciate being placed into the same bag of rotten apples(your target). Such men would be your friend, one would think, an ally of sorts, unless your notion of "feminism" equals man hater. — creativesoul

While I acknowledge that there have likely always been good men, I would caution you against assuming the majority in past centuries were female allies. I think as the culture has changed, so too have men and women.

There was a time when it was "common knowledge" (as is, people, men and women alike, assumed to be true) that women were inferior in many ways. It was also commonly accepted that, while a husband should not beat his wife to a bloody pulp, he had the perfect right to hit her if she got "hysterical" (code for, having her own opinion).

If the majority of men did not go along with that, as well as with many other injustices against women, these injustices would never have been part of the framework of society.

We would not, for example, still bear the vestiges of such a history in such phrases as "rule of thumb."

What you've revealed is a painful truth about humanity. Movements are born out of injustice but injustice prevails within such movements themselves.

A cake has many layers and no matter how you cut it the layers are preserved in every piece and in the same order.

So, we here have feminism, seen as a just cause, but within it, injustice, discrimination based on race, sexuality, ethnicity, etc. exist.

It is not wrong to say that if we don't correct the issue of the lack of intersectionality we would be hypocritical, short-sighted and self-serving to boot, making us no better than a slave-owner who wants to free his kin from slavery.

However what redeems us is that we're doing the best we can with hands bound behind our backs - societies and cultures have limits and will react violently to changes that are just too radical - and that may make it impossible to correct all societal ills at once. It's inevitable that racism, homophobia and other injustices exist within the otherwise just cause of feminism - giving women equal rights. This doesn't mean that we shouldn't do anything about. Lending support to other just causes can work out to be beneficial to all sides - not being a hypocrite and helping another good cause can really boost morale and people-convincing prowess.

I would caution you against assuming the majority in past centuries were female allies. I think as the culture has changed, so too have men and women. — Artemis

No caution needed. I've assumed no such thing.

Not all men are they way you've described some. Not all females are like you either(assuming you're a female).

The 'intersectional' aspect of the thread would be unnecessary if everyone were given some equal modicum of respect/value/equality/etc simply because they are human.

I mean the creation of cultural institutions as well as art. Cultural institutions include religion, politics, education, military organization, govt., distribution of weath (class system), etc. — uncanni

I don't think women are from Venus and men are from Mars, and Saturn really should have been named Athena to Zeus's Jupiter. Pluto could have been named Persephone, and Neptune Demeter. But... those damned patriarchal astronomers.

It seems very unlikely to me that in the penultimate stretch of human evolution (modern homo sapiens wandering the Veldt for 300,000 years, at least, hunting, gathering, and living an exceptionally sustainable lifestyle, men and women were in constant war with each other. It wasn't the Peaceable Kingdom, if Steven Pinker's theory about the state lessening violence is right, but it had to have been been fairly good, because archeological/anthropological evidence indicates that they were reasonably healthy and long-lived. An inhospitable, inharmonious society living where willing cooperation and fellowship was a requirement would have difficulty surviving and thriving as well as they did.

10-12-14 thousand years ago life changed dramatically -- the agricultural revolution. We settled down on the land. Now, there are some interesting theories about how and why that came about. With agriculture came the tilled fields, the city, and the state. Some anthropological historians suspect that there was a conspiracy. Agricultural was promoted vigorously by the state (initially consisting of one family stronger than the rest living in a bigger rock pile than everybody else) because surplus food could be TAXED, and the tax would feed the state. Compared to 300,000 years of amicable wandering the earth, agriculture, the state, and the city took off like a rocket. It wasn't long before family life (the prime reason for humans existing) was severely altered by work, religion, politics, trade, economy, state, garbage heaps, shit piles, (what happens when people stay in one place), and then domesticated animals in addition to our canine alter-egos, writing, etc.

All this happened VERY FAST. Agriculture brought with it the need for control and regulation and our cultural inventions turned on us -- not in the 19th century a.d. but in the 10th millennium b.c. I don't know what life was like back then for ordinary people. Probably a mixed bag.

We know more about the high culture of ancient Greece in the age of Pericles. If not patriarchal, it can certainly be described as male-oriented. Women were expected to stay at home. Important men were the public eye (unimportant men were irrelevant). But it was also a harsh society, despite the high levels of culture. The punishment for unpaid debts (not a dollar owed for a cup of wine, but more like bankruptcy) was enslavement for one's entire family, and not a symbolic slavery either.

But then, there are a few plays that survived like Lysistrata or Antigony where women play important cultural roles.

Our view of ancient cultures, or for that matter our own culture several hundred years ago, is pretty limited because the lives of ordinary people just aren't recorded. The Ties That Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England by Barbara A. Hanawalt suggests a reasonably happy existence of men, women, and children. The Decameron by Boccaccio and Canterbury Tales by Chaucer aren't anthropology, of course, but suggest a reasonably decent society for better-off people in the late medieval-early renaissance period. (Nobody wrote Tales of the Proles, unfortunately.)

Putting together 10,000 years of 'civilization' practically had to involve everyone. Well, that's my take on it. I don't imagine any period of women's liberation that would resemble the current time, but it doesn't seem reasonable to impose a ghastly tale of universal, unending female oppression, either. Yes, there are ghastly practices imposed on people: foot binding, castration, female genital mutilation, circumcision, etc. But those weren't universal.

men and women were in constant war with each other. — Bitter Crank

This has clearly never been the case; nor is it now, although feminist philosophy etc. has had serious cachet for the last 40 years. Clearly, for the vast majority of the time, women were tied down to taking care of babies and men were tied down to hunting and foraging. I can understand the physically-stronger and more aggressive sex being bossy, but then it turns into all sorts of wretched ideological systems when writing becomes serious business. Which is when the really sick shit gets carved in stone, so to speak.

I know how the history of humankind developed; and you've got to be joking if you try to argue that Greece wasn't as phall-logo-centrically patriarchal as they come.

a ghastly tale of universal, unending female oppression — Bitter Crank

Who said that? I don't recall anyone saying that??? You're not trying to manipulate us, are you? The above unfortunate statement doesn't in the least reflect what this discussion has been about--at least according to my understanding of what we've been discussing.

Patriarchy puts men in charge of the socio-cultural institutions.

No one denies that things have changed a lot in the past 40 years.

It's fucking about time Me, Too happened. (Oh, sorry, went off on a tangent, but the point is there.)

This is how I see it, and you may not at all see things the way I do:
* change is slow to occur;
* only recently did women have equal access to education;
* even more recently women obtained more freedom from domestic thralldom (and I'll bet if you'd asked them if they wanted to go out and work some and let the men stay home washing poopy diapers, they'd have said yes); (and this would have been good for some men, too, who would have benefitted from staying at home);
* much of humanity continues to see women fundamentally as sex objects and inferior beings;
* too many men disrespect women's intellect by telling them they're brainwashed (and when they do that, they owe an apology);
* women have never had the chance to share equally in the decision-making apparati;
* men and women are oppressed and made sick by the dysfunctional dynamics that pervade.

We are a truly primitive species who may extinguish itself long before it gets a chance to truly grow up emotionally. I find this thought so sad cuz we were in charge of the whole planet.

foot binding, castration, female genital mutilation, circumcision, etc. — Bitter Crank

I can't believe that you put these practices all on the same level. Castration has never been a universal cultural practice the way that female gen. mutilation is, and I'm sorry, but circumcision is almost insignificant compared to foot binding. What does circumcision do? You lose a little feeling. Maybe the head of your penis gets cold in a breeze. But foot binding? You're fucking crippled for life. Unable to walk, skip, jump, run, dance. You can never go anywhere under your own steam. That's hellish.

Not all men are they way you've described some. Not all females are like you either — creativesoul

I didn't say they were. So what's your point?

The 'intersectional' aspect of the thread would be unnecessary if everyone were given some equal modicum of respect/value/equality/etc simply because they are human. — creativesoul

Feminism would be unnecessary too. So would any social justice movement. Alas, that's not the world we live in, and so they are, in fact, necessary.

Castration has never been a universal cultural practice the way that female gen. mutilation is — uncanni

Well, I didn't really mark out an aristocracy of suffering.

No, castration was not universal practice, but eunuchs were handy to have around guarding harems or singing counter-tenor, or higher. FGM is hardly universal (which is not to lessen its awfulness). As far as I know, most of the world outside of the Islamic sphere has not practiced it--but there are... a billion Moslems.

Just for your information, if a guy is not circumcised, then his foreskin gets cold in a breeze--maybe colder than the head. For Minnesota winter bicyclists, one's whole dick can get cold. Peninsular structures are dead ringers for freezing solid and falling off. Very inconvenient, Yes, foot binding is bad. Read about it in The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, about Gladys Aylward, a Foot Inspector. Apparently it was done to make young girls sit still and work all day at boring tasks like weaving, which families sold for income. Economics again. Without foot binding, the young women would have jumped out of their stockings and devastated the countryside (per Ambrose Bierce, Devil's Dictionary).

And how do you know, anyway, that circumcision isn't traumatic?

I didn't really mark out an aristocracy of suffering. — Bitter Crank

Yeah, you kinda did. And I think it trivializes this discussion.

Off topic, but I love this shit-stirring Bridget person. She is hilarious without trying.

She stirs the pot with the most triggering controversial topic to date and gets the fuck out of the way.

She has not responded to one post. She's hilarious and I'm really laughing.

Condemnation of homosexuality is also an aspect of patriarchal thinking. Is that also a thing of the past?

If patriarchy was a real thing, it is still in business. But things have changed quite a bit in this country, and in many other countries--not everywhere however. If maybe 50% - 60% of Americans are now tolerant of homosexuality, 40% to 50% are not reconciled with gay marriage, gay adoption, and certainly not gays lurking in dark parks doing unspeakable things. The percentages of people in many other countries who are tolerant is smaller than in the US or Europe.

One of the ideas that some gay liberation thinkers developed in the 1970s was that gay men and gay women were separate cases, in terms of oppression. Gay men were a psychological affront to straight men--not because straight men all feared they themselves were homosexual, but because gay men failed to fulfill the collective social expectations for men. A lot of straight women also thought that gay men were failures.

Gay men didn't have all the burdens that straight men had to put up with in the typical marriage --supporting one's wife and a bunch of whining, crying, sick, shitting, vomiting children, commuting to a fucking job, all sorts of social demands, no time of one's own, etc., etc., etc. Gay men were objects of disgust, displeasure, and hatred (jealousy?)--in the same way that anti-war protestors, hippies, communists, and so forth were objects of loathing and hatred by "red-blooded American men and women". All these deviant people were disgracefully shirking their sex-linked responsibilities. (And they might unforgivably have been having more fun.).

As a consequence, gay men had been coming in for a much more severe social repression than gay women did. Homosexuals besmirched the reputations of real, red-blooded men. That's serious business.

The situation for lesbians was asymmetrical. Men weren't very upset with lesbianism for three reasons: A) lesbianism didn't have anything to do with masculinity; B) whatever women were doing with each other just wasn't very important. Lesbian sex was sex between unimportant people. C) an unknown percentage of men found lesbian sex titillating. They were less subject to social condemnation because their lives were peripheral to start with.

Lesbianism seems to be more challenging to heterosexual women than heterosexual men (in general; whether this is still true, not sure).

I'm not a big fan of patriarchal theory, so my opinion is biased. I blame capitalism for a lot of our problems. Capitalism and Christianity. But all that has changed too. It isn't that Capitalism has become humanized, and most people are finding fulfillment in their work--fulfilling Luther's view that all work is holy, whether it's the work of a farmer, a miner, or a priest.

No indeedy. The extractive, efforts and alienating effects of capitalists haven't softened up one bit. It's just that Europeans, Americans, and maybe 1/2 billion middle-class people in China, India, South America, and middle east petro-states are not currently the subjects of crude value extraction. The curse of profit weighs most heavily now upon the backs of lower working class Chinese, Vietnamese, Bangladeshis, Indians, Pakistanis, Jordanians, Mexicans, Brazilians, and so forth. The Folks Who Live on the Hill, the well-off Americans, Germans, Chinese, Japanese, Indians, etc. still have to produce, but it's managerial work and idea production. Idea work can be pretty tedious, too, of course. The primary purpose of the middle class is to work enough to afford to consume all the peripheral products that are being turned out, from fast fashion (that falls apart after a few wearings) to the latest gadget.

"Hey, you middle-class parasites: if you don't earn enough to buy all this crap into the foreseeable future, then the economy crashes and you crash along with it. So, let's see a little enthusiasm for that Octoberfest White Sale!!!"

Not all men are they way you've described some. Not all females are like you either
— creativesoul

I didn't say they were. So what's your point? — Artemis

You made a universal claim about men. It is universal because all men qualify for the criterion you used.

Men.

I'm all for creating a system which leads to all people being treated equally. One in which more people share in the same sorts of accumulated advantages that some men have long since been the beneficiaries thereof.

Some men.

Some men have never had such privileges afforded to them. Some men have been given the same shortest straw by the same people... some men. If our path forward does not include more opportunities for the male who has not reaped the benefits of this idea that has become a movement aimed at all men, based upon just the fact that some men do bad stuff, then these men will be essentially punished for the sins/crimes/trespasses of other people simply because they all share the same name.

"Men".

If you judge all men solely by virtue of being men, then you're assuming that they have something in common aside from just sharing the namesake. That is a mistake that many racists make as well. Making the mistake does not make you a racist. Rather, it makes you both guilty of gross overgeneralization.

Some men have not done the things you've said counted as men protecting women.

Some of these men(arguably most) are all for promoting women's rights. That doesn't mean that we have to agree with everything that every women says. That doesn't mean that we cannot add value to the movement towards women's rights.

The impending possible challenges to Roe v. Wade are startling though. Clearly planned systematic elimination of the only place all women can afford regarding their health concerns and/or feminine needs.

Shameful way to take away the ability for some women to realize the results of using their rights. It is a woman's right to decide what is done to her body. That right ought be afforded to everyone. All to whom it's afforded should be able to use it. Eliminating all the places for them to use it is to take away their ability to use their rights. The notion becomes empty. You have the right, but... we have made sure that you cannot use and/or benefit from using it.

Imagine a snarky receptionist...

Well... technically... you do have the right to terminate an unwanted pregnancy, unfortunately you'll have to travel to another state because new regulations put into place somehow made all the former places no longer qualify. Existing walls too narrow to meet our new criterion for what size halls were needed. We determined this by whatever was larger than what you currently have. No grandfather clause to speak of.

Ex post facto.

Isn't it wrong to punish someone for having a hallway that is too small for current standards even though that same hall has been well used for decades prior? Upon what reasonable ground does a governmental agency employ new standards to be met by everyone in such cases? Sorry, we know that you're one of the few places that women in this area can exercise and/or use their right to end an unwanted pregnancy, or acquire birth control but... from this date forward, in order to do that it has to be done within a building that has bigger hallways than yours.

How on earth does this not qualify for being illegal?

Someone on a state level decides to eliminate all the places for women to use the rights recently afforded to them after long hard struggles. Are you f***ing kidding me?

Homosexuals besmirched the reputations of real, red-blooded men. That's serious business. — Bitter Crank

Dale Martin, Yale New Testament scholar, says that male homosexual sex was abhorrent because it defied the God-given order of male dominance. So yes, it was interpreted as weakness, but by virtue of that weakness, it was sin.

I agree that capitalism has the potential to be an equalizer. A strong-willed English woman comes to the US, marries a weak man because she has to in order to engage in business, and subsequently becomes a regional power house. True story. In some cases capitalism can benefit a member of an oppressed class more than any government intervention has.

Still: why don't gay politicians come out more often than they do (especially conservative ones)? Patriarchy. They want to be electable.

Maybe it's an academic take on patriarchy that you object to?

You made a universal claim about men. It is universal because all men qualify for the criterion you used. — creativesoul

I did not. You just wish I was the strawperson you're trying to make me out to be.