To clarify, this is the critique behind my initial post, which proved somewhat controversial:
I. Mainstream #feminism today tends to see “patriarchy” everywhere and (consistent with that view) focuses almost solely on issues affecting more women than men, and on differences of outcome where women seem to do worse than men.
II. Definition of #patriarchy (in bold, my emphasis):
“Social system in which the father or a male elder has absolute authority over the family group; by extension, one or more men […] exert absolute authority over the community as a whole.”
— Britannica.
“Social organization marked by the supremacy of the father in the clan or family, the legal dependence of wives and children, and the reckoning of descent and inheritance in the male line.”
“Society in which the oldest male is the leader of the family, or a society controlled by men in which they use their power to their own advantage.”
— Cambridge English Dictionary.
III. According to normal definitions of the term (and also because there are important issues affecting more men than women, and differences of outcome where men are clearly doing worse than women) prosperous liberal democratic countries today are obviously not patriarchies.
IV. When confronted with this error, #feminists often bend and distort the definition of “patriarchy” to make it a synonym of “sexism”, and (consistent with that redefinition) say that the patriarchy is also hurting men, and that ending the patriarchy will benefit men, too.
V. That redefinition of “patriarchy” is unnecessary and confusing. Why conflate two words with very very different meanings? Can we then say that the Taliban and the old tribes of hunter-gatherers were merely “sexist”, instead of outright “patriarchal”? Should we then lump together under the same category truly retrograde societies where a few old men are the only people legally entitled to exert absolute authority and to inherit and all women are legally subservient, and extremely egalitarian 21st-century Sweden? The redefinition is (conscious or unconsciously) disingenuous.
VI. In spite of all those issues, bona fide #feminists often accept this bizarre framing for the sake of moving the conversation forward and making actual progress against sexism, naïvely assuming that finally we are all now talking about the same thing (ie, fighting sex-based discrimination, wherever it occurs).
VII. After making this concession, inevitably it so happens that the original denouncers of the patriarchy get back to focusing only on issues affecting more women than men, and on differences of outcome where women do worse than men — ignoring or dismissing all male issues, just as before.
VIII. The result is that all participants in the discussion have now agreed that our modern, developed, equal-under-the-law societies are patriarchies (I invite you to re-read the three definitions above) while at the same time having made zero progress against actual sexism of any kind. In fact, participants make negative progress, because this swallowing-the-patriarchy move generates a lot of guilt and resentment.
I find this recurrent pattern dishonest, counterproductive, and irritating.
If that’s your takeaway, I must have done a really bad job at explaining myself.
What does “not all men” even mean?
Which of the steps in my argument do you disagree with, and why?
@tripu You did.
Step III says: "According to normal definitions of the term (and also because there are important issues affecting more men than women, and differences of outcome where men are clearly doing worse than women) prosperous liberal democratic countries today are obviously not patriarchies."
And yet, if we were to device a series of observational tests which ask, "What structure would patriarchal societies take?" we'd find a lot of positive results.
@tripu For example, we'd find that women's labor is devalued compared to men's labor, and we'd find a sharp divide in what's "acceptable" and "preferable" for the sexes to execute on.
@tripu You also cherrypick a specific set of dictionary senses that paint "Patriarchy" as exclusively a Handmaid's Tale. It's abnormal
E.g., Wikipedia offers: "Patriarchy is associated with a set of ideas, a patriarchal ideology that acts to explain and justify this dominance and attributes it to inherent natural differences between men and women. "
And...
@tripu The American Heritage Dictionary offers:
The American heritage dictionary offers: " A family, community, or society based on this system or governed by men."
Dictionary.com offers: "a social system in which power is held by men, through cultural norms and customs that favor men and withhold opportunity from women"
In these senses, which are more structural and less prescriptive, it's quite easy to find metrics demonstrating many societies have patriarchal principles.
@tripu "bona fide #feminists often accept this bizarre framing for the sake of moving the conversation forward and making actual progress against sexism"
Then you follow by attempting to "both sides" the issue saying that sexism affects both men and women. While obviously and trivially true, you then argue that the only way to address any injustice in systemic sexism is to attack *all* sexism. But this is a ludicrous proposition that I doubt you actually agree with in broad strokes.
@tripu For example, FIre Safety is most effective when practiced preventatively on all homes and locales.
But if there is a fire, you don't spray water around uniformly. You direct the water to the houses currently on fire, with a preference for saving lives.
Your argument is tantamount to saying that we should rob resources from firefighting to fund fire prevention, which is obviously a losing strategy during a fire.
Finally:
“You then argue that the only way to address any injustice in systemic sexism is to attack *all* sexism. But this is a ludicrous proposition that I doubt you actually agree with in broad strokes.”
Of course I think we should “attack all sexism”. How could it be otherwise? Don’t you want to combat “all” racism, “all” violence, “all” disinformation…?
What I have never said is that all manifestations of sexism are equal in importance, or equally pressing — or that both sexes suffer sexism in the same degree. Now, that would be a ludicrous proposition.
For instance: I think we all should put resources towards the eradication of (and speak out loudly against) #FGM, honour killings (mostly female), child soldiers (mostly male), any discrimination in the law on the basis of sex (eg, monarchies extending exclusively in the male-line, military draft for males only), oppressive social norms that still prevent girls from getting and education and a job and becoming independent… — we need to focus much more on all that, before tackling customisable pronouns everywhere, cultural abuse towards introverted male nerds, dress codes, accurate parity in parliaments or shareholders’ meetings, redesigning all iconography in public spaces to make it fully inclusive, etc.
If that’s where we disagree, I can easily clarify that misunderstanding, and I’m glad that our views are actually closer than it seemed.
You say that I “cherrypick a specific set of dictionary senses” for the term “patriarchy”, and offer three alternative definitions that supposedly “are more structural and less prescriptive”.
The problem is, you are cherrypicking even more, since none of the quotations you cite are listed as the first meaning, or appear in the first paragraph of those sources. This is not irrelevant in the context of our discussion, because the first entries in those dictionaries, and the first sentence in that encyclopedia, all give a very specific and prescriptive definition.
These are all the first entries/sentences from your own sources, verbatim (in bold, my emphasis):
👉 Wikipedia:
“Patriarchy is a social system in which men hold primary power and predominate in roles of political leadership, moral authority, social privilege and control of property.”
👉 American Heritage Dictionary:
“1. A social system in which the father is the head of the family. 2. Dominance of a society by men, or the values that uphold such dominance.”
“A form of social organization in which the father is the supreme authority in the family, clan, or tribe and descent is reckoned in the male line, with the children belonging to the father’s clan or tribe.”
“If we were to device a series of observational tests which ask, ‘what structure would patriarchal societies take?’ we’d find a lot of positive results.”
“Structure” is too vague a term, but I like this general idea. 👍 I agree that this would be a useful heuristic to “test for” #patriarchy.
To avoid biases, the experiment would have to be conducted having fixed, ex-ante, a few parameters and criteria. Otherwise, results could be interpreted to support pretty much any hypothesis.
In that spirit, here I suggest some improvements:
1️⃣ How many of those “structures” must exist for a society to qualify as “patriarchal”? ie, what if we find just two or three of those structures? or, what if we find many, but most of them are of low importance, or circumscribed to very specific areas of life?
2️⃣ For the sake of consistency, we should also ask “what structure would patriarchal societies NOT take?”, and test for that, too. Positive findings here would weaken our confidence in the hypothesis, namely that the society being examined is indeed “patriarchal”.
3️⃣ All participants in the test should commit to considering any conceivable aspect of life or measure of well-being as supportive of the patriarchy hypothesis iff statistically women do worse than men on average. And conversely, any area where statistically men do worse than women on average contributes to undermine the hypothesis. This is to proscribe the insidious sleight of hand of explaining that women on average earn less money than their male colleagues because “men exert power and control in society”, and also that boys on average fail school more often than their female classmates… because “men exert power and control in society” (!).
WDYT? Agree on the terms before conducting the “experiment”?
@tripu care to actually address my points instead of tagging me in your continued BS?
Meanwhile let me spoon-feed you the meaning of the word and what it is commonly associated with in this context:
In which definition that you yourself are quoting here did you read the word country? Countries are not patriarchies? What are you even talking about? Patriarchy is a culture and it is wide spread in all modern societies. Men are considered superior in pretty much every relevant activity, and more often than not assume leadership roles, be it families, neighborhoods, corporation, governments or whatever other organizations. Woman are objectified and assigned intrinsic value, while men are expandable, unworthy unless proven otherwise. This stems form the most basic notions of patriarchy, that at some point in the past were (and to some degree today are) objective reality due to natural selection:
“Women are incubators, hence intrinsically valuable as long as they stay incubators and don’t veer from that path, and men are not worthy of life unless proven loyal and otherwise useful, since intrinsically they pose a competition for ownership of the incubators”. This is the culture that men as rulers establish, and once it is established it is supported by men and women alike. In modern societies you can only hear distant echoes of this blatant truth, but it doesn’t take a genius to put the two and two together.
Your points seemed all very confusing to me. And you did not argue against any of mine, specifically. But I’ll try to answer. I hope you’ll reciprocate.
@tripu Reading your material, it really seems like the entire thrust of it is, "Not all men, don't say it's all men."
Which doesn't seem like a novel or useful contribution to the conversation.