"Matriarchy Now"
I used to jog along the Yarra, as the path winds between the paddocks of the Collingwood childrens farm (a farm targeted at child visitors, not where children are farmed), on my way under the Studley Park bridge over to Dights Falls. I used to look up at one of these bridges, I'm 80% confident it was the Studley Park bridge, and see a large piece of hastily painted graffiti that read quite legibly 'Matriarchy Now'.
Mentally I react in a way to such a prompt in a manner that is probably described as best as I can assume, as closed minded. But every time I ran under that bridge and saw this bit of graffiti, it prompted within me the question 'I wonder what that looks like?' which is to say, I tried to entertain the idea of living in a matriarchy and create in my imagination how a matriarchy would differ from a patriarchy.
Mostly, this would stir me to ponder on why Absolute Monarchies, were so much more effective at putting Women at the top of the hierarchy, than post suffrage Democracies. Queen Elizabeth I, Mary Queen of Scots, Queen Victoria, Catherine the Great, Queen Lili'uokalani, does Cleopatra count? Does the dowager Empress count? Nero's mother?
Then I hit that stumbling block, which was eventually answered by an episode of Qi (for scholars of Chinese unfamiliar with BBC programming it's pronounced 'Cue-eye' not 'Chi'), where the question posed was one with no answer: 'name a matriarchal society', for which apparently to the satisfaction of Qi research standards, the consensus is there has never been one in human history. No anthropologist, archaeologist or historian has stumbled across evidence of a matriarchal society, let alone a matriarchal society.
Which is to say, according to Qi, Queen Elizabeth I, Mary, Queen Vic etc. were functionally female patriarchs, or female's presiding over patriarchies.
Of course, part of the problem and why it perhaps took me years to even get my thoughts to the last two paragraphs is because the language is so widely used and so ill defined.
Etymologically, Patriarchy comes from Greek and means something like 'rule of the father'. Historically 'The' Patriarchy was an explicit ruling body of patricians (aristocrats) tempered by the plebians in ongoing disputes between the Roman Monarchy and Roamn Empire where Rome operated an Oligarchic Republic.
But I don't believe that when people refer to 'the patriarchy' or prefix an assertion with 'because the patriarchy' they are believing in a deep state of surviving aristocrat descendants from pre-imperial Rome.
I instigated an argument, or at the very least very fragmented conversation(s) by remarking to a friend 'when people say "because the patriarchy" I don't know what the fuck they are talking about.' That in sober hindsight as an introduction to a topic is quite an emotive way to present my query that lends itself to an interpretation that I might be denying the phenomena of inequality between the sexes. So instead of getting a clarifying definition, I got an assertion about the gender pay-gap.
This caused confusion in me, because the existence of a pay gap is evidence of the existence of a pay gap, it neither defines a patriarchy nor is evidence of the existence of a patriarchy (that at this stage I still didn't know what it was, unless I inferred it is a synonym for pay gap, which it didn't occur to me to infer.)
At any rate, I made an inquiry a few days later with a different friend that defined sympathetic to my ignorance put it thusly:
When in doubt, Wikipedia:
Property rights are ultimately enforced by men. In which case, it's probably useful to define what it means to be 'in power'. On an individual basis I am a fan of the definition that power is the ability to act or do. On the basis of governance though power is the ability to enforce rights, especially property rights.
Economist Mark Blyth describes this power as the source of the eternal conflict, for [paraphrasing] whoever has the means to secure your property, also has the means to take it away. Hence you can get the wealthiest elite still having a distaste and distrust of the very body that actually enforces the recognition of their wealth. Think of China's capital flight, with China's wealthiest presumably chief benificiaries of the state sinking their money into property in popular property bubble destinations like Miami, London, Sydney and Melbourne, in order to put their wealth out of the reach of the power system that made them wealthy.
Interestingly, the historic Patriarchy, that is the oligarchical republic of pre-Imperial Rome, had expelled their last king, leaving a two-class struggle between the aristocrats (the patricians) and the small land owners (the plebeians). This is interesting because Machiavelli in his text 'The Prince' tends to divide up society into three entities - the prince, the nobles and the commonfolk.
The prince functions as a kind of 'uber noble' in that the prince is really just the most powerful noble, that would naturally pit the other nobles against the prince because that's who they have to overtake. The prince can pacify the nobles by sharing the wealth and keeping them happy, or neutralize them by being favored by the commonfolk such that an overthrow conspiracy would lead to popular uprising and other complex complicated game theory etc.
However, since I'm reasonably confident that when people refer to 'the patriarchy' they are almost certainly not referring to the time Rome had an oligarchy of landed gentry and no presiding absolute monarch. I won't try to summarize Machiavelli's dynamics here.
The same sparring partner that I set off with my careless 'wtf' much later described 'patriarchy' as a vague and nebulous term (paraphrasing) however I feel it is worse than just vague, it is probably misleading - because it suggests patriarchy is something being ubiquitously actively done.
When Hannah Gadsby in her Emmy winning Sydney Opera House recording of Nanette, makes an emotional appeal to men to 'pull their socks up.' or when Clementine Ford writes in her Op-ed following the rape and murder of another woman on the streets of Melbourne that Australian men (or perhaps Men everywhere) need to 'pick a side' I quite intuitively make an inference, unbidden that I feel confident would solicit a response 'that's not what I meant.'
My unbidden intuitive thought is 'so you're calling for patriarchy?' and allow me to elaborate. An easy way to wash your hands of the depressing statistics of men's violence against women (incidently Spanish has a specific and convenient word for this 'femicide') is to admit that you have little-to-no control over what other men do, largely because we aren't organized into a social system, we are a population that really struggles with quality control. Everyday I walk past dozens, to hundreds of men I have no idea who they are and absolutely no authority over.
The suggestion of patriarchy paints if not an idea an intuition of society wide organization, such that were I to walk into a dive bar at 2am on a wednesday and call out some men for making rape jokes, their retaliation would be tempered by an unconscious understanding that the patriarchal superstructure will produce repercussions.
My lived experience rather suggests, when I stick my nose into other mens business it is generally regarded as an act of hostility to varying degrees (depending on the level of interference and presumptiveness) is actually quite dangerous in a very real physical sense. Just as I would never recommend expressions of road rage, I would never recommend engaging strange men in an argument unless you feel an absolute categorical imperative to do so, and that I feel is very rare - that's man threatening to kill a woman on the street circumstances. And I don't feel in those cases the businessman and Dutch backpacker that lost their lives intervening were part of any patriarchal superstructure along with the perpetrator.
That's all by-the-by, call it a statement of my lived experience as a man. I raise this unbidden thought, because of what it reminds me of, and it reminds me of the mystery of conspiracy theorists.
Sure there's a whole spectrum of conspiracy theorists, but the specific ones that confuse me, are the ones that for example insist with confidence that 9-11 was an inside job, and that JFK was assassinated by some deep state not a lone gunman etc. What's curious is that these conspiracy theorists appear to hate said deep state and wish to expose them to be destroyed or something. They have ostensibly committed time and energy, if not their lives to the mission of destroying the conspirators, based on their profound belief that evidence suggests they exist.
Now if I walked across a person kneeling in prayer kissing a little crucifix they wore around their neck and said 'good news my buddy-pal, there's absolutely no evidence to suggest your God exists, you can stand on up and get on with your day.' I would absolutely understand why they would not be thrilled to have their faith questioned. My impression is they quite like the entity they choose to believe in. On the contrary, Conspiracy-theorists often claim to hate the reptillian lizards, or Jewish communist bankers, or secret government agents they believe exist, so they should be not only reassured by 'good news buddy, there's absolutely no evidence to suggest 9-11 was an inside job!' but motivated to believe that themselves. Or namely seek to disconfirm whatever conspiracy hypothesis.
There is however, a seemingly easy reconciliation between adamant belief in a God you profess to hate. That is, the idea that nobody is actually in charge (chaos) is much more distressing, than the thought that someone bad is in charge and making bad things happen.
It's expressed quite well in this passage from here:
Thus for me, this was about the time I felt strange desires to actually 'join the conversation' because I would actually be interested in a conversation on this question. However I remain not agnostic, but skeptical that 'join the conversation' is actually an invitation to 'learn the orthodoxy.'
What's 'this' question? It's not the question of whether the Patriarchy exists or not, but the question of 'How efficient is the Patriarchy.' It was inspired by this poem I saw posted by someone on facebook.
It got me thinking about this question of efficiency. Would it be by symmetry, equally valid to say:
I woke up and it was oppression. I looked in the cupboard and it was oppression. I made breakfast and it was oppression. I rode my bike to work and it was oppression. At work I asked a question of my manager and it was oppression. I expressed an opinion on procedure and it was oppression. I ate lunch alone and it was oppression. I handled a customer complaint and it was oppression. etc.
Christopher Hitchens' in his twilight years was fully engaged with attacking the religious crowd as a self-described anti-theist. He kept using this word to describe religious belief as 'solipsistic and I'm reasonably confident he meant it in the 'self-absorbed' sense. An assumption that the creator of the universe is specifically interested in them.
Because the vague and nebulous Patriarchy suggests a social system, it at least by my possibly flawed interpretation suggests or leads one to infer systematic oppression. I get interested in the question of how efficient the patriarchy is, because I do not wake up every day occupied with thoughts on how I can retard women's ability to compete with me for resources and esteem and dignity. It's not quite true that I don't think about oppressing women (I'll come to this later), but I don't think about oppressing women in any capacity where I desire to oppress women.
So it seems to me, that my membership too, and participation in the patriarchy is really efficient, because I can just go about my day introspecting on whatever cooking a meal and doing some drawings, and bingo bango, women are oppressed. It's an effortless regime, a bi-product of me and billions of men like me going about our day without a thought spared to oppressing women.
If you have read thus far, you will be unsurprised I am confident, to learn if you are hearing of it for the first time, that I don't identify as a feminist, and haven't for over a decade. I used to tell people I was a feminist back in the early 2000s, before I realized it costs men quite literally nothing to declare themselves a feminist, and if it costs nothing to say you are, then it costs nothing to say you aren't. I've been testing that hypothesis for over a decade and thus far, it has cost me nothing to not be a feminist. I also feel it is more honest to say I am not, because I feel, if tested I would prove myself unwilling to make any sacrifices for the cause.
Lesser in importance but more relevant though, to the efficiency of the Patriarchy, is that I cannot sign on to feminism as currently manifested or at least represented by my online peer-group, because it is the antithesis of the advice of my historic mentors I admire, here's a sample:
However it really is a recurring theme, going back to Classical times with the Romans and Greeks through to not just fictitious characters like Rocky Balboa (a character created by a man who was sleeping inside the New York Port Authority bus station, and took a role in a porno out of desperation) but is reflected in the autobiography of Joshua Waitzkin, who describes competing in a Tai-Chi tournament where the event was systematically rigged against him as an outsider or out-group member, and his need to simply accept the unfairness and work within it to win the world championship.
I mention all this, because when I do think about oppressing women and entertain the idea of being the patriarch or patrician hell-bent on keeping women down, it is earnestly hard for me to conceive of a better means of oppression than contemporary radical feminism.
Because 'the Patriarchy' is not just vague and nebulous in so far as it doesn't refer to a formal system of sexist oppression. It suggests with some solipsism that there is a conspiracy to oppress women. Which means women are taught, unlike the recipient of Abe's advice to a young man, to suspect constantly that close to half the population are actively trying to hinder them. It encourages blame and excuses (two of the four popular and intuitive means of avoiding responsibility) contrary to stoic philosophy, and this is important - stoic philosophy encourages a practice of dispensing with blame altogether even in situations where there may be someone legitimate to blame, because they still view it as unproductive. And just using the last of my example samples, it encourages a notion that 'the patriarchy' must be 'smashed' to achieve their ends, rather than Rocky's granite jaw advice that it's about getting hit hard and moving forward.
If (without unpacking representation) toxic masculinity is teaching men to be resilient and responsible (whether responses are good or bad) and teaching women non-toxically that they never get a fair shake and to appeal constantly to the responsibility of men. I would bet that outcomes will favor men.
There are other means by which I'd opine that modern radical feminism as functionally oppressive to women, but I lack the energy and inclination to substantiate these opinions, aside from mentioning that through doing courses like Gender Studies, or Womens Studies and whatever other social sciences it may have reached into, it creates another gap whereby bright women have a significant contingent of their population syphoned off into the depressing effort of studying their own oppression, while a much smaller population of straight men will engage in these studies that are less depressing for them, but the greater population of men may pursue courses with higher financial and social standing payoffs. Perhaps a form of being oppressed compounds, because you are intuitively compelled to fixate on your oppression leaving your oppressors free to compound their privilege.
The big risk though, is trying to smash a system that just isn't there. Which isn't to say the disparities don't exist, nor that the sexism doesn't exist, but that it isn't a system that can be dismantled. With or without the masters' tools.
If the patriarchy is generally, as efficient as my experience of it has been, where, to be an efficient oppressor requires less instruction than a drivers learner's permit, almost no quality control or refresher courses, and recruitment and replacement can be done lazily if not negligibly, and smashing it requires reading a whole paragraph of Judith Butler or more. Then smashing the patriarchy would prove a significant exception to the general principle of entropy.
Whilst I do not describe myself as a feminist, I am not anti-the project of feminism. Certainly the media (including social) treatment of former PM Julia Gillard certainly established as fact a latent misogyny out there in the Australian public. I worked in a call center during this time representing a Government department and the Gillard years were particularly illuminating as to how many people actually read and believed what the tabloid news reported.
However, should 'the patriarchy' be a short hand for 'outcomes favor men' then I am not a denier of the existence of the patriarchy. But it seems by the wikipedia page, one of the defining traits of the patriarchy is to explain that disparity as natural, which is my question on the efficiency by another name.
I just, when I think on it, and reconcile it with my lived experience. Here's what I'd expect should the Patriarchy be inefficient, which is to say, it required concerted effort and energy to sustain, men had to be systemically taught toxic masculinity etc. I would have expected that history would substantiate from the many isolated communities, a society that was actually matriarchal - in at least something approaching 50 per cent of isolated communities. Instead it's zero, zero cases in history. That's in West Papua, on Easter Island, throughout the Amazons, in hunter gatherer societies, the arctic circle, and the mysterious north sentinal islanders.
So efficient, that British and French Colonizers, and Spanish Conquistadors never came across a society where they had to impart and impose patriarchy. A fair coin was flipped and came up dicks every time, ever.
And I in no way, insist that that means there's a natural order that must be maintained forever more. Rather the means of transgressing what appears to largely be a spontaneous system of oppression are just now arriving at our disposal. Namely that technology renders masculinity readily redundant.
And so, perhaps wearily we return to the prospect of 'matriarchy now' there is a context in which I believe matriarchies do exist, namely in terms of female social hierarchies. Of which I know very little on the near side of nothing, and understand even less.
It would seem that the main thing that sustains the patriarchy is recourse to violence, and that in turn appears to render, for men, a thorough understanding of female social hierarchies somewhat redundant to the goals of climbing the male hierarchy.
But I suspect many a sensitive and reflective man, whom has been given the opportunity to live alongside women's social systems has at some point reflected on how women treat each other, and expressed to the heavens 'thank god we fight... because the shit women do to women...'
If women's homosocial behavior (that is, socializing with the same sex) is indicative of what life would be like under the matriarchy, it casts doubt for me at least, as to whether it would be better. I am very biased I should disclose, to mental health outcomes because I believe fundamentally that our mental health is the prism through which we perceive everything else.
There's also a degree to which I suspect we may have in some social bubbles achieved 'matriarchy now' and this of all things was inspired by watching Ol' Dirty Bastard's film clip for 'Shimmy Shimmy Ya' it was quite random but there's a refrain within it where ODB is saying 'would the n*s that know me tell them who the fuck I be.' and 'would the women that know me tell them who the fuck I be.'
The thought that arrived was 'this is a good example of masculine aggression' which largely manifests as the assertion that you can do what you like and others are dared to stop you. In short 'get the fuck out of my way!' is masculine aggression.
By contrast I would describe feminine aggression as 'get the fuck back in line.' which is to say, it's about preventing deviation from the party line and promoting conformity.
By the way, I just use my own working definition of masculine and feminine as such - masculine consists of behaviors that reward in game theoretic ways the production of small sex cells. feminine describes behaviors that pay off in game theoretic ways the production of large sex cells.
I don't think these behaviors are mutually exclusive, I just feel the descriptors as useful to talk about tendencies. And certainly 'should' doesn't come into the equation.
I suspect we may have started living in a matriarchal society, because we've become less social. Social media as a mediator of social standing, leaves no recourse to physical violence, so it is defacto feminine aggression, a matriarchy, social media behavior is about behaving so as not to deviate and get ostracized, and people while addicted, don't appear to be big fans of social media, particularly platforms like facebook. Cyber-bullying appears also to be somewhat of an issue.
Again to testify to my lived experience, my intuitions of male homo-social hierarchies are somewhat of a bell-curve. The men at the bottom are very isolated. In the meaty part of the curve the middle, the men are quite sociable and then at the top of the hierarchy those men are also quite isolated. Such that what I call feminine aggression - get the fuck in line is not something particularly foreign to men, because in the middle of the hierarchy you don't have much recourse to 'get the fuck out of my way' but 'get the fuck back in line' is something you can only say down the hierarchy, not up the hierarchy. It doesn't work on the top tier males.
I suspect and this is moving into speculations, women only get to operate in male hierarchies at a remove from intervention by males, eg. say in a women's prison, women emerge that don't care about ostracism because they can shank anyone who talks shit about them. (Aisha Robinson's story arc in Cobra Kai is perhaps a good if fictitious example of a woman moving from being subject to feminine aggression to employing masculine aggression and transforming the female high school hierarchy she lived within via a front wedgie.)
In the natural world, where sexual dimorphism favors women (large sex cell producers) such as in Spiders and Angler fish and what not, maybe these indicate life under a matriarchy, in which case by a veil of ignorance test would result in a net loss for our offspring should men be relegated to nothing more than sperm delivery systems and no other specialized roles to play in civilization.
One of the most problematic parts of the Patriarchy as conspiracy theory, is that it presumes I am invested in oppressing any of my female offspring, given that when I reproduce I have a fairly even chance of producing female heirs of my genes. Now without getting bogged down in why patrilinial inheritence is much more popular historically than matrilinial ones, because we now live in modernity. Where there is a declining birthrate there logically is less incentive to create and sustain a system that oppresses women, from any analytical perspective.
It also I suspect helps explain why absolute monarchies were better at putting women in the top job than democratic societies.
I'm actually not sure a matriarchy can exist, now or until such a time as sexual dimorphism has been neutralized. Because until such a time, it requires basically a universal and voluntary participation by men, and even strictly speaking if it requires voluntary participation, that might still technically be a patriarchy since in-group rights are ultimately enforced by the choices of men.
By contrast, it seems fundamental to any definition of the Patriarchy, that permits it to exist, there is no stipulation women voluntarily participate (though I'm sure whatever and however their patriarchy works, there are female participants/in oppressing women, for example the women who make a career of make-up tutorials online doing the work of reinforcing expensive beauty standards, or as alluded to early radical feminists may be significant enforcers of patriarchy).
There's just a couple of basic asymmetries that draw me back though, to the null hypothesis that the inequity of our society is socially constructed.
The first assymetry regards post-modernism/post-structuralism etc. revealed by the Sokal affair and Sokal squared, and to a lesser extent, reverse-turing machines that can procedurally generate post modernist writing (therefore proving it unintelligent). If you are unfamiliar it's basically just that various academics have made up bullshit papers and submitted them to social science journals and had them published. Including one with excerpts from Mein Kampf with word replacements.
These mean-spirited hoaxes were undertaken with the intent to expose the epistemic problems with what the instigators regard as fake academia, or in plainer language plain bullshit. These efforts were criticized however, by the social sciences as revealing nothing as you could do it with any field of inquiry.
Alas, to my knowledge it remains to be seen whether someone with no formal training in physics or one of the other hard sciences could make up bullshit research and write a bullshit paper and get it published. The counter hoax may be underway as I write this, but as of this writing a successful ridiculing of physics is yet to be revealed.
It appears, that you can't just make up a physics or engineering paper and get it published, in a reputable journal or otherwise. This has been demonstrated to not be the case with much of the critical theories.
That asymmetry makes me question the notion of a matriarchy, and whether radical feminism is in fact an unwitting reinforcer of the patriarchy because you have the patriarchy falling back on quite robust epistemology in a few domains (economics is populated with a lot of political economy bullshit and quite corrupt, psychology has it's own extensive replication crisis etc.) whereas the other is a field defined by a quite porous epistemology, a set of assertions that near as my explorations and engagement can discern are an elaborate and energy intensive way to permit oneself to believe whatever one wants, with perhaps at it's foundation an assertion that there is no public domain and no objective facts.
Objective facts bring me to the second asymmetry inspired by the phenomena of women's only subway carriages. Shelving for the purpose of brevity all issues of trans-rights and gender fluidity and gender identity, the Tokyo Subway system to combat sexual harassment and assault incidents happening on rush hour trains, began to designate women only carriages. Mexico city also has sections of train platforms dedicated to Women and children only (Mujeres y Ninos).
Now imagine if you are a woman, or being a woman sitting on one of these carriages and a shady man steps on (again just shelving all of the TIQ questions of how one can discern another person's gender) by what degree do you have to outnumber one creepy man in order to feel safe? 10-1? 30-1? 100-1? I imagine but can't know that it probably isn't a matter of sheer numbers but something more akin to how many women do you have to have between you and the shady man to feel safe? That the woman standing next to him is not necessarily reassured that there are a hundred other women behind her.
On the flipside, were I to find myself suddenly stepping onto a carriage populated only by women, I might feel embarassed, confused and wondering whether I was in the wrong place, perhaps even a bit worried that I might have to explain my error to the cops, but not fundamentally unsafe. Were I sitting on a carriage and a predatory woman boarded it, the numerical advantage question would probably be answered somewhere between one on one to 3-1 odds, depending on the build and psychological stability of the woman. And yes, predatory women do exist, I have had the displeasure and misfortune to have been thrown in working situations with such in the course of my life, and they make me nervous and guarded but rarely do they make me feel physically unsafe. They engage my reputation management instincts.
So that asymmetry is the fox in the henhouse vs hen in the foxhouse aspect of sexual dimorphism. Yeah Ronda Rhosey could kick my arse, there's plenty of taller women than me and some ethnic populations produce women that on statistical average can kick my arse. But in terms of smashing the patriarchy and implementing a matriarchy, it would appear that to do so would require the permission of the patriarchy.
And if the patriarchy isn't just self-governing, but actually self-perpetuating and self-sustaining because it lacks a head one can cut off so the body dies. Hmmm...
Consider the Monty Hall Problem, my go to example for where people's intuitions reliably fail them. It is a counter intuitive problem that is the basis I am fairly confident for Deal or No Deal to be financially viable. (and possibly a class action suit against Andrew O'Keefe for making false and misleading statements.) The point of which is people en masse can reliably be exploited by the Monty Hall problem by reliably miscalculating the probabilities. In the case of Deal or No Deal, getting down to 2 cases and thinking they have a 50/50 chance of winning the major cash prize, when in truth it's actually a 1/28 chance of winning the major cash prize.
I couldn't guess what proportion of the population actually understands the Monty Hall problem, but I suspect it may be less than 1%. The relevance is that nobody has to be taught 'toxic probability' to get the Monty Hall Problem wrong, we generally have to be taught to get it right, and I personally fought the conclusion with my intuitions all the way.
What I find interesting is the motivated use of language, for one example why use the term 'privilege' rather than 'advantage' even though they are somewhat synonyms? I suspect by my own intuitions that privilege conveys a sense of being gifted an advantage, that it isn't intrinsic or otherwise earned. Whereas advantage carries with it some baggage of superiority. Eg. moving from 'Love' to 'Advantage' in Tennis. Similarly why is their almost no discussion of 'disadvantage' in much of my social bubbles discourse?
I am left with an impression that there is no disadvantage, just oppression. There's a necessity for some reason to believe that the way the world is is arbitrary, and therefore subject to rearbitration. Curiously, Labor studies have long produced regression analysis that the best predictor of corporate success is height (contrary to whatever Jordan Peterson says). I am completely bang on average in height for men, and thus at a disadvantage in the corporate world for ever making it to CEO. Though little discussed, should I become a CEO I would have beaten the odds, considerably.
However, it would only be oppression in my opinion if the talligarchy made promotion consideration dependant on 'who can get the can from the top shelf fastest' and performance evaluations consisted of 'describe the top of the fridge in as much detail and as accurately as possible.'
I don't believe we are taught to revere, trust and follow tall people. It appears to be a more innate quirk of human psychology, perhaps instinctive heuristics, perhaps failings like embodied cognition - our penchant for thinking in metaphors we aren't aware of... but did the expression 'to look up to' drive our error in revering someone for being tall, or did a long history of following taller people generate the expression?
At 5'9" I am taller than roughly 50% of the male US population, but taller than probably some 60% of the female population of the US (with average height of 5'4") I don't know what the standard deviation is, but if height truly is a robust predictor of corporate success, to the point that it renders factors like education, qualification and experience either nuetral or obsolete then women are simply at a clear disadvantage, and at no point in my life was I taught to revere tall people, regardless of how dumb their ideas are.
It would appear that the talligarchy is just something that gets spontaneously reinforced again and again in a reliable repetition of isolated impressions.
I don't know in a lot of cases the specific mechanics that might put women at disadvantages. However, I do know that the effects of even seemingly negligible differences and inequalities, can over repetition produce huge inequalities.
Nor do I, or would I ever deny that institutional sexism doesn't exist. My suspicion though is that this sexism is often post hoc rationalized rather than pre-meditated. Eg. you have some legacy where only men are doctors, a hangover from a time when there was no reliable birth control, and birth rates were much higher and pre-marital sex much lower in the stratas of society that could afford tertiary tuition, so the technological environment just meant that doctors were all men bar a few notable cross dressers and frontier medicine women.
Then as the environment changed and women went to school, the hangover of all male doctors started rationalizing reasons women couldn't be doctors, incentivized by a desire to not increase the level of competition between practicing doctors, and you have institutional sexism. But it doesn't require a grand conspiracy of masonic lodge masters coordinating to produce these institutions. these obscene errors are made all the time through the faulty wetware between all human ears.
I actually don't have a conclusion to go to, because even considering all these likelihoods, I can't conceive of a matriarchy, nor a credible threat to patriarchy. But to end on an optimistic note, I do know many women that someway somehow are perfectly equipped to navigate the patriarchy, whatever it is. The disadvantages are neutralized, and they are far more likely to be put in a position to oppress than to be oppressed. I love these women, they are some of my favorite people but seem to be largely ignored and invisible if privately admired by their peers. They seem to be quite quiet themselves suggesting that they are somewhat 'naturals' at life, having never occurred to them to navigate the world in any other way.
I try to do my part by occupying one of the lowest socio-economic tiers I can achieve. I would be bummed to discover I have simply been left out of all the patrician get togethers all my life because they don't like my nose.
Mentally I react in a way to such a prompt in a manner that is probably described as best as I can assume, as closed minded. But every time I ran under that bridge and saw this bit of graffiti, it prompted within me the question 'I wonder what that looks like?' which is to say, I tried to entertain the idea of living in a matriarchy and create in my imagination how a matriarchy would differ from a patriarchy.
Mostly, this would stir me to ponder on why Absolute Monarchies, were so much more effective at putting Women at the top of the hierarchy, than post suffrage Democracies. Queen Elizabeth I, Mary Queen of Scots, Queen Victoria, Catherine the Great, Queen Lili'uokalani, does Cleopatra count? Does the dowager Empress count? Nero's mother?
Then I hit that stumbling block, which was eventually answered by an episode of Qi (for scholars of Chinese unfamiliar with BBC programming it's pronounced 'Cue-eye' not 'Chi'), where the question posed was one with no answer: 'name a matriarchal society', for which apparently to the satisfaction of Qi research standards, the consensus is there has never been one in human history. No anthropologist, archaeologist or historian has stumbled across evidence of a matriarchal society, let alone a matriarchal society.
Which is to say, according to Qi, Queen Elizabeth I, Mary, Queen Vic etc. were functionally female patriarchs, or female's presiding over patriarchies.
Of course, part of the problem and why it perhaps took me years to even get my thoughts to the last two paragraphs is because the language is so widely used and so ill defined.
Etymologically, Patriarchy comes from Greek and means something like 'rule of the father'. Historically 'The' Patriarchy was an explicit ruling body of patricians (aristocrats) tempered by the plebians in ongoing disputes between the Roman Monarchy and Roamn Empire where Rome operated an Oligarchic Republic.
But I don't believe that when people refer to 'the patriarchy' or prefix an assertion with 'because the patriarchy' they are believing in a deep state of surviving aristocrat descendants from pre-imperial Rome.
I instigated an argument, or at the very least very fragmented conversation(s) by remarking to a friend 'when people say "because the patriarchy" I don't know what the fuck they are talking about.' That in sober hindsight as an introduction to a topic is quite an emotive way to present my query that lends itself to an interpretation that I might be denying the phenomena of inequality between the sexes. So instead of getting a clarifying definition, I got an assertion about the gender pay-gap.
This caused confusion in me, because the existence of a pay gap is evidence of the existence of a pay gap, it neither defines a patriarchy nor is evidence of the existence of a patriarchy (that at this stage I still didn't know what it was, unless I inferred it is a synonym for pay gap, which it didn't occur to me to infer.)
At any rate, I made an inquiry a few days later with a different friend that defined sympathetic to my ignorance put it thusly:
Patriarchy is shorthand for a social system that preferences men and 'masculinity' over women and 'femininity'. It's also prescriptive in the who and the how of these roles.At the time, I interpreted that as thus: 'Patriarchy is shorthand for a society in which inequality favors outcomes for men.' which would then make sense of why my admission that I was ignorant of what was being talked about generated a statement about the pay gap. Upon reflection, I actually find the above definition unintelligible, as in I'm still not sure what it is asserting.
When in doubt, 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. Some patriarchal societies are also patrilineal, meaning that property and title are inherited by the male lineage.That last sentence of which clarified another point of confusion when I watched that fateful episode of Qi, because I was aware that in Western Indonesia, there's a matrilinial culture, where men marry into the women's tribe/family and women inherit property along maternal lines or something. However these societies would still be considered patriarchal because...
Property rights are ultimately enforced by men. In which case, it's probably useful to define what it means to be 'in power'. On an individual basis I am a fan of the definition that power is the ability to act or do. On the basis of governance though power is the ability to enforce rights, especially property rights.
Economist Mark Blyth describes this power as the source of the eternal conflict, for [paraphrasing] whoever has the means to secure your property, also has the means to take it away. Hence you can get the wealthiest elite still having a distaste and distrust of the very body that actually enforces the recognition of their wealth. Think of China's capital flight, with China's wealthiest presumably chief benificiaries of the state sinking their money into property in popular property bubble destinations like Miami, London, Sydney and Melbourne, in order to put their wealth out of the reach of the power system that made them wealthy.
Interestingly, the historic Patriarchy, that is the oligarchical republic of pre-Imperial Rome, had expelled their last king, leaving a two-class struggle between the aristocrats (the patricians) and the small land owners (the plebeians). This is interesting because Machiavelli in his text 'The Prince' tends to divide up society into three entities - the prince, the nobles and the commonfolk.
The prince functions as a kind of 'uber noble' in that the prince is really just the most powerful noble, that would naturally pit the other nobles against the prince because that's who they have to overtake. The prince can pacify the nobles by sharing the wealth and keeping them happy, or neutralize them by being favored by the commonfolk such that an overthrow conspiracy would lead to popular uprising and other complex complicated game theory etc.
However, since I'm reasonably confident that when people refer to 'the patriarchy' they are almost certainly not referring to the time Rome had an oligarchy of landed gentry and no presiding absolute monarch. I won't try to summarize Machiavelli's dynamics here.
The same sparring partner that I set off with my careless 'wtf' much later described 'patriarchy' as a vague and nebulous term (paraphrasing) however I feel it is worse than just vague, it is probably misleading - because it suggests patriarchy is something being ubiquitously actively done.
When Hannah Gadsby in her Emmy winning Sydney Opera House recording of Nanette, makes an emotional appeal to men to 'pull their socks up.' or when Clementine Ford writes in her Op-ed following the rape and murder of another woman on the streets of Melbourne that Australian men (or perhaps Men everywhere) need to 'pick a side' I quite intuitively make an inference, unbidden that I feel confident would solicit a response 'that's not what I meant.'
My unbidden intuitive thought is 'so you're calling for patriarchy?' and allow me to elaborate. An easy way to wash your hands of the depressing statistics of men's violence against women (incidently Spanish has a specific and convenient word for this 'femicide') is to admit that you have little-to-no control over what other men do, largely because we aren't organized into a social system, we are a population that really struggles with quality control. Everyday I walk past dozens, to hundreds of men I have no idea who they are and absolutely no authority over.
The suggestion of patriarchy paints if not an idea an intuition of society wide organization, such that were I to walk into a dive bar at 2am on a wednesday and call out some men for making rape jokes, their retaliation would be tempered by an unconscious understanding that the patriarchal superstructure will produce repercussions.
My lived experience rather suggests, when I stick my nose into other mens business it is generally regarded as an act of hostility to varying degrees (depending on the level of interference and presumptiveness) is actually quite dangerous in a very real physical sense. Just as I would never recommend expressions of road rage, I would never recommend engaging strange men in an argument unless you feel an absolute categorical imperative to do so, and that I feel is very rare - that's man threatening to kill a woman on the street circumstances. And I don't feel in those cases the businessman and Dutch backpacker that lost their lives intervening were part of any patriarchal superstructure along with the perpetrator.
That's all by-the-by, call it a statement of my lived experience as a man. I raise this unbidden thought, because of what it reminds me of, and it reminds me of the mystery of conspiracy theorists.
Sure there's a whole spectrum of conspiracy theorists, but the specific ones that confuse me, are the ones that for example insist with confidence that 9-11 was an inside job, and that JFK was assassinated by some deep state not a lone gunman etc. What's curious is that these conspiracy theorists appear to hate said deep state and wish to expose them to be destroyed or something. They have ostensibly committed time and energy, if not their lives to the mission of destroying the conspirators, based on their profound belief that evidence suggests they exist.
Now if I walked across a person kneeling in prayer kissing a little crucifix they wore around their neck and said 'good news my buddy-pal, there's absolutely no evidence to suggest your God exists, you can stand on up and get on with your day.' I would absolutely understand why they would not be thrilled to have their faith questioned. My impression is they quite like the entity they choose to believe in. On the contrary, Conspiracy-theorists often claim to hate the reptillian lizards, or Jewish communist bankers, or secret government agents they believe exist, so they should be not only reassured by 'good news buddy, there's absolutely no evidence to suggest 9-11 was an inside job!' but motivated to believe that themselves. Or namely seek to disconfirm whatever conspiracy hypothesis.
There is however, a seemingly easy reconciliation between adamant belief in a God you profess to hate. That is, the idea that nobody is actually in charge (chaos) is much more distressing, than the thought that someone bad is in charge and making bad things happen.
It's expressed quite well in this passage from here:
Humanistic psychologists argue that even if a posited cabal behind an alleged conspiracy is almost always perceived as hostile, there often remains an element of reassurance for theorists. This is because it is a consolation to imagine that difficulties in human affairs are created by humans, and remain within human control. If a cabal can be implicated, there may be a hope of breaking its power or of joining it. Belief in the power of a cabal is an implicit assertion of human dignity—an unconscious affirmation that man is responsible for his own destiny.Mind you, if the definition of Patriarchy is just a shorthand for the fact that outcomes in our societies favor being a man, I am not denying the existence of that Patriarchy, however I do feel there is a connection to conspiritorial thinking, which is that the idea of a patriarchy is somewhat reassuring, and maybe to many of it's critics actually desirable, as it would mean men on some scale or another, can control the behavior and conduct of men.
Thus for me, this was about the time I felt strange desires to actually 'join the conversation' because I would actually be interested in a conversation on this question. However I remain not agnostic, but skeptical that 'join the conversation' is actually an invitation to 'learn the orthodoxy.'
What's 'this' question? It's not the question of whether the Patriarchy exists or not, but the question of 'How efficient is the Patriarchy.' It was inspired by this poem I saw posted by someone on facebook.
It got me thinking about this question of efficiency. Would it be by symmetry, equally valid to say:
I woke up and it was oppression. I looked in the cupboard and it was oppression. I made breakfast and it was oppression. I rode my bike to work and it was oppression. At work I asked a question of my manager and it was oppression. I expressed an opinion on procedure and it was oppression. I ate lunch alone and it was oppression. I handled a customer complaint and it was oppression. etc.
Christopher Hitchens' in his twilight years was fully engaged with attacking the religious crowd as a self-described anti-theist. He kept using this word to describe religious belief as 'solipsistic and I'm reasonably confident he meant it in the 'self-absorbed' sense. An assumption that the creator of the universe is specifically interested in them.
Because the vague and nebulous Patriarchy suggests a social system, it at least by my possibly flawed interpretation suggests or leads one to infer systematic oppression. I get interested in the question of how efficient the patriarchy is, because I do not wake up every day occupied with thoughts on how I can retard women's ability to compete with me for resources and esteem and dignity. It's not quite true that I don't think about oppressing women (I'll come to this later), but I don't think about oppressing women in any capacity where I desire to oppress women.
So it seems to me, that my membership too, and participation in the patriarchy is really efficient, because I can just go about my day introspecting on whatever cooking a meal and doing some drawings, and bingo bango, women are oppressed. It's an effortless regime, a bi-product of me and billions of men like me going about our day without a thought spared to oppressing women.
If you have read thus far, you will be unsurprised I am confident, to learn if you are hearing of it for the first time, that I don't identify as a feminist, and haven't for over a decade. I used to tell people I was a feminist back in the early 2000s, before I realized it costs men quite literally nothing to declare themselves a feminist, and if it costs nothing to say you are, then it costs nothing to say you aren't. I've been testing that hypothesis for over a decade and thus far, it has cost me nothing to not be a feminist. I also feel it is more honest to say I am not, because I feel, if tested I would prove myself unwilling to make any sacrifices for the cause.
Lesser in importance but more relevant though, to the efficiency of the Patriarchy, is that I cannot sign on to feminism as currently manifested or at least represented by my online peer-group, because it is the antithesis of the advice of my historic mentors I admire, here's a sample:
The way for a young man to rise, is to improve himself every way he can, never suspecting that any body wishes to hinder him. ~ Abraham Lincoln.
“For nothing outside my reasoned choice can hinder or harm it—My reasoned choice alone can do this to itself. If we would lean this way whenever we fail, and would blame only ourselves and remember that nothing but opinion is the cause of a troubled mind and uneasiness, then by God, I swear we would be making progress.” — Epictetus
“Let me tell you something you already know. The world ain't all sunshine and rainbows. It's a very mean and nasty place and I don't care how tough you are it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain't about how hard ya hit. It's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward. That's how winning is done!” ~ Rocky BalboaThese appear to be the inner secrets of the Patriarchy, though I would take a moment in my limited ability to Steel-man the contrary opinion which is 'it's easy to talk about resilience and persisting through hardship when your privilege affords you little to none of the hardship other groups do.'
However it really is a recurring theme, going back to Classical times with the Romans and Greeks through to not just fictitious characters like Rocky Balboa (a character created by a man who was sleeping inside the New York Port Authority bus station, and took a role in a porno out of desperation) but is reflected in the autobiography of Joshua Waitzkin, who describes competing in a Tai-Chi tournament where the event was systematically rigged against him as an outsider or out-group member, and his need to simply accept the unfairness and work within it to win the world championship.
I mention all this, because when I do think about oppressing women and entertain the idea of being the patriarch or patrician hell-bent on keeping women down, it is earnestly hard for me to conceive of a better means of oppression than contemporary radical feminism.
Because 'the Patriarchy' is not just vague and nebulous in so far as it doesn't refer to a formal system of sexist oppression. It suggests with some solipsism that there is a conspiracy to oppress women. Which means women are taught, unlike the recipient of Abe's advice to a young man, to suspect constantly that close to half the population are actively trying to hinder them. It encourages blame and excuses (two of the four popular and intuitive means of avoiding responsibility) contrary to stoic philosophy, and this is important - stoic philosophy encourages a practice of dispensing with blame altogether even in situations where there may be someone legitimate to blame, because they still view it as unproductive. And just using the last of my example samples, it encourages a notion that 'the patriarchy' must be 'smashed' to achieve their ends, rather than Rocky's granite jaw advice that it's about getting hit hard and moving forward.
If (without unpacking representation) toxic masculinity is teaching men to be resilient and responsible (whether responses are good or bad) and teaching women non-toxically that they never get a fair shake and to appeal constantly to the responsibility of men. I would bet that outcomes will favor men.
There are other means by which I'd opine that modern radical feminism as functionally oppressive to women, but I lack the energy and inclination to substantiate these opinions, aside from mentioning that through doing courses like Gender Studies, or Womens Studies and whatever other social sciences it may have reached into, it creates another gap whereby bright women have a significant contingent of their population syphoned off into the depressing effort of studying their own oppression, while a much smaller population of straight men will engage in these studies that are less depressing for them, but the greater population of men may pursue courses with higher financial and social standing payoffs. Perhaps a form of being oppressed compounds, because you are intuitively compelled to fixate on your oppression leaving your oppressors free to compound their privilege.
The big risk though, is trying to smash a system that just isn't there. Which isn't to say the disparities don't exist, nor that the sexism doesn't exist, but that it isn't a system that can be dismantled. With or without the masters' tools.
If the patriarchy is generally, as efficient as my experience of it has been, where, to be an efficient oppressor requires less instruction than a drivers learner's permit, almost no quality control or refresher courses, and recruitment and replacement can be done lazily if not negligibly, and smashing it requires reading a whole paragraph of Judith Butler or more. Then smashing the patriarchy would prove a significant exception to the general principle of entropy.
Whilst I do not describe myself as a feminist, I am not anti-the project of feminism. Certainly the media (including social) treatment of former PM Julia Gillard certainly established as fact a latent misogyny out there in the Australian public. I worked in a call center during this time representing a Government department and the Gillard years were particularly illuminating as to how many people actually read and believed what the tabloid news reported.
However, should 'the patriarchy' be a short hand for 'outcomes favor men' then I am not a denier of the existence of the patriarchy. But it seems by the wikipedia page, one of the defining traits of the patriarchy is to explain that disparity as natural, which is my question on the efficiency by another name.
I just, when I think on it, and reconcile it with my lived experience. Here's what I'd expect should the Patriarchy be inefficient, which is to say, it required concerted effort and energy to sustain, men had to be systemically taught toxic masculinity etc. I would have expected that history would substantiate from the many isolated communities, a society that was actually matriarchal - in at least something approaching 50 per cent of isolated communities. Instead it's zero, zero cases in history. That's in West Papua, on Easter Island, throughout the Amazons, in hunter gatherer societies, the arctic circle, and the mysterious north sentinal islanders.
So efficient, that British and French Colonizers, and Spanish Conquistadors never came across a society where they had to impart and impose patriarchy. A fair coin was flipped and came up dicks every time, ever.
And I in no way, insist that that means there's a natural order that must be maintained forever more. Rather the means of transgressing what appears to largely be a spontaneous system of oppression are just now arriving at our disposal. Namely that technology renders masculinity readily redundant.
And so, perhaps wearily we return to the prospect of 'matriarchy now' there is a context in which I believe matriarchies do exist, namely in terms of female social hierarchies. Of which I know very little on the near side of nothing, and understand even less.
It would seem that the main thing that sustains the patriarchy is recourse to violence, and that in turn appears to render, for men, a thorough understanding of female social hierarchies somewhat redundant to the goals of climbing the male hierarchy.
But I suspect many a sensitive and reflective man, whom has been given the opportunity to live alongside women's social systems has at some point reflected on how women treat each other, and expressed to the heavens 'thank god we fight... because the shit women do to women...'
If women's homosocial behavior (that is, socializing with the same sex) is indicative of what life would be like under the matriarchy, it casts doubt for me at least, as to whether it would be better. I am very biased I should disclose, to mental health outcomes because I believe fundamentally that our mental health is the prism through which we perceive everything else.
There's also a degree to which I suspect we may have in some social bubbles achieved 'matriarchy now' and this of all things was inspired by watching Ol' Dirty Bastard's film clip for 'Shimmy Shimmy Ya' it was quite random but there's a refrain within it where ODB is saying 'would the n*s that know me tell them who the fuck I be.' and 'would the women that know me tell them who the fuck I be.'
The thought that arrived was 'this is a good example of masculine aggression' which largely manifests as the assertion that you can do what you like and others are dared to stop you. In short 'get the fuck out of my way!' is masculine aggression.
By contrast I would describe feminine aggression as 'get the fuck back in line.' which is to say, it's about preventing deviation from the party line and promoting conformity.
By the way, I just use my own working definition of masculine and feminine as such - masculine consists of behaviors that reward in game theoretic ways the production of small sex cells. feminine describes behaviors that pay off in game theoretic ways the production of large sex cells.
I don't think these behaviors are mutually exclusive, I just feel the descriptors as useful to talk about tendencies. And certainly 'should' doesn't come into the equation.
I suspect we may have started living in a matriarchal society, because we've become less social. Social media as a mediator of social standing, leaves no recourse to physical violence, so it is defacto feminine aggression, a matriarchy, social media behavior is about behaving so as not to deviate and get ostracized, and people while addicted, don't appear to be big fans of social media, particularly platforms like facebook. Cyber-bullying appears also to be somewhat of an issue.
Again to testify to my lived experience, my intuitions of male homo-social hierarchies are somewhat of a bell-curve. The men at the bottom are very isolated. In the meaty part of the curve the middle, the men are quite sociable and then at the top of the hierarchy those men are also quite isolated. Such that what I call feminine aggression - get the fuck in line is not something particularly foreign to men, because in the middle of the hierarchy you don't have much recourse to 'get the fuck out of my way' but 'get the fuck back in line' is something you can only say down the hierarchy, not up the hierarchy. It doesn't work on the top tier males.
I suspect and this is moving into speculations, women only get to operate in male hierarchies at a remove from intervention by males, eg. say in a women's prison, women emerge that don't care about ostracism because they can shank anyone who talks shit about them. (Aisha Robinson's story arc in Cobra Kai is perhaps a good if fictitious example of a woman moving from being subject to feminine aggression to employing masculine aggression and transforming the female high school hierarchy she lived within via a front wedgie.)
In the natural world, where sexual dimorphism favors women (large sex cell producers) such as in Spiders and Angler fish and what not, maybe these indicate life under a matriarchy, in which case by a veil of ignorance test would result in a net loss for our offspring should men be relegated to nothing more than sperm delivery systems and no other specialized roles to play in civilization.
One of the most problematic parts of the Patriarchy as conspiracy theory, is that it presumes I am invested in oppressing any of my female offspring, given that when I reproduce I have a fairly even chance of producing female heirs of my genes. Now without getting bogged down in why patrilinial inheritence is much more popular historically than matrilinial ones, because we now live in modernity. Where there is a declining birthrate there logically is less incentive to create and sustain a system that oppresses women, from any analytical perspective.
It also I suspect helps explain why absolute monarchies were better at putting women in the top job than democratic societies.
I'm actually not sure a matriarchy can exist, now or until such a time as sexual dimorphism has been neutralized. Because until such a time, it requires basically a universal and voluntary participation by men, and even strictly speaking if it requires voluntary participation, that might still technically be a patriarchy since in-group rights are ultimately enforced by the choices of men.
By contrast, it seems fundamental to any definition of the Patriarchy, that permits it to exist, there is no stipulation women voluntarily participate (though I'm sure whatever and however their patriarchy works, there are female participants/in oppressing women, for example the women who make a career of make-up tutorials online doing the work of reinforcing expensive beauty standards, or as alluded to early radical feminists may be significant enforcers of patriarchy).
There's just a couple of basic asymmetries that draw me back though, to the null hypothesis that the inequity of our society is socially constructed.
The first assymetry regards post-modernism/post-structuralism etc. revealed by the Sokal affair and Sokal squared, and to a lesser extent, reverse-turing machines that can procedurally generate post modernist writing (therefore proving it unintelligent). If you are unfamiliar it's basically just that various academics have made up bullshit papers and submitted them to social science journals and had them published. Including one with excerpts from Mein Kampf with word replacements.
These mean-spirited hoaxes were undertaken with the intent to expose the epistemic problems with what the instigators regard as fake academia, or in plainer language plain bullshit. These efforts were criticized however, by the social sciences as revealing nothing as you could do it with any field of inquiry.
Alas, to my knowledge it remains to be seen whether someone with no formal training in physics or one of the other hard sciences could make up bullshit research and write a bullshit paper and get it published. The counter hoax may be underway as I write this, but as of this writing a successful ridiculing of physics is yet to be revealed.
It appears, that you can't just make up a physics or engineering paper and get it published, in a reputable journal or otherwise. This has been demonstrated to not be the case with much of the critical theories.
That asymmetry makes me question the notion of a matriarchy, and whether radical feminism is in fact an unwitting reinforcer of the patriarchy because you have the patriarchy falling back on quite robust epistemology in a few domains (economics is populated with a lot of political economy bullshit and quite corrupt, psychology has it's own extensive replication crisis etc.) whereas the other is a field defined by a quite porous epistemology, a set of assertions that near as my explorations and engagement can discern are an elaborate and energy intensive way to permit oneself to believe whatever one wants, with perhaps at it's foundation an assertion that there is no public domain and no objective facts.
Objective facts bring me to the second asymmetry inspired by the phenomena of women's only subway carriages. Shelving for the purpose of brevity all issues of trans-rights and gender fluidity and gender identity, the Tokyo Subway system to combat sexual harassment and assault incidents happening on rush hour trains, began to designate women only carriages. Mexico city also has sections of train platforms dedicated to Women and children only (Mujeres y Ninos).
Now imagine if you are a woman, or being a woman sitting on one of these carriages and a shady man steps on (again just shelving all of the TIQ questions of how one can discern another person's gender) by what degree do you have to outnumber one creepy man in order to feel safe? 10-1? 30-1? 100-1? I imagine but can't know that it probably isn't a matter of sheer numbers but something more akin to how many women do you have to have between you and the shady man to feel safe? That the woman standing next to him is not necessarily reassured that there are a hundred other women behind her.
On the flipside, were I to find myself suddenly stepping onto a carriage populated only by women, I might feel embarassed, confused and wondering whether I was in the wrong place, perhaps even a bit worried that I might have to explain my error to the cops, but not fundamentally unsafe. Were I sitting on a carriage and a predatory woman boarded it, the numerical advantage question would probably be answered somewhere between one on one to 3-1 odds, depending on the build and psychological stability of the woman. And yes, predatory women do exist, I have had the displeasure and misfortune to have been thrown in working situations with such in the course of my life, and they make me nervous and guarded but rarely do they make me feel physically unsafe. They engage my reputation management instincts.
So that asymmetry is the fox in the henhouse vs hen in the foxhouse aspect of sexual dimorphism. Yeah Ronda Rhosey could kick my arse, there's plenty of taller women than me and some ethnic populations produce women that on statistical average can kick my arse. But in terms of smashing the patriarchy and implementing a matriarchy, it would appear that to do so would require the permission of the patriarchy.
And if the patriarchy isn't just self-governing, but actually self-perpetuating and self-sustaining because it lacks a head one can cut off so the body dies. Hmmm...
Consider the Monty Hall Problem, my go to example for where people's intuitions reliably fail them. It is a counter intuitive problem that is the basis I am fairly confident for Deal or No Deal to be financially viable. (and possibly a class action suit against Andrew O'Keefe for making false and misleading statements.) The point of which is people en masse can reliably be exploited by the Monty Hall problem by reliably miscalculating the probabilities. In the case of Deal or No Deal, getting down to 2 cases and thinking they have a 50/50 chance of winning the major cash prize, when in truth it's actually a 1/28 chance of winning the major cash prize.
I couldn't guess what proportion of the population actually understands the Monty Hall problem, but I suspect it may be less than 1%. The relevance is that nobody has to be taught 'toxic probability' to get the Monty Hall Problem wrong, we generally have to be taught to get it right, and I personally fought the conclusion with my intuitions all the way.
What I find interesting is the motivated use of language, for one example why use the term 'privilege' rather than 'advantage' even though they are somewhat synonyms? I suspect by my own intuitions that privilege conveys a sense of being gifted an advantage, that it isn't intrinsic or otherwise earned. Whereas advantage carries with it some baggage of superiority. Eg. moving from 'Love' to 'Advantage' in Tennis. Similarly why is their almost no discussion of 'disadvantage' in much of my social bubbles discourse?
I am left with an impression that there is no disadvantage, just oppression. There's a necessity for some reason to believe that the way the world is is arbitrary, and therefore subject to rearbitration. Curiously, Labor studies have long produced regression analysis that the best predictor of corporate success is height (contrary to whatever Jordan Peterson says). I am completely bang on average in height for men, and thus at a disadvantage in the corporate world for ever making it to CEO. Though little discussed, should I become a CEO I would have beaten the odds, considerably.
However, it would only be oppression in my opinion if the talligarchy made promotion consideration dependant on 'who can get the can from the top shelf fastest' and performance evaluations consisted of 'describe the top of the fridge in as much detail and as accurately as possible.'
I don't believe we are taught to revere, trust and follow tall people. It appears to be a more innate quirk of human psychology, perhaps instinctive heuristics, perhaps failings like embodied cognition - our penchant for thinking in metaphors we aren't aware of... but did the expression 'to look up to' drive our error in revering someone for being tall, or did a long history of following taller people generate the expression?
At 5'9" I am taller than roughly 50% of the male US population, but taller than probably some 60% of the female population of the US (with average height of 5'4") I don't know what the standard deviation is, but if height truly is a robust predictor of corporate success, to the point that it renders factors like education, qualification and experience either nuetral or obsolete then women are simply at a clear disadvantage, and at no point in my life was I taught to revere tall people, regardless of how dumb their ideas are.
It would appear that the talligarchy is just something that gets spontaneously reinforced again and again in a reliable repetition of isolated impressions.
I don't know in a lot of cases the specific mechanics that might put women at disadvantages. However, I do know that the effects of even seemingly negligible differences and inequalities, can over repetition produce huge inequalities.
Nor do I, or would I ever deny that institutional sexism doesn't exist. My suspicion though is that this sexism is often post hoc rationalized rather than pre-meditated. Eg. you have some legacy where only men are doctors, a hangover from a time when there was no reliable birth control, and birth rates were much higher and pre-marital sex much lower in the stratas of society that could afford tertiary tuition, so the technological environment just meant that doctors were all men bar a few notable cross dressers and frontier medicine women.
Then as the environment changed and women went to school, the hangover of all male doctors started rationalizing reasons women couldn't be doctors, incentivized by a desire to not increase the level of competition between practicing doctors, and you have institutional sexism. But it doesn't require a grand conspiracy of masonic lodge masters coordinating to produce these institutions. these obscene errors are made all the time through the faulty wetware between all human ears.
I actually don't have a conclusion to go to, because even considering all these likelihoods, I can't conceive of a matriarchy, nor a credible threat to patriarchy. But to end on an optimistic note, I do know many women that someway somehow are perfectly equipped to navigate the patriarchy, whatever it is. The disadvantages are neutralized, and they are far more likely to be put in a position to oppress than to be oppressed. I love these women, they are some of my favorite people but seem to be largely ignored and invisible if privately admired by their peers. They seem to be quite quiet themselves suggesting that they are somewhat 'naturals' at life, having never occurred to them to navigate the world in any other way.
I try to do my part by occupying one of the lowest socio-economic tiers I can achieve. I would be bummed to discover I have simply been left out of all the patrician get togethers all my life because they don't like my nose.
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