The Patriarchy / Agrarian Culture Thingie

[AHunter3]

Sunny is right, it is interesting, and you can post about it all you want just start another thread.


(from the Troll report thread. Damned if I know how to make the quotification link to it, but it's here (https://www.giraffeboards.com/showpost.php?p=1764594&postcount=88))

So I just blogged about this the other day... ermm, I should maybe admit that with a self-imposed schedule of blogging weekly, I'm always on the lookout for relevant interactions and stuff anyway, and this was good setup for same. So this is more, rather than less, of a continuation of GiraffeBoard discussion, just shunted out to the larger world for their edification and whatnot.

As usual, I apologize in advance for being a pontificating self-important twat kind of person. That ain't gonna go away so get used to it..

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Link to orig blog post in case you givva damn: https://ahunter3.dreamwidth.org/90507.html

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Post:

The assault on abortion rights was never about abortion per se, it's been all about returning us to patriarchy, pre-feminism. And all the Otherisms like racism that are part and parcel of it.

Whenever feminists made that claim, many folks said "You're pontificating. You're making it into a bigger thing than it really is. Seriously, the world is not all about women's oppression. I don't mean it doesn't matter or isn't important but it's just a part of the picture".

But the radical feminists said "This is the big picture. The entire history of social politics is whether there is sexual equality or there is not. All the other stuff is a subset of it."

Patriarchy means old men got young men by the balls by first controlling women, hence sex, as a commodity. Patriarchy means controlling reproduction too, anchoring it to individual means of supporting the children. Patriarchy is a departure from tribal / communal responsibility for the children in a general sense. It isn't done just to divest general responsibility for children, though; it is done because it diverts so much individual young people's energy into channels so that their lives are obsessed with finding a relevant mating opportunity once those channels have been significantly narrowed and all sexuality officially pinned to one model. It also makes women and men adversaries, necessarily fearful of each other's motivations. However much she loves and cares for you, her social situation means she has to find a socially and financially stable partner because children. Perhaps he finds you fascinating and attractive but he is not wanting to be roped into supporting children just in order to get close to you.

Birth control and abortion meant it didn't have to be that way. They shifted the social possibilities. Or, if you prefer, the shift in social possibilities made room for making birth control and abortion services available.



I'd like to point out that pre-patriarchy there was tribal responsibility for the children. And there was no complex property to hand down. Pre-patriarchy was largely pre-agriculture.

What we know is that we, as a species, can exist multiple ways, can configure ourselves multiple ways. We adjust. It's not all hard-wiring. There are some hard-wired things but they can be rendered in a lot of different ways.

Patriarchy is one way. Feminism and associated social movements for equality were in the process of giving us a different world. Some folks don't like this historic shift at all and they're doing their last-stand best to return us to the previous world. The current chapter in American politics should be titled "Episode V: The Patriarchy Strikes Back". The long-term odds are against them but they're scaring me to the core to be honest about it.



The Kalahari desert San people, one of the few remaining hunter-gatherer societies, obtain everything they need with an average of 7 hours work per week from each person. And they're doing this in one of the areas of the planet that nobody wanted because it's a freaking desert.

Humans didn't switch from simply wandering around plucking what was growing (and hunting down an occasional critter) to staying put and tending stuff in the ground, keeping animals penned up and having to feed them, and defending all that from the other humans who were still wandering around -- until the alternative was starvation.

Agrarian civilization is a stupendous amount of work, it's a precarious existence with a lot that can go wrong.

All evidence shows it first took off in small fertile areas surrounded by deserts. Dense populations with too many people to obtain their food from the desert. Dense populations that depleted the resources in the fertile area where they originated.

The focus of patriarchy, as pointed out by Marilyn French, is control, obedience, personal sacrifice for the greater good, authoritarianism, fear of other groups. If you think of an entire society with the mindset that individuals have when they are in danger and feel threatened, that's the shared mindset of patriarchal society. It's us in scarcity mode. It's contagious (it entrenches and expands and drives out hunter-gatherer groups). And other than survival there's nothing good about it. It's also rigid and extremely tradition-bound and resistant to change, hence it lingers long after there us sufficient abundance to not need it. It isn't EEEEVIL incarnate or anything, as if there's a Devil and this is his agenda, but patriarchy isn't particularly praiseworthy and it sure as hell isn't pleasant.

And not only do we no longer need it, it's toxic for us in our modern circumstances. Our survival now depends on flexibility, cooperation, and coexistence, not rigidity and intractable adversarial competition.


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Preemptive reply to any mention of "mansplaining patriarchy": This is no time for silence, I neither present this as all my own independent thinking nor attribute it all to others, I'm not into the whole "man" thing, and I won't shut up.

[Sunny Daze]

I think of the patriarchy as resource control. Who has and who has not. Unfortunately, in this model, the have nots fairly quickly become stratified. Women are a resource, and as such are rigidly controlled. They are not people, they are type of livestock with attendant expectations. Produce offspring, perform labor.

You are correct that this model is both no longer necessary, if it ever was, and in fact a detriment to the future of humanity. As you say, flexibility and cooperation are essential to survival.

[asahi]

Preemptive reply to any mention of "mansplaining patriarchy": This is no time for silence, I neither present this as all my own independent thinking nor attribute it all to others, I'm not into the whole "man" thing, and I won't shut up.

I thought it was a good post.

Yeah, in short, "civilization" (the shift to sedentism and agriculture) enabled us to sustain larger populations, which offered advantages - mainly the advantage of having more predictable stores of food on hand. Leading in turn to the ability to sustain larger populations.

But sustaining ever-growing populations is complex stuff, and it required specialization and individuals with special knowledge, skills, and roles in order to make it all work. The switch to civilization required trade-ffs, and the big one was that in return for having a food supply we could count on (and all of the other advances that came later), we gave up equality. And inequality between the sexes is a particularly pronounced feature of human life over the last 10,000 years.

[asahi]

You are correct that this model is both no longer necessary, if it ever was, and in fact a detriment to the future of humanity. As you say, flexibility and cooperation are essential to survival.

I can't imagine any Fortune 500 company being particularly excited at the prospect of a future in which women's status declines, given their purchase power and their influence over others' spending. Debasing the status of women is, by the book, an economically dumb move for our society to be making.

Unfortunately, authoritarian societies quite frequently do things that don't make economic sense and are willing to sacrifice the common weal to preserve the power of those who 'matter' more. Consider Putin's disastrous foray into Ukraine, for instance - a disaster for ordinary Russians but he isn't about to change direction. Consider how miserable people are in most oppressive regimes. They don't care. They do whatever it takes to oppress and keep the resources for themselves.

[Sputnik]

When my first wife and I got married, we were still in school (univ). She wanted to stop her education and work until I got my degree, then she would return to school and I'd work. She is an extremely intelligent person, and totally capable of doing anything she wants to do.

She went to work for a major utility as an office worker. By the time I graduated, she liked what she was doing and wanted to keep the job until and unless we decided to write a letter to the stork. She applied herself and was soon noticed and offered a promotion to the first level of management. She was thrilled. After she was promoted, the whispers started. She had gotten a BBB promotion according to those whispers. BBB referenced Browns, Blacks, or Boobs. IE, she was promoted to fill a quota. Her feelings were hurt because she felt she'd earned it. About 2 years later, she was offered another promotion to the 2nd level of management. Again she was thrilled, until the whispers started, this time about who she had slept with to get the job. See, in the eyes of the males there, a woman couldn't possibly earn something as valuable as a promotion on her own, there must be some other explanation for why she got it.

Patriarchy takes many forms. Patriarchy in the workplace is just another example. I'm not sure it will ever go away, and that's sad on so many levels. Women in the workplace have to be twice as good to be viewed as half as good as a male. ERA, equal pay, etc. There's just no national incentive for equality.

Now we have the giant thumb of the SCOTUS telling women to STFU and be a mommy. And don't try to wiggle out from under the thumb.

[Swammerdami]

I can't imagine any Fortune 500 company being particularly excited at the prospect of a future in which women's status declines, given their purchase power and their influence over others' spending. Debasing the status of women is, by the book, an economically dumb move for our society to be making.

Unfortunately, authoritarian societies quite frequently do things that don't make economic sense and are willing to sacrifice the common weal to preserve the power of those who 'matter' more. Consider Putin's disastrous foray into Ukraine, for instance - a disaster for ordinary Russians but he isn't about to change direction. Consider how miserable people are in most oppressive regimes. They don't care. They do whatever it takes to oppress and keep the resources for themselves.

Companies don't vote. Their executives do. The self-interest of the rich is NOT tied to overall prosperity; it is tied to increasing inequality and to bamboozling the lower classes into not voting in their economic self-interest.

[asahi]

Companies don't vote. Their executives do. The self-interest of the rich is NOT tied to overall prosperity; it is tied to increasing inequality and to bamboozling the lower classes into not voting in their economic self-interest.

Exactly.

There's an inherent power differential. Given the choice between concentrating their wealth and power with minimal counter-balancing forces on one hand or agreeing to have strong public institutions put boundaries on that power, they inevitably opt for the former. Their base outlook is that more power for everyone as a whole is less for power and means for themselves - it's a zero-sum world they live in. Everyone else is expendable.

Redirecting this back to the current thread, the past 100-150 years in particular has shown that women's progress and with expanded female autonomy (along with expanded freedom and autonomy for minorities) has coincided with more wealth and better living conditions for the average Joe and Jane. If a group of power-thirsty individuals were to develop the machinery of oppression, the most logical design would be machinery that rolls back progress for women and minorities. And as you say, you can "bamboozle" frustrated white men by promising them a time when just their white skin and extra six inches south of the equator made them more important than many of their neighbors and coworkers.

[AHunter3]

One thing I learned from playing the rather boring Parker Brothers game Monopoly as a child is that if you aren't the rapacious exploiter driving others to bankruptcy, someone else will be, and the rules of the game will favor them.

It isn't about bad people occupying executive positions.

Patriarchy, along with its offshoot-game Capitalism, is a game with rules. The entire money system, aka specific reciprocity, is not fun to play and has not been serving us well for a long time. It assumes scarcity and the necessity of poking people to get them to work, and these aren't valid assumptions (in fact there isn't enough work to go around and the most important competition is the competition to get jobs).

[JackieLikesVariety]

if you aren't the rapacious exploiter driving others to bankruptcy, someone else will be, and the rules of the game will favor them.

It isn't about bad people occupying executive positions.

Patriarchy, along with its offshoot-game Capitalism, is a game with rules. The entire money system, aka specific reciprocity, is not fun to play and has not been serving us well for a long time.

I agree with you 100%

and thank you for not quoting what's his name. :thumbs:

[asahi]

One thing I learned from playing the rather boring Parker Brothers game Monopoly as a child is that if you aren't the rapacious exploiter driving others to bankruptcy, someone else will be, and the rules of the game will favor them.

It isn't about bad people occupying executive positions.

Right, I'd say it's about inequality. Historical/archaeological evidence indicates that patriarchy and the legal/political system of 'fatherhood' probably began to appear in its recognizable form about 5000 years or so after the agricultural revolution. But inequality among individuals was an almost instant feature of sedentism and land ownership. Specialization made certain people more important than others, and it created roles of "jobs" for people. Capitalism isn't an offshoot of patriarchy as much as both are intertwined features of our shift away from a life of interdependence to one of larger populations requiring specialization and inequality to sustain increasingly complex societies.

Patriarchy, along with its offshoot-game Capitalism, is a game with rules. The entire money system, aka specific reciprocity, is not fun to play and has not been serving us well for a long time. It assumes scarcity and the necessity of poking people to get them to work, and these aren't valid assumptions (in fact there isn't enough work to go around and the most important competition is the competition to get jobs).

Or maybe there is enough work to go around but only if one agrees to a life of total servitude and agrees to work for nothing but enough calories to keep them alive and economically productive - and a much shorter lifespan, about half that of a free man if we look at records of American slavery.