Patriarchy
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.
----
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.
-----
My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, hardback versions to follow, stay tuned for details.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for GenderQueer now and for Guy in Women's Studies once they come out.
-------
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
--------
Index of all Blog Posts
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.
----
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.
-----
My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, hardback versions to follow, stay tuned for details.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for GenderQueer now and for Guy in Women's Studies once they come out.
-------
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
--------
Index of all Blog Posts