Much ado about patriarchy
I Should Have Known Better by the The Beatles is playing. It could have been any other song about a man obsessed with a woman, but it’s not, it’s this one. Hang on a second, I think, what if all this, all this patriarchy shit—men going to work, getting education, starting wars, etc.—was just one massive attempt to win the love of a woman, of women? And if it was, why didn’t any of the men think to ask women if they were cool with the setup? Who knows, if men had asked, maybe women would’ve been cool with it; maybe women were cool with it, back when it all started. Problems arose, I guess, when women didn’t agree with the way men were shaping the world.
Pretty much all human cultures are patriarchal, and have been since the beginning of human culture. That is not to say since the beginning of human beings, but since we made the transition from biological animal beings into cultural beings largely formed by the cultures we create. Of all the human societies that evolved independently from each other over millions of years, almost none of them turned out matriarchal or any other -archal than patriarchal.
Which probably indicates that there is something about our basic biology that causes us to build patriarchal societies. Or that patriarchal societies have been the most successful at producing new humans and therefore have continued to exist. Ugh. Before I rant on, a definition.
patriarchy
Patriarchy literally means ‘rule of the father’. It refers to any system of governance that by default puts the father or eldest male at the top—of the family, village, town, country, religion, company, world, mission to Mars. If that system is also patrilineal (which it often is), power, money and surnames are passed down through the male line.
We’re not just talking fathers and sons though. These days, patriarchy generally refers to larger systems where men hold most of the power and women are excluded from most of the power. Today’s patriarchal societies may no longer technically exclude women from holding power (thanks feminism), but they stem from societies that did and are often still patriarchal in their nature—evidenced by the large majority of men in power and large amount of women equally deserving of that power being met with mysterious barriers to getting it.
Barriers may include people already in power—historically, white men—hiring more people who look like them (unconscious bias), women who believe themselves less deserving of power/the job/rights than men (internalised patriarchy) and people not hiring women for powerful jobs because they might get pregnant (reproductive discrimination).
I first heard about patriarchy on The Guilty Feminist—a comedy podcast that throws “smash the patriarchy” into conversation every once in a while. I thought: if patriarchy is the thing that oppresses women whilst elevating men, if patriarchy is the thing that feminism arose in response to, then yeah, let’s smash it! What a stupid thing!
It’s an effective a rallying cry, but it also makes it sound ridiculously simple. Like there’s this one thing to blame, like we can smash it and fix everything in one fell swoop. Sexism, oppression of women, men being in charge of everything, it will all disappear, just like that, as soon as we smash this evil thing, this word, patriarchy.
Smashing the patriarchy sounds a bit like removing a tumour from a body to prevent the disease spreading, instead of trying to find out why it was there in the first place and what can be done to prevent similar tumours from popping up again.
I want to know why patriarchy popped up in the first place. Because, I figure, if we understand (or at least try to understand) the things that brought it into existence, perhaps we can think of better ways to move on from it, so it doesn’t pop up again. I’m going to write about it in a fluffy way. If you need to arm yourself with Wikipedia first, be my guest.
So, why did patriarchy pop up in the first place?
Feminists (myself included) will often say “men, a long time ago”. And that may be, in part, the truth, but it’s too easy an answer. It’s easy to blame the people who appear to be benefiting from the system, and all too often this results in blaming the men who are alive today, poor guys. The answer is probably much much much much more complicated.
I say probably because no one really knows. Little evidence remains from the millions of years that human beings evolved before we started documenting everything. There are only theories. Here are some of mine:
Millions of years ago, when humans lived very different lives to us, male and female humans were busy evolving. We know why natural selection gave females wider hips and larger breasts: they were more likely to survive childbirth and nurse children into the next generation. Male evolution is less obvious. Perhaps male humans became physically stronger and slightly more aggressive because they had to fight each other for females (intra-sexual selection), perhaps they were fighting tigers to stop them from eating human babies, perhaps females chose males who were stronger and more aggressive (inter-sexual selection) because the sex was more bouncy.
In most animal species, it’s the sex who does the majority of baby-producing work—usually female—who is most sought after, which often results in males getting fighty with each other or developing really beautiful feathers to waggle at females and win their love.
Sex-wise, evolution also seems to have favoured males who felt most pleasure ejaculating into females and were therefore incentivised to do so more often, but it apparently didn’t favour females who experienced pleasure being penetrated (otherwise more females would have evolved to orgasm during penetrative sex). If the female orgasm was necessary for the release of eggs, things might have turned out very differently.
Instead, females who successfully passed down their genes evolved more caretaking tendencies. If the father had disappeared by the time the baby was born (worth noting: early humans probably didn’t know how babies were made or if babies even had fathers), the baby would only survive if cared for by its mother. Hence all that dopamine produced by breastfeeding. Possibly, this caused many females, in the early days of agriculture and domestic life, to spend time nurturing their babies, rather than working the fields or building houses. As indeed, many still do.
Meanwhile, if males were physically stronger, more aggressive and more interested in reproductive sex, they were perhaps more inclined to eventually establish rules that gave them control over female bodies, when things like rules came along.
Another reason males may have wanted to exercise control over females: when humans discovered that females didn’t just randomly produce babies, but that babies also had fathers, fathers would have probably wanted some kind of proof that a particular baby was theirs. To a female it was obvious she was the mother, to a father it was not. He had to do everything to ensure that he knew a baby was his, and this may have led to things like females not being allowed to have sex with other males, and the idea that a father “owns” his children.
But here’s what I think it really came down to. When humans started to settle—farming and living in houses rather than roaming and living in nature—males simply had more time on their hands. Effective contraception (other than abstinence) wasn’t a thing until the 20th century. If you were female, fertile and being ejaculated into, you were likely to get pregnant a lot. Like one baby a year kind of thing. And you were also likely to die much earlier than you might today, at, say 42, or even earlier, in childbirth. Which, for a female human, could mean an adult life full of nothing but pregnancies, breastfeeding and near-death experiences. With little time to build matriarchies or equalarchies or whatever else females might have come up with, given a little time.
That might explain what females were busy doing and why they didn’t have so much time to participate in the building of society other than the actual continuing of the human species part. But it doesn’t really explain why males chose to use their extra time to oppress females for the next few millennia. You’d think it would be in male interests that the other half of the human species were happy, wouldn’t you?
Which brings me back to the first answer, “men are to blame”. They may well be, but that doesn’t mean they did it intentionally. What seems more likely is that the actual oppression developed over many many generations. Initially it just made sense for males to plough fields and build houses, whilst females were busy birthing and nursing all those babies. To most females at the time, motherhood would have seemed like their inescapable fate. They probably wouldn’t have questioned it. I know if I was giving birth and breastfeeding all the time, I wouldn’t exactly be fighting for my right to plough fields and build houses. Let the males do that, I’d think. They’re not exactly useful when it comes to the life work of birthing and milking, so they might as well make themselves useful in other ways.
And so they did. They invented religions and laws to facilitate large populations; they domesticated animals for human purposes: milk and meat and ploughing fields. And perhaps, perhaps, perhaps the males who oversaw this enterprise, began to see female humans a bit like cows: creatures that produce milk and give birth and don’t seem to do much else. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps they also began to treat females a bit like cows. Less-intelligent, milk-producing, baby makers, to be owned and controlled by males. Eventually, these ideas may have wiggled their way into religions and laws and stayed there, for a very long time.
A theory. One of many.
My theories might be spot on or way off.
Either way, seen through my contemporary eyes, it’s depressing that patriarchy arose all over the world. As if it’s the inevitable fate of humans, as if it’s merely an extension of “human nature”. What is the point in trying to smash it? If we smash it all down, won’t it just rise up again like it did the first time?
The good(?) news is, we are already so far away from human nature. We ceased to be biological beings a long long time ago and ever since we’ve been far more influenced by the cultures built by our predecessors. If we manage to get rid of patriarchy, we won’t be whisked back to square one, with zero contraception and zero education. At least now we’ve got a good few centuries of women doing stuff to go from. Even if those women have been born into and educated in institutions established by patriarchy.
Thanks for the education, we say. But we still have no idea what education, or indeed the world, might have looked like if it weren’t patriarchy that built it. And we probably never will. Today’s women and men are so shaped by patriarchy, it’ll take another few millennia and a lot of systematic unravelling before we can shake it off and create something truly new.
If this newsletter is going to have any point at all, there’s a second question I ought to try and answer:
How can theories about the origins of patriarchy help us move forward?
For starters, just considering the origins of patriarchy, can help us to be aware of how the actions we take today—actions that we deem to be right and true—could also turn into systems of oppression. We don’t, for example, want to build a matriarchy that oppresses all straight white men, because we’re so angry at them about patriarchy.
We can do better than that. But to do so, we have to learn from the people who formed the first human cultures—not only from their mistakes, but from their blindness. What didn’t they see coming? What might we not see coming?
Optional toppings
📒 Daddy by Emma Cline, a book of addictive short stories that explore the Daddy phenomenon each in their own way, beautifully written and so so clever
♟ PATRIARCHY: IS IT INVENTION OR INEVITABLE? in The New York Times gives a neat summary of Gerder Lerner’s 1986 book “The Creation of Patriarchy”
🦴 Alpha Males on You’re Wrong About podcast
💁🏻♂️ I Should Have Known Better by The Beatles, the song that started it all
🦚 @hzlvns (me!) on Twitter
That’s enough patriarchy for now. If you want to keep going, I’d love to hear your thoughts, alternative theories, ideas for new systems of governance. Send them my way!
— H. E.