By Dave
When I came across the notion of Patriarchy in my more egalitarian days, I would vehemently deny that such a system ever existed. However, I can no longer deny that the feminists were exactly right in their assessment.
There indeed was a Patriarchy, many, in fact, all across the Earth in all ages. Most high-cultures had men in a place of dominance and women in a place of submission. Where I disagree with feminists is in the claim that such a system is, or was, bad. Consider for a moment that if Patriarchy is the natural organization of our species, then it is no more good or bad than a baboon’s patriarchy or a hyena’s matriarchy, for nature is valueless.
There are several reasons which, I believe, caused the emergence of Patriarchy as a social system. As a disclaimer, I make no prescriptive statements on whether this is good or bad, only that it is.
1: Sexual Asymmetry.
The foundation of Patriarchy is the natural, asymmetric features of men and women. The necessity of survival required men and women to take on different roles because fundamentally men and women were built for different things – women to bear and raise children, and men to do ensure their survival. Over time, men and women adapted physically and mentally to better complete these roles. This had a strong influence on who will be dominant and who will be submissive.
For men, the hostile environment crafted them to be stronger, faster, and have a greater endurance than women. This is just basic, biological fact. Yes, a female bodybuilder is stronger than some men, but when talking about averages, men are indeed physically stronger, faster, and have greater endurance. The strongest men are stronger than the strongest women. Average men are stronger than average women. Even weak men are stronger than weak women.
When it comes to attaining power, the strong have the advantage and thus men have the advantage over women. If anyone has witnessed, or been part of, a family argument between a mother and her teenage son, then you see the one-sided nature of physical force between the sexes. If the mother didn’t have the leverage of money and resources that she could deny her child, or the father/police to step in when she needed it, then a physical altercation between them would not be in her favor. Ask, then, how stable is her authority if her son can usurp her power through violence? Such is the tenuous hold of a Matriarchy or any egalitarian sociopolitical setup.
Again, I’m not saying this is a good thing or a bad thing, only that a male’s innately greater physical capability puts them in a place of dominance, and thus power. For women to overcome this handicap, they would need to become stronger, or have some mechanism to equalize the field.
2: Male Expendability/Female Security
Biologically speaking, males are the more expendable sex. This is because 1: the number of females determines how fast the species can potentially grow, not the number of males, and 2: women can only become pregnant from one man and carry one child at a time, whereas one men can impregnate many women at once.
Thus, if a tribe goes to war and sends out all of its men and half come back alive, then each woman in the tribe can still become pregnant and the tribe can still grow, just as it had before. If the tribe sends out all its female Amazonian warriors to fight, and half come back, then the tribe’s growth potential is cut in half. It is thus necessary to keep women secure while also necessary for men to take risks and perhaps die doing so.
If the human males’ greater innate strength wasn’t enough to advantage Patriarchy over other systems, then male expendability puts them in the necessary position to become hunters, warriors, scouts, or any other role that comes with a greater amount of danger. And it is precisely those warriors, hunters, etc. that hold a significant amount of power.
Imagine a tribe, led by group of women, who decreed that they would go to war with another tribe for resources. Despite the women being in charge in a formal context, it is the male warriors who ultimately choose whether to follow those directions. If they choose not to, then there is little recourse from the female leadership.
It is the mother/teenage son analogy once again, but now at a larger scale.
The other side of the coin is that women, who are essential to the continuation of the tribe/society/species, need to be under protection from danger, and are thus put in a place of submission, rather than dominance.
It is this dynamic of male expendability and female security that further tips the balance in favor of a Patriarchy.
But it’s important to note that the strength of this dynamic depends on the degree of danger in the local environment. In an environment where warriors and hunters are not needed, their power will be limited, even nonexistent. If little danger is present then there is less need for protection for women, and the advantage of Patriarchy starts to wane. It is in a placid, resource-rich setting that we see the world’s few tribal matriarchies. In these environments, men’s advantages in physical force pale in comparison to a woman’s power over reproduction. In most places across the world, however, male power and male conquest led to expansion of the society, and it is why male-dominated societies became so successful.
3: Experience
As time went on in our early past, the necessity of men taking on dangerous roles also allowed them to diversify those roles.
A man of the tribe might have started as a scout, then warrior once he became strong and experienced enough, but once the tribe made contact with others on a friendly basis the role of warrior changed to peacemaker, negotiator, and what would later become the statesman. Hunters learned to domesticate animals while gatherers became farmers. The male’s strength allowed them to become builders and craftsmen.
The early roles of males (the scout, the gatherer, the warrior) were a perfect springboard into more complex and diverse roles as society advanced. Thus, when it came to who would rule, men, who had the widest breadth of experience and the greatest expertise, were put at a greater advantage than women who did not. The scales were tipped even further to Patriarchy’s favor.
4: Pregnancy and Opportunity Cost.
Even if women eventually caught up with men in terms of experience, pregnancy put women at a disadvantage when gaining power and influence.
If a man and a woman chose the same career path and had the exact same ability, the man would be at a comparative advantage if his female counterpart decided to have children. In the past, a child usually set women on the path of full-time motherhood and took her out of influence. Today, leave from work can range from a few weeks for just the delivery and recovery, to several months if a mother wishes to take off work to care for the child. This creates an opportunity cost associated with pregnancy, for if the woman is taken out of work then she misses the gains she would have achieved by continuing to work.
The degree of the opportunity cost depends on the length of time off and the field the woman works. Women in higher positions of power would see a higher opportunity cost than women at mid or low level positions. Men, however, rarely face that opportunity cost. They have nothing to distract them when seeking higher positions of leadership, further advantaging Patriarchy.
If highly-intelligent women did not choose to reproduce and instead focused primarily on gaining power and influence, then their innate abilities and intelligence would be completely removed from the gene pool, creating a dysgenic effect. This creates a catch-22. If women reproduce, the opportunity cost places them at a disadvantage in gaining power, but if they choose not to reproduce then the decline in population and the dysgenic effect would contribute to a decline in that society. Correcting for these effects requires a myriad of institutions all working together to promote it, as well as a paradigm shift in cultural beliefs, creating an ever more complicated, and ever more fragile, societal Rube-Goldberg machine which goes against natural dynamics.
Patriarchy, however, avoids these problems by focusing on a more efficient sexual division of labor.
5: Female Attraction to Male Power
In our early ancestry, women needed resources and security to survive. The men of the tribe, the hunters and warriors, ensured that women would get those necessities. Thus, the association between male power and continued survival became linked through a woman’s attraction to men.
Today, that trend still remains in women’s mate preferences. Women generally don’t prefer to attach themselves to males that are weaker than them, less intelligent, and, most importantly, lower in status than they are. They do prefer to the opposite: strong, intelligent men with great power, wealth, and status. Female mate preference generally strives to be with men at the highest echelons of power and influence so that women themselves can be lifted into those circles, thus providing her with her own status and resource security for far less effort than obtaining it on her own.
Taken as a whole, it seems that women unconsciously advocate for Patriarchy in their mate preferences, since Patriarchy puts men in stations of power and provides women their ideal mate choices. If women are at the top, say in a Matriarchy, then they have no choice but to €œdate down€ to males of lower status, which does not generally suit their mating preferences.
6: The Nuclear Option.
Men’s work and experiences led to whole societies being created across the Earth and throughout the ages, societies which are still largely maintained by men. This means that, for a society to continue, it needs men’s labor. To get their labor, it needs their consent. Any society which does not meet men’s needs will quickly fall as men see no reason to work in its favor and actively work toward its destruction. If the teenage son does not respect his mother’s authority, and she cannot win through violence, then the only recourse is to appease him. If the warriors of the tribe are going to continue defending and hunting for it, then they too need appeasement. The easiest way placate men is to simply allow them to control that which they build and maintain, which is essentially what Patriarchy does. It gives men an incentive to keep working and creating.
Given how much men work to further their society, a Matriarchy or egalitarian society would only come about if men allowed it, and it would only remain if men tolerated it. The continuation of that society, however, would still rest in the hands of the men who could end it, if they wanted to.
Conclusion:
The social order which best reflects and capitalizes on the innate characteristics of mankind is going to be more stable and survive better than one that tries to go against the grain.
Patriarchy itself was not designed, but rather emerged organically and evolved over the millennia from the natural inequalities and unique circumstances between human male and human female. All these effects, added together, give strength to the Patriarchal social order over other systems, and it explains why so many cultures, nations, and societies all across the Earth have been Patriarchal, and why we still have it today. No other system, as of yet devised, has capitalized on the dynamics outlined above to such a degree as Patriarchy. Any system that does try to divert simple mechanics with complex, artificial institutions will become as unworkable as the equations for a geocentric universe.
Thus, I do not believe that Patriarchy should be avoided or dismantled. Once we accept what our species naturally gravitates toward, then we can start asking questions about justice, fairness, and our society’s direction. Until we accept that one piece of the puzzle, we can only experiment in the dark.
