Patriarchy Theory, any counter-arguments?

Pecanpig · 2013-07-20T05:53:57+00:00

You don't seem to know very much if you think that scientists back patriarchy theory.

naturemage · 2013-07-20T05:09:42+00:00

It's been very tough to counter the theory of patriarchy, as research is done in academic circles, and as we know its tough to do anything but 'approved' research.

I can not argue, based upon the current theory of patriarchy, that economic and business patriarchy exists. (business owners, rich people, corporations run by men, the biggest financiers, etc are men.)

However, I've had good results arguing that we have a --social -- matriarchy. Yes, a matriarchal society exists in the US. Society is our families, religion and culture, our education, behavior and cultural norms and practices. These are not lead or directed by men as you will see.

Men have 0 reproductive rights, women hold 100% of the reproductive rights in US society
Men are underrepresented as teachers, so women are educating our youth and directing their impressionable youthful period
Men receive and hold fewer child custodies or visitations after divorce; women raise the post-divorce children
Women raise the pre-divorce children, since men are still seen as 'success objects' by women, and women opt to take more time off to spend time with their families
Men have fewer contributions to society, and less power and position in a social context...leading to the stress that makes their level of suicide, heart disease etc a bigger problem than for women
Men are shamed by women so that their issues with domestic violence or male rape are belittled or disregarded
Women make the financial decisions for their households http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/savings/9571809/Women-now-in-charge-of-major-financial-decisions.html
Male circumcision, breast cancer, and other issues that women face, are placed at lesser importance than the same issues for women.
etc.

That is not a patriarchal society. That is a matriarchal society. YES, there is a patriarchal economy and business culture. BUT a patriarchal society, clearly does not exist. Women control the procreation of, bear, have, educate and raise the children. That is a matriarchy.

TheCommonManMedia · 2013-07-20T05:55:37+00:00

As far as studies/etc, look to neuroscience and evolutionary psychology. Pick up Steve Moxon's "The Woman Racket" (not an academic book in itself, but a good reflection of the basics).

As far as arguments go, it's not hard to counter patriarchy theory at all. Just reiterate some basic things, in this order:

While men are overrepresented at the top of society, men are also overrepresented at the bottom of society as well, and as the base of the pyramid is wider at the bottom than at the top, so too are more men at the bottom than at the top.
If a "system of male power" disadvantages far more men than it empowers, it's not really (generally speaking) a system of male power to begin with.

Now, in response to the bullshit "but men run the world" comment:

There's far more to power than just public institutions. Those who think otherwise are narrowminded dumbasses (ok, maybe leave off that last part).

Men do occupy most places of public power, but the question is not whether men occupy the majority of these positions, but rather "do men control the majority of the forces that impact human behavior," and the answer to that is no. Given that evolution shapes our biology, biology shapes our psychology, and psychology shapes our culture, and that we are programmed by evolution and culture to make men disposable in service of the only sex that can reproduce (women), this means that - broadly speaking - society is not set up for male privilege. Indeed, it may be set up for the opposite.

2013-07-20T06:22:59+00:00

In what scientific communities is Patriarchy theory popular? As far as I know the only experiements that have ever sucessfully validated the theory are the resume name change studies. While they do basically prove discrimination against women exists in certain occupations those results are nowhere near strong enough to vaidate the wide ranging claims of patiarchy theory.

No good studies have ever shown anytihng like rape culture exists however. Having taken the time to actually read the most popular studies on rape prevalance/false rape (everytihng cited on wikipedia wrt FRAs) the studies are all very bad science. The studies on rape prevalence use evtremely leading questions. And most women classified as rape victims tend to disagree if you directly ask them. Though there is some science here.

The research on False rape accusations is much, much worse. Here is the methodology. First the author defines a high standard for proving a rape accusation was false. For example the accusser must admit no rape occured or there must be proof no sex at all occured. Simply being found not guilty is not suffient for example. Then the author computes the percentage of rape accusations that are clearly false by the authors standard. They then assume all other accusations are true. And then the author reports the false accusation rate to be 2-8%. This is not at all what they computed. They computed a lower bound on the number of false accusations. The fact that these studies are cited and published despite consistently doing such terrible science is a testament to how lacking in rigour the whole field is.

Eulabeia · 2013-07-20T07:59:10+00:00

Patriarchy, in feminist circles, is just a word that they took from anthropology and made up their own definition. It was originally used to describe "a social organization marked by the supremacy of the father in the clan or family, the legal dependence of wives and children, and the reckoning of descent and inheritance in the male line". That's the dictionary definition. I don't think anybody is arguing that patriarchal societies never existed, because the word obviously exists for a reason, but arguing that any western culture is like this nowadays seems pretty silly.

datsupportguy · 2013-07-20T08:33:43+00:00

To be perfectly honest, I stopped reading at "scientific community" and patriarchy in the same sentence.

Patriarchy Theory is this hilariously nebulous idea that could only make a sliver of sense taken from a dogmatic / ideological standpoint.

For sources of counterpoints, Farrell's got the biggest points on lock down. GWW is also a great, mostly moderate voice. Her politics I can't get behind but her arguments are well reasoned, concise, and open ended (for the most part). There's a handful of heavy handed, schticky vids of hers but the "worst" is super tame compared to the ridiculous crap coming from the "other camp". Her video on male disposability in particular is much grood (personal bias notice: it's one of the things that led me here)

2013-07-20T19:14:17+00:00

Social scientists are largely idiots who have already swallowed feminist ideology without any evidence whatsoever. They are cowards who are too afraid to question the feminist bullies running the entire discipline.

mikesteane · 2013-07-20T08:06:16+00:00

A good source of information on how history has been distorted to fit the feminist agenda is Steve Moxon's "The Woman Racket"

HappyGerbil88 · 2013-07-20T14:33:39+00:00

Patriarchy is a social system in which men hold the central positions of power in a society, and correspondingly have greater social status than females. Patriarchy Theory is the feminist application of this idea, maintaining that those (men) in positions of power are using that to discriminate against women for their personal gain, and the betterment of males in society. Just my definition as I understood it from googling a few places here and there, any challenges welcome!

See, and that's where Feminism falls apart. Men hold central positions of power: Yes. Have greater social status? Laughably false. This is why men chase after women not the other way around. This is why bars have ladies nights and not men's nights. Because women have a greater social status than men. Using it to discriminate against women for the betterment of males? You'd have to be pretty delusional to actually think that way. Using it to discriminate against both sexes for the betterment of society? Theoretically, yes. Traditional gender roles are rooted in biology, and until modern times were a necessity. Most work was physical labor. Men are better suited for that, and women needed to get pregnant a lot due to high infant mortality rates. The role of men working while women stay with the kids has nothing to do with "oppressing women for the betterment of males," to even suggest that is extremely ignorant of what men were actually doing. The role of men as disposable is because a population can recover faster from a loss of male life than from a loss of female life. If the feminist notion of The Patriarchy was accurate, and was simply a system where men were setting society up to benefit men at the expense of women, wouldn't women be viewed as disposable? Wouldn't their lives be seen as having less value, not more, relative to a man's? And wouldn't women have been the ones working in factories and doing hard labor while men stayed with the kids?

2013-07-20T15:46:33+00:00

The galaxy may have been run my the emperor, but we all know the Bene Gesserit were calling most of the shots.

mister_ghost · 2013-07-20T18:57:53+00:00

I think the most important thing is to get whoever you're talking to to explain what they mean by 'patriarchy'. It gets used in a sort of 'we all know what we're talking about' way, but there are many possible definitions. Here's mine: That system which results in the members of the ruling class in our society's being male.

Once you get a definition, it's much easier to debunk it if it needs debunking.

Here's the way I address it:

It is true that the people in charge of our society are disproportionately men. This is an easily testable fact (note- this discounts elements of covert power which are, by definition, almost impossible to account for), and provides ample evidence for a system which places certain men in power on account of their maleness or some associated characteristic, which we may as well call patriarchy. We cannot directly examine it because its nature is not really understood: it may by biological, social, cultural, deliberate or accidental, etc. Therefore we must be cautious when making assumptions about it without testable evidence.

It would be easy to assume that patriarchy is some system which gives an advantage to every man, but this is contradicted by the number of men in death professions (glass cellar). That means we need to find something that is counteracting patriarchy at the lower levels of society or throw out the theory that whatever is filling the highest tier with men is helping out all of them.

You can take your pick, but any theory that doesn't account for the fact that both the top and bottom tiers of our civilization are full of men is incomplete, if not inaccurate altogether.

vivadisgrazia · 2013-07-20T07:49:56+00:00

Since no one else in this thread is providing you with what you requested I will get you started

Theorising Patriarchy

Surfacing the Structures of Patriarchy Debating Patriarchy - Reasonable Doubts

Patriarchy has been conceptualized and analyzed by several feminist scholars in different ...

Selected full-text books and articles on Patriarchy at Questia

And a book

The Creation of Patriarchy (Women & History) by Gerda Lerner

rightsbot · 2013-07-20T04:48:17+00:00

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Beefymole · 2013-07-20T08:48:07+00:00

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cypher197 · 2013-07-20T12:01:06+00:00

Go ahead and look at this article on Patriarchy Theory and Demonstrability, and see what you think.

2013-07-20T14:40:31+00:00

The counter-argument is that feminist objection to patriarchy is not the accident of male power, but it being ensconsed in society. The MRM position should be that secret selection processes hurt everyone.

Evidence US government bid efficiency. MRM can point to the dissonance that private businesses are at risk for discrimination suit if they engage on discriminatory hiring, but government does not work on the model of risk and accountability. Instead government bids continue to assume latent patriarchy and explicitly favor women owned businesses.

Don't argue "reverse racism" - that's a non-starter. Argue for a unified rule of accountability for discrimination which is blind to gender and transparent throughout the process.

diatribeeverything · 2013-07-25T04:29:40+00:00

The one thing I can add is that "the patriarchy" get very nebulous like religion's concept of god in the light of science (fact checking).

For example, in religions god gets all the credit (one survivor in a disaster) but none of the blame (all the dead in the disaster).

Patriarchy is like this but opposite in that i gets all the blame period. Women perceive some oppression - "it's the patriarchy." Women have some advantage/provision in society - "it's STILL the patriarchy since it's just assigning women roles and seeing them as week."

drplump · 2013-07-20T06:17:08+00:00

The same way you disprove any theory SCIENCE! If it is real it will be proven and become a law if it is not it will be something we laugh about like the idea of the body having "humors" and bloodletting.

Title	Patriarchy Theory, any counter-arguments?
Author	Beefymole
Upvotes	9
Comments	51
Date	July 20, 2013 4:47 AM UTC (13 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/1iogub/patriarchy_theory_any_counterarguments/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/patriarchy-theory-any-counter-arguments.1168376 https://theredarchive.com/post/1168376

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