Do We Live in a Patriarchy?
Helen Pluckrose makes the case against
Quillette recently republished a classic essay by the great Helen Pluckrose, titled “How to Tell if You’re Living in a Patriarchy.” The subtitle captures the gist of the piece: “Arguments that patriarchy exists in the West today are largely dependent on reinventions of the concept that would be better dispensed with.” Below is an excerpt. It only really scratches the surface, though, so if you like what you’re reading, check out the full article - and subscribe to Helen’s Substack, The Overflowings of a Liberal Brain!
By all historical understandings of patriarchy and by looking at patriarchal societies that exist now, it seems clear that the UK and the US and much of the Western world are not patriarchal. Women are no longer obliged to obey their husbands and have full legal equality with men and access to all of the public positions that men do. Yet, within feminism in particular and to some extent in wider society, the word “patriarchy” is used to describe a problem in society that still needs to be overcome. How is this justified?
Most often people point to statistics showing that men are very much over-represented in politics and business and say that this is evidence of a society ruled by men. However, there is no law that only men can access these positions and some are held by women... There is little evidence that the imbalance is due to discrimination against women rather than different choices made by men and women. Since women have had access to all professions, they have quickly come to dominate education, healthcare, publishing, and psychology. Does this make these heavily social fields, which guide how society thinks and feels, matriarchal? …
Another common argument for patriarchy is the fact that rapists and boorish men still exist. This is said to be evidence of a rape culture and is presented along with the fact that violent criminals, and particularly sex offenders, are much more often men as evidence of a society which devalues women and in which men feel entitled to abuse women. The problem with this claim is that we have a society in which violence by men against women is taken very seriously and punished more harshly than violence by men against men and much more than violence by women against anyone. Violence against women is also despised culturally and men are by far the greatest victims of violence. We have shelters for women and very few for men. We have a special register for sex offenders and they have to be segregated from other violent offenders in prison because hatred of them is so profound. It is very difficult to argue that a culture which regards sexual abuse of women as so abhorrent is a rape culture or that one which is so much more concerned about female victims of violence than male victims is a patriarchy in which women are devalued...
A more modest claim of patriarchy is that it is seen in the fact that sexist and domineering men still exist and can even attain positions of power. There are men who feel that patriarchy should still exist or act as though they think so by belittling women, doubting their capabilities, talking over them, or condescending to them... I have been told both rudely and politely that I am not the intellectual equal of men and cannot cope with public positions of responsibility and should stay at home and have babies. This is a recognised ultra-conservative view. It is not reflected in wider society which recognises my intellectual capabilities by awarding me academic qualifications and job opportunities. The mirror image of it is to be found in people who belittle men and generalise them according to the least ethical, intelligent, and productive male members of society. However, it is demonstrably false to claim that society approves more of sexist men than sexist women. We saw Tim Hunt reduced to tears, contemplating suicide, and feeling compelled to resign following a joke about sexist attitudes and recently an Uber director resigned following outrage that he had said a meeting with more women in it was a meeting with more talking. Meanwhile prominent female figures including politicians have been able to use the term “mansplaining” without comparable censure…
There is still a hangover of patriarchal attitudes in the form of socially conservative ideas of gender roles but now, for the first time, men and women are able to defy them and we get the chance to see what a society in which everybody gets to access everything will look like. It probably won’t result in men and women making exactly the same life and work choices in exactly the same numbers, but women are already everywhere. It is this ability to exercise autonomy and individuality to access every opportunity that we need to seize and the confidence to defy any social pressures we experience that we need to encourage. Approaches to gender equality which perpetuate ideas of women’s weakness and need for special protections in the public sphere can only undermine this goal. We have smashed patriarchy in the systematic sense and we can smash any residual cultural hangover with individual assertion of our own choices and respect for other people’s.
You can read the full essay here, and subscribe to Helen’s Substack here.
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Excellent excerpt! It is bordering on silly to point to the sex of our legislators as proof of patriarchy. A much better question is who do our legislators serve? A good case can be made that our legislators are more likely to serve the needs of women than they are to serve the needs of men. Look at the history of laws protecting the safety of workers. Who did the early industrial revolution's laws protect? Not men, women and children! Who do our present laws protect? Look at the VAWA that protects women from domestic abuse while ignoring men who are also victims. Research shows that about half of the victims of domestic violence are men and yet they get very little from government or from the media. We have seven federal offices for women's health and zero for men. The list goes on and on. We are living in a gynocentric culture and very few are aware of this. Most simply nod in agreement with the feminist fantasies of patriarchy which defy even the simplest observations. Why do people nod in agreement? Gynocentrism.
In viewing subsets rather than society as a whole, I tend to view patriarchy as a good thing, if its foundation is service, provision, and protection. What got the old patriarchy in trouble was its dissolution into foundations of power. That’s when everything went haywire.
I’ve seen both sides of this. When the patriarchy is a system based on others-centered traits, it is a very high functioning entity.