Questions From Readers Vol. 3

Do you believe that it's a male dominated world?

Hmmm… That’s a trickier question than it at first appears.

Because of the universal division of labor that we as a species evolved to best survive over millions of years, males that in the stone age would have left the cave to go hunt and do the more dangerous and arduous work to best guarantee the survival and safety of the women and children still now go out into the world to provide and protect for the women and their young at least a little more than the women, for the same immutable biological reasons: endangering the women means you are endangering the children and so the survival of the human race. Men, on the other hand, still work the overwhelming majority of overtime, night shifts, hazardous and arduous work where death is a very probable risk like forestry, construction, oil rigs, fishing trawlers, electricians, anything up a ladder or hanging off the side of a building, etc.

The story of the human race is for the most part not one of male privilege but of male disposability: men’s lives are universally viewed as less valuable and important pretty much everywhere in the world, certainly everywhere in the western world, just as much today as they were ten thousand years ago. But hey, I guess that’s the patriarchy for you.

Over millennia men took responsibility for the day to day running of the mundane infrastructure of society basically because to expect a pregnant or breastfeeding woman (and remember: for the great majority of past, way before 20th century contraception, most healthy and sexually active women were either pregnant or nursing children most of their adult lives), to be hunting game, digging sewers or carrying hods full of bricks up and down three-story ladders all day every day would be inarguably cruel and a horrific misuse of a society’s resources when the other half of the population would not be doing - and could not be doing - what the female half had to.

So men took those burdens upon themselves and continued to do the majority of work outside of the home even as civilization increased in size and complexity and the work became more and more abstract and indirect: instead of going out hunting to bring back food to feed his wife and children, a man went out to work in, say, an office or a bank to bring back money to feed his wife and children.

In the days before identity politics - that is, all human history before the 20th century - we all worked together as first families, then tribes, villages, towns, counties, countries… And everyone benefited from this, but perhaps women most of all: they and their children were safe and provided for, they were not forced to go die in war or work themselves to death in the coal mines or on the railway or all the other new jobs and they had a place of honor and respect for their essential and unique contributions to society.

The rise of industrialization and then feminist lobbying changed much of that, first allowing then forcing women to enter the mills and factories and become wage slaves alongside their men. Now women have to still do the work of bearing all the children AND work as hard at a job ‘just as good as any man’ if they are to be seen as having any worth to society. Thanks, feminism.

The true nature of what feminists call ‘patriarchy’ is overwhelmingly one of male drudgery and sacrifice on behalf of women and their children, but through the filter of Patriarchy Theory this is viewed only as ‘male privilege’ and they choose only to see the glitter and shiny trappings of the very, very few men at the very top - the rest of the men are simply invisible through this set of lenses. For every man who is the head of a big successful business he started or CEO of some multinational corporation there are thousands of other men who risked everything they owned to do the same and failed, went bankrupt and now work night shift jobs to pay off their debts. Men risk more, fail more, but also succeed more than women as a whole, though that last one only by a shrinking margin now.

I guess the shorter answer is that though it still can appear to be a male dominated world, this is at best only a small aspect of how society is truly organized, and at worst a really ugly delusion being propagated by a hate-mongering ideology for political gain.

There’s a video by Alison Tieman that I think says all the above better than I just tried to in probably quite a few less words. I’d recommend everyone reading this to check it out here:

http://youtu.be/YAeSTsDc4qE