Is Western Society a Patriarchy? A Debate on Gender and Power

Well, that's my idea of the patriarchy which is a system of male dominance of society

Yeah, but that's not my sense of the patriarchy. So what's yours? Well in what sense is our society male-dominated?

The fact that the vast majority of wealth is owned by men the vast majority of capital and is owned by men women do more

Unpaid labor a very tiny proportion of men and a huge proportion of people who are seriously Disaffected are men most people in prison are men most people who are

On the street are men most victims of violent crime are men most people who commit suicide are men Most men most people who die in wars are men

People who do worse in school are men. It's like where's the dominance here precisely? What you're doing is you're taking a tiny substrata of hyper

Successful men and using that to represent the entire structure of the of Western society. There's nothing about that But I could say equally well the most rape victims are women

Terrible things happen to people of both sexes and you could say that with with perfect utility But that doesn't provide any evidence for the existence of a male-dominated

Patriarch well there just means the terrible things happen to both genders which they certainly do but there are almost no women who rape men

For example, so that is an asymmetry there in sexual violence Well, yes There's an ace there's an asymmetry in all sorts of places

But that doesn't mean that Western culture is a male-dominated Patriarchy the fact that there are asymmetries has nothing to do with your basic argument

No, but you might even this is a trope that people just accept Western society is a male-dominated Patriarchy it's like no, it's not that's not true

and and even if it even if it has a patriarchal structure to some degree the The fundamental basis of that structure is not power. It's competence. That's why our society works

it's only when it's when a Structure degenerates into tyranny that the fundamental relationships between people become dependent on power

It's not power if you hire a plumber who's likely to be male It's not because there's roving bands of tyrannical plumbers forcing you to make that choice

And it's the case with almost every interaction that you have at the face of our culture You're dealing with people who are offering a service of one form or another

who are usually part of the broad middle class and who offer and what you're looking for is the person who can offer the

Best service and you can find it. It's not a consequence of being dominated by anything That's tyrannical and and then again our culture Western culture

which is by no means perfect and certainly has tyrannical elements like all cultures do is

The least tyrannical society that's ever been produced and certainly the least tyrannical society that exists now this whole patriarchy thing

I think you have no idea how pernicious and dangerous it is. Well, no, I don't

throughout history have fundamentally cooperated to push back against the absolute catastrophe of existence a

Terrible death rate that the probability of chronic starvation early death disease the difficulty of raising children with all the death that was associated with that and to

Look backwards in time and say well Basically what happened was men took the upper hand and persecuted women in this tyrannical patriarchy

So it's absolutely dreadful misreading of history It's a terrible thing to teach young women and it's a horrible thing to inflict on men