That Rolling Stone article you linked to is incredible. Apparently the idea that semen retention increases testosterone levels and overall virility has been 'widely debunked'. A link was supplied - I clicked it, hoping for a review of scientific literature, but was instead taken to another opinion piece in a liberal rag that holds proponents of masturbation abstinence up for mockery because, of course, their ideas are self-evidently stupid; how could Internet porn addiction be anything less than the height of eudaimonia?
But the part of the Rolling Stone piece that LITERALLY made my jaw drop was the claim that "because mainstream porn often features white women paired with black men, there’s also a virulently racist element to much of this discourse, such as the suggestion that interracial porn is intended to steer white women away from procreating with white men and toward men of color." To imply that porn in any way represents a healthy model of interracial relationships, rather than a racist fetishisation of black men for their alleged penis size, shows how utterly lost we have become. In particular, it reveals the deep racism that underlies the 'antiracism' doctrine of the Woke religion - in just the same way that 'feminism' now means the exploitation and erasure of women. As the kids say, it's all ass-backwards!
What a relief to read this at this time. So well put. I have been dwelling on how to define patriarchy lately because I have felt at odds with how it is defined in the mainstream. Mary, you captured the definition so well..."a set of complex emergent patterns with material, cultural and historical components, that arise in part due to the irreducible asymmetry of the sexes and in an attempt to navigate that asymmetry."
But this accurate description will not hold up in the mainstream, leftist narrative as its acolytes do not recognize sex as the legitimate way to describe people because it is binary and gender ideology is so fraught with anti-science stances that claim sex has no correlation with gender expression. This definition of patriarchy, if accepted, could reconcile the rift between the sexes and the left and right extremes. So how do we proceed? How do we, in your words, "...find our way out the other side of this destruction of all norms, toward a new realism about those features of our equally dignified but irreducibly sexed human nature that we need to accommodate?"
Great stuff as always, Mary. I can't help but think: it's awful fashionable (or was, for a while) in queer circles to talk about how "the patriarchy oppresses men too". Well, if we define the patriarchy as you have, and if we consider it oppressive to impose any normative obligations on people based on their own unchosen features and relations to others - and that's exactly the kind of thing that gets called "oppression" without a second thought in these corners - then I imagine Tate might well agree that men are oppressed by the patriarchy, and that he's selling them liberation from it. Funny how the rabbit-holes in the logic of liberalism are always best lit at the opposite ends. (That metaphor needs work, I'll tidy it up some other time.)
I am always amazed at your wisdom and balance in these matters, and being a man who fled the stereotyped nature of intersex relationships to find a more relaxed society where I, as a man, could find and utilise both my feminine and masculine attributes without being deemed effeminate, I now see that the men I detested were in fact less traditionally patriarchal than I was.
The fact that I became a nurse in an area where care was taking on the personal and intimate care that patients could not cope with was laughed at by some men and ridiculed by a few women, but in this profession I was able to relax in my ability to embrace both aspects of my personality and accomplish things that other men could not. This also led to my admiration for women which went beyond a sexual reference and focused much more on the feminine strength that most men do not have.
We always said on the ward, we need a balance: men and women who complement each other with their abilities with their varying areas of strength, with their varying perspectives in a situation, but together overcome the challenges that each day brought.
Seems very much the other side of the coin to your previous UH piece about the book 'Abolish the Family.' It struck me at the time that your summaries of Firestone and Lewis could be summarised futher as 'Ayn Rand but for women' in their insistence that no unchosen (or unwanted) obligation is legitimate. Probably not a coincidence that the thing that convinced me Rand not only wasn't right but couldn't be right was the single-word argument 'children.' Or that there literally isn't an entry on the (otherwise extensive) Ayn Rand lexicon website for the word.
Probably not a surprise that once you reduce social rules to 'sic volo, sic iubeo,' you get Andrew Tate instead of John Galt.
All very fine stuff Mary. However there is one essential aspect of the patriarchy or male axis that you have not considered, namely the military, warfare, organized violence.
It's not a coincidence that the common icon for "Female" is the symbol of the mirror of Aphrodite/Venus goddess of love, sex and beauty while the common icon for "Male' is the spear and shield of Ares/Mars god of warfare and combat.
Andrew Tate was a kick-boxer and likes to pose with guns but there is no way he's any sort of a soldier or warrior. He's far too deeply in love with himself to have the self sacrifice necessary for that. If he was ever in a real fight with real warriors he would be utterly destroyed.
It's important to note that all social and political orders ultimately rest upon a foundation of force. Mars isn't the sort of guy you would invite to your fashionable dinner parties but he is always in the house and always will be.
Great nuanced post. I genuinely had never heard of this shitty bloke. (Sometimes, as in the case of e.g. Ed Sheeran, one also claims "never to have heard of" the ginger musical menace lol, but of course one has. In this case though, nope, never heard of him. It's worrying that a lout like that could ever have been in a position to influence anyone.
In vaguely analogous vein, my few thoughts on the death of chivalry:
In mainline discourse, patriarchy proudly inhabits a densely-populated set of empty signifiers du jour (aka ‘mysterious and all-pervasive ills’ 😉)—along with fascism, racism, and entire rainbow-stack of diverse phobias.
Meaningless doesn’t mean useless of course; quite the contrary: the terms’ great utility stems from their radical ambiguity. Constitutes perfect means to hold the polite society suspended in continuous paranoia, lest an innocuous remark crosses a random fuzzy line into the savage land beyond acceptable 😟
What your essay terms the 'Regime of the Brother" is identical to what Robert Bly described as the "Sibling Society" in a book of that title, published back in 1996. The process of de-centering social authority and dis-integrating the social roles of men and women has only accelerated since then, leading humanity further and further toward an atomic society. That is, a society which is nothing more than a container of transiently interacting individuals having no shared values beyond individual liberty, the autonomy to pursue their individual desires, and freedom from any socially enforced engagement or inter-personal responsibility. A march toward perfect individuality, which has the perverse effect of transforming human life into a discrete, material commodity, in perfect harmony with the ongoing commodification of the rest of the world by the sibling modern gods, Science and Technology. Never mind slavery from above, just give the humans enough rope and they will enslave themselves.
One logical outcome in such a society would be the desire for men to have children without the intermediary relationship of women, as well as the desire for women to have children without the intermediary burden of pregnancy and childbirth. In other words, children as products from some sort of baby-factory. Developing rapidly and coming soon to a fine medical center near you! And for those unwilling to wait, there are already millions of underemployed women willing to serve as biological baby-factories, or if you prefer, surrogate mothers.
But there is no need for worry or anxiety about some kind of dystopic future.
Great article and insight. I am not aware of all of Mary’s journey but I take it that feminism was a large part of it. I wonder at what point do we admit that the project went horribly wrong. My 16 year old daughter and her friend were only last night telling us how boys ask on chat sites -‘do you send?’
I was telling them how this phenomena didn’t even exist before, not because we did not want sex with them to the same degree, but because we could not bear to look them in the eye and say ‘show me your tits.’ Men need Mary’s description of patriarchy as much as women. How else do most of us reconcile our deep constant desire for women with the reality of our ability to attract them. The life force does not care that only 20% of men get 80% of the women. It does not care about the feelings and life prospects of all those discarded men and women. It is a life force to ensure maximum regeneration. It is culture that has reconciled this as Mary so beautifully describes. Feminism has ridden roughshod over this wisdom. I wonder weather it is largely because it is driven by young women and young women are just as dominated by their sexed selves as men are. When do we start admitting that feminism is a destructive heresy. Like all heresy’s not without some truth, but ultimately a deeply destructive belief system that needs to be overthrown if we not to descend into a world of vulgarity. Perhaps it’s too late and we are already there.
iirc, it was Carole Pateman, in the Sexual Contract, who said that fraternity replaced older species of patriarchy with the rise of liberalism. Then she turned around and kept calling it patriarchy (because of its recognizability I presume). And I've never gotten "*the* patriarchy." Patriarchal relations have happened in countless forms. Oh well . . . great reflection, as usual.
A very lengthy way of saying modern feminism has really screwed things up for society. Women are NOT better off today than 20 years ago and it’s just getting worse. This new “Boss bitch” phase is not something that men find attractive and has helped lead us to where we are where someone like Andrew Tate has such appeal. In generations past his attitude would not have been tolerated by other men but thanks to feminist liberation of societal norms someone like Tate not only is popular but who is now a strong influencer on young men and between an Andrew Tate and a Dr Jordan Peterson, ladies which man would you want to be the one influencing the generation of men you hope to find a relationship with?
Modern feminism has led to the societal destruction we are seeing. It has destroyed healthy male/female relationships and in many ways has helped start a sex war between men and women; a war women will not win and I say that as a father of 2 teenage girls who is very concerned about their future because of what feminism has done to society.
"Rather, the list of things women can do perfectly well for ourselves is considerably longer than in premodern times largely as a consequence not of moral advancements but technology."
This is largely correct, which makes it all the more baffling that your definition of patriarchy seems to depend solely on its ideological maxims and not on its material conditions and constraints. You need not look further than to what is currently happening in Iran to see that there's not much difference between the religious patriarchs and the Andrew Tates of the world - codes of chivalry sit at the very, very top of the iceberg of patriarchal norms.
That Rolling Stone article you linked to is incredible. Apparently the idea that semen retention increases testosterone levels and overall virility has been 'widely debunked'. A link was supplied - I clicked it, hoping for a review of scientific literature, but was instead taken to another opinion piece in a liberal rag that holds proponents of masturbation abstinence up for mockery because, of course, their ideas are self-evidently stupid; how could Internet porn addiction be anything less than the height of eudaimonia?
But the part of the Rolling Stone piece that LITERALLY made my jaw drop was the claim that "because mainstream porn often features white women paired with black men, there’s also a virulently racist element to much of this discourse, such as the suggestion that interracial porn is intended to steer white women away from procreating with white men and toward men of color." To imply that porn in any way represents a healthy model of interracial relationships, rather than a racist fetishisation of black men for their alleged penis size, shows how utterly lost we have become. In particular, it reveals the deep racism that underlies the 'antiracism' doctrine of the Woke religion - in just the same way that 'feminism' now means the exploitation and erasure of women. As the kids say, it's all ass-backwards!
What a relief to read this at this time. So well put. I have been dwelling on how to define patriarchy lately because I have felt at odds with how it is defined in the mainstream. Mary, you captured the definition so well..."a set of complex emergent patterns with material, cultural and historical components, that arise in part due to the irreducible asymmetry of the sexes and in an attempt to navigate that asymmetry."
But this accurate description will not hold up in the mainstream, leftist narrative as its acolytes do not recognize sex as the legitimate way to describe people because it is binary and gender ideology is so fraught with anti-science stances that claim sex has no correlation with gender expression. This definition of patriarchy, if accepted, could reconcile the rift between the sexes and the left and right extremes. So how do we proceed? How do we, in your words, "...find our way out the other side of this destruction of all norms, toward a new realism about those features of our equally dignified but irreducibly sexed human nature that we need to accommodate?"
Great stuff as always, Mary. I can't help but think: it's awful fashionable (or was, for a while) in queer circles to talk about how "the patriarchy oppresses men too". Well, if we define the patriarchy as you have, and if we consider it oppressive to impose any normative obligations on people based on their own unchosen features and relations to others - and that's exactly the kind of thing that gets called "oppression" without a second thought in these corners - then I imagine Tate might well agree that men are oppressed by the patriarchy, and that he's selling them liberation from it. Funny how the rabbit-holes in the logic of liberalism are always best lit at the opposite ends. (That metaphor needs work, I'll tidy it up some other time.)
I am always amazed at your wisdom and balance in these matters, and being a man who fled the stereotyped nature of intersex relationships to find a more relaxed society where I, as a man, could find and utilise both my feminine and masculine attributes without being deemed effeminate, I now see that the men I detested were in fact less traditionally patriarchal than I was.
The fact that I became a nurse in an area where care was taking on the personal and intimate care that patients could not cope with was laughed at by some men and ridiculed by a few women, but in this profession I was able to relax in my ability to embrace both aspects of my personality and accomplish things that other men could not. This also led to my admiration for women which went beyond a sexual reference and focused much more on the feminine strength that most men do not have.
We always said on the ward, we need a balance: men and women who complement each other with their abilities with their varying areas of strength, with their varying perspectives in a situation, but together overcome the challenges that each day brought.
Thank you for your insight.
Seems very much the other side of the coin to your previous UH piece about the book 'Abolish the Family.' It struck me at the time that your summaries of Firestone and Lewis could be summarised futher as 'Ayn Rand but for women' in their insistence that no unchosen (or unwanted) obligation is legitimate. Probably not a coincidence that the thing that convinced me Rand not only wasn't right but couldn't be right was the single-word argument 'children.' Or that there literally isn't an entry on the (otherwise extensive) Ayn Rand lexicon website for the word.
Probably not a surprise that once you reduce social rules to 'sic volo, sic iubeo,' you get Andrew Tate instead of John Galt.
All very fine stuff Mary. However there is one essential aspect of the patriarchy or male axis that you have not considered, namely the military, warfare, organized violence.
It's not a coincidence that the common icon for "Female" is the symbol of the mirror of Aphrodite/Venus goddess of love, sex and beauty while the common icon for "Male' is the spear and shield of Ares/Mars god of warfare and combat.
Andrew Tate was a kick-boxer and likes to pose with guns but there is no way he's any sort of a soldier or warrior. He's far too deeply in love with himself to have the self sacrifice necessary for that. If he was ever in a real fight with real warriors he would be utterly destroyed.
It's important to note that all social and political orders ultimately rest upon a foundation of force. Mars isn't the sort of guy you would invite to your fashionable dinner parties but he is always in the house and always will be.
Great nuanced post. I genuinely had never heard of this shitty bloke. (Sometimes, as in the case of e.g. Ed Sheeran, one also claims "never to have heard of" the ginger musical menace lol, but of course one has. In this case though, nope, never heard of him. It's worrying that a lout like that could ever have been in a position to influence anyone.
In vaguely analogous vein, my few thoughts on the death of chivalry:
https://ayenaw.com/2021/11/27/howdy-maam/
In mainline discourse, patriarchy proudly inhabits a densely-populated set of empty signifiers du jour (aka ‘mysterious and all-pervasive ills’ 😉)—along with fascism, racism, and entire rainbow-stack of diverse phobias.
Meaningless doesn’t mean useless of course; quite the contrary: the terms’ great utility stems from their radical ambiguity. Constitutes perfect means to hold the polite society suspended in continuous paranoia, lest an innocuous remark crosses a random fuzzy line into the savage land beyond acceptable 😟
What your essay terms the 'Regime of the Brother" is identical to what Robert Bly described as the "Sibling Society" in a book of that title, published back in 1996. The process of de-centering social authority and dis-integrating the social roles of men and women has only accelerated since then, leading humanity further and further toward an atomic society. That is, a society which is nothing more than a container of transiently interacting individuals having no shared values beyond individual liberty, the autonomy to pursue their individual desires, and freedom from any socially enforced engagement or inter-personal responsibility. A march toward perfect individuality, which has the perverse effect of transforming human life into a discrete, material commodity, in perfect harmony with the ongoing commodification of the rest of the world by the sibling modern gods, Science and Technology. Never mind slavery from above, just give the humans enough rope and they will enslave themselves.
One logical outcome in such a society would be the desire for men to have children without the intermediary relationship of women, as well as the desire for women to have children without the intermediary burden of pregnancy and childbirth. In other words, children as products from some sort of baby-factory. Developing rapidly and coming soon to a fine medical center near you! And for those unwilling to wait, there are already millions of underemployed women willing to serve as biological baby-factories, or if you prefer, surrogate mothers.
But there is no need for worry or anxiety about some kind of dystopic future.
Because that future is already here.
Great article and insight. I am not aware of all of Mary’s journey but I take it that feminism was a large part of it. I wonder at what point do we admit that the project went horribly wrong. My 16 year old daughter and her friend were only last night telling us how boys ask on chat sites -‘do you send?’
I was telling them how this phenomena didn’t even exist before, not because we did not want sex with them to the same degree, but because we could not bear to look them in the eye and say ‘show me your tits.’ Men need Mary’s description of patriarchy as much as women. How else do most of us reconcile our deep constant desire for women with the reality of our ability to attract them. The life force does not care that only 20% of men get 80% of the women. It does not care about the feelings and life prospects of all those discarded men and women. It is a life force to ensure maximum regeneration. It is culture that has reconciled this as Mary so beautifully describes. Feminism has ridden roughshod over this wisdom. I wonder weather it is largely because it is driven by young women and young women are just as dominated by their sexed selves as men are. When do we start admitting that feminism is a destructive heresy. Like all heresy’s not without some truth, but ultimately a deeply destructive belief system that needs to be overthrown if we not to descend into a world of vulgarity. Perhaps it’s too late and we are already there.
Well if a woman can choose not to be a lady, a man can choose not to be a gentle-man.
iirc, it was Carole Pateman, in the Sexual Contract, who said that fraternity replaced older species of patriarchy with the rise of liberalism. Then she turned around and kept calling it patriarchy (because of its recognizability I presume). And I've never gotten "*the* patriarchy." Patriarchal relations have happened in countless forms. Oh well . . . great reflection, as usual.
A very lengthy way of saying modern feminism has really screwed things up for society. Women are NOT better off today than 20 years ago and it’s just getting worse. This new “Boss bitch” phase is not something that men find attractive and has helped lead us to where we are where someone like Andrew Tate has such appeal. In generations past his attitude would not have been tolerated by other men but thanks to feminist liberation of societal norms someone like Tate not only is popular but who is now a strong influencer on young men and between an Andrew Tate and a Dr Jordan Peterson, ladies which man would you want to be the one influencing the generation of men you hope to find a relationship with?
Modern feminism has led to the societal destruction we are seeing. It has destroyed healthy male/female relationships and in many ways has helped start a sex war between men and women; a war women will not win and I say that as a father of 2 teenage girls who is very concerned about their future because of what feminism has done to society.
"Rather, the list of things women can do perfectly well for ourselves is considerably longer than in premodern times largely as a consequence not of moral advancements but technology."
This is largely correct, which makes it all the more baffling that your definition of patriarchy seems to depend solely on its ideological maxims and not on its material conditions and constraints. You need not look further than to what is currently happening in Iran to see that there's not much difference between the religious patriarchs and the Andrew Tates of the world - codes of chivalry sit at the very, very top of the iceberg of patriarchal norms.
Great read, Mary.
Spot on, this: "another unexamined paradox he embodies: the fact that he’s a product not of too much patriarchy, but not enough of it. "
And stop coming up with clever phrases like "sexual Thatcherism;" leave some for the rest of us, RF.
Cheers.
TCW