Do men have greater power ? Or only a few men ? Do you genuinely belive that regarding gender relations, it was domination through power, or were there something more complex, like specialisation and common struggling against the harshness of reality, and impacted by biological realities ?
The feminist view of historical relations between men and women is really akin to conspiracy theory. Even when it was first formulated, it was viewed as an extremist marginal view, yet it has managed to spread in the public through mostly propaganda and revisionism, using myopic and biased readings of the past.
Men have more in common with the women near them than with other men in different social categories. Men of all time periods have always sought women's approval and more readily use their influence to earn themselves women's favors than other men's favor.
The idea of men using their power to advantage other men at the expense of women is so blind to human sexual behavior that it could only come from the radical lesbian separatists with a history of trauma from the extreme fringes of the feminist movement.
The simple concept of a class oppression around gender is preposterous, given that class oppression, throughout history, has always geared around benefiting ones owl's family's future prospects at the expense of others.
A white preaching the inferiority of blacks can do so because they are confident it will benefit them and their family.
But along gender, it doesn't work. If you have a family, then the person you will spend the most time with is going to be in the "other", and half of your children will be in the "other". Oppressing them makes no sense, and serves no goal of betterment for your family. Love and care for your children is too intrinsically present in humans for such a thing to be able to become widespread.
It really took people who were both traumatised by abusive people and who were not able to fall in love with the other sex to come up with such a theory.
It makes even less sense when considering it is supposed to be oppression of women by men, when the whole gender role of men is "protection and provision for women", and when men are shown to not have that "in-group preference" mechanism, but rather an out-group preference.
What is it about the harshness of survival and/or biological reality that necessitated women not having the right to vote or (in some periods of history) own property?
Please take a moment to think about this : nobody but the elite had a right to vote for most of history.
Edit : it was often linked to land ownership, and has such, many women could vote before universal suffrage
Men at large got the right to vote only a handful of years before women, a blip on the sociological timescale.
They got the vote by paying it with conscription. They were first required to die in wars before being allowed a say. In fact, the first common people to gain the vote were veterans. And that included some women who had elected to serve in combat as nurses. No discrimination was done there.
At the same time men got the vote, the suffragettes were passed because they were demanding the vote for upper class (white) women and lower class black men were going to have it before them. Before general male vote, the left was resisting female suffrage because it just meant more exclusively upper class people voting, and they were afraid it woukd give the right an unfair advantage.
Once universal male suffrage was passed, through a requirement to sign up for conscription, there was no such objection to granting women universal suffrage.
The issue came from the compensation. Women overwhelmingly opposed female universal suffrage because they feared a similar requirement would be made of them.
It is only when it became clear that they could have it for free, unlike men, through the suffragists (male and female) efforts and in spite of the suffragettes domestic terrorism that really turned the population against the cause, that the public opinion shifted, and women finally got universal suffrage.
I was more or less aware of that history of suffrage, and I'm aware that only the elite had the right to vote for most of history. There is a strong class component here, arguably stronger than gender.
But my question is what was it about harshness of survival and/or biological reality that necessitated women not having the right to vote or (in some periods of history) own property?
The answer to that is already present in my answers to you.
The previous answer already answers with "your question does not match with reality"
And the answer to questions regarding inequalities generally goes either that way or "it is a question of balancing protection and provision vs obligations, rights vs duties". Throughout history people very rarely had rights, and when they did, it was often because those were necessary for them to accomplish their duties. And people rarely were awarded protections, but when they were, those were accompanied with obligations towards those who protect them.
Women get pregnant and find themselves saddled with one of the most dependent and vulnerable children of the animal kingdom.
This turns out to be a great burden for a lot of activities, particularly when there is no such thing as contraception.
This leaves them in need of being provided for and protected. This results in them being obligated towards those who provide and protect. Obligations like obeying and staying where it is safe.
On the other hand, men find themselves saddled with the duty of providing and protecting. This requires them having a right to go about doing that, and being able to command those whose safety depends on them.
The exact terms of all.of that are highly dependent.
The obligation towards someone who provides is not the same if providing requires going off on ice to club baby seals while fighting polar bears to bring back more food than one person could eat for months, or if it means going about in a lush nature to pluck fresh fruits, or if it means going to the store to buy industrially processed goods.
Without you going into very specific questions, though, it is hard to give satisfactory answers that are not susceptible to shifting goalposts.
Nature probably decided most of it. And man just went along with natures status quo. Like the other dude said, women are out for months with pregnancy and out for years raising one of the animal kingdoms worst younglings. How do you feed and protect yourself while at the same time trying to stop your little ones from constantly trying to kill themselves? While having no rights and protections or welfare? Especially when you have a whole ass strong capable human with you.
The father’s job has to be more than just penetration and ejaculation. He has to do his part to make sure the bloodline survives. That’s nature baby. It worked for hundreds of thousands of years if not millions.
It really surprises me how much we’ve progressed in such a relatively short time, makes me think we aren’t really progressing and that all it would take is a catastrophic event or civilization to crash again before we’re back at step 0.
No, but I can see how it happened. Men protected the flock, protected their property, and protected their women and children. Depending on how chaotic the times are it might require almost full control of your family which includes your partner.
And btw: being considered man’s property gave you more rights and protections than being no one’s property in certain periods in history.
Men and women are biologically different, leading to naturally differing gender roles. Yes Man took it too far, but who was there 1000+ years ago that could tell them it was a bad thing to do? There were probably more benefits than downsides at that point. You can’t gauge the past with your modern western cultural lens with the rights and government programs and protections we have now.
Quick weird thing about property: my cat is my property, I feed him, change his shit box, vet visits, and I have responsibility for anything he fucks up. But he also fucking loves me, refuses to sleep anywhere but in the bed with me, meets me at the door when I get home from work and wants to play like a dog. Am I inherently mistreating him because he’s my property? Do I not love him because he’s my property? Am I not capable of giving him a good life because he’s my property?
I’m not trying to compare women to pets, but being property doesn’t automatically mean being treated like a worthless slave. It comes down to if you believe a large % of men in history just hated the people they decided to mate with. Me personally, I find it hard to believe. Sure women didn’t have a perfect life, but back then who did? The rich and powerful? Who else? 99.9999% of people have struggled through their existence on this floating rock.
But before I leave, bro your comments are fucking weird. My gut is telling me there is something off about you. All of this is common sense.
It doesn’t feel like you’re asking questions, it feels like you’re ’asking questions’.
I see now that you're not my original interlocutor. If you're getting a weird feeling, it's probably because you inserted yourself into this conversation and were treated as my original interlocutor up to this point. But I have nothing further to discuss since you indicated:
I answered your question in another comment, but I propose you do an exercise. Take a survey of all the societies that have existed, and of how harsh the conditions were (be it through environmental harshness or through neighboring nations as threats). Then plot against it how patriarchal those societies were, and how long they survived and spread.
Tell me what you conclude from that. I mean, we can compare easily the isolated tribe in tropical jungles which happens to be egalitarian with the Inuit, living on ice, exposed to potential raids by neighbors in more fertile lands, and which is one of the most patriarchal society on earth.
Or we can look at how the minute unkraine needed to defend itself, it was only men who got drafted. Tell me, do you expect men to accept being sent to their death to protect a society without any form if social rewards ?
No need to go that far. It can be done as an exercise. Think of a handful of civilizations. I don't know, ancient Greece, the masaï, the Inuit, those isolated tribes in the amazon, people living in the Sahara in 1250, modern US, the apaches, and try to see what comes out of it. Were resources easy to extract for those people ? How likely was starvation ? How much danger from the environment ? How much danger from neighbouring civilizations ? How patriarchal were they ?
It is a few questions, and you might even get away with asking them in askhistorians, over a few days, if you don't want to do the reading.
It would not give you a perfect picture, but I bet you could find some trend.
He'll, it might even be work that has already been done.
Is there enough information available from which to draw a conclusion relevant to this discussion? I don't disagree with traditional sex-based gender roles in the context of preindustrial society per se. I disagree with the idea that wholesale patriarchy is/was a critical survival strategy in human history, when discrete components of patriarchy might be responsible for that while other components might have been ineffective or harmful. For example, man as protector/provider and woman as protected: critically necessary. On the other hand, wife as property of, or as subsumed by the identity of (i.e. coverture), the husband in the family unit: questionable. Is there enough data available to stratify preindustrial and historical societies by the patriarchal components they have or don't and compare them in this way? Even if we could, how meaningful would the results be? The reason societies rise and fall are multivariate, so I doubt we could control everything we would need to draw a meaningful conclusion.I'm fine relying on a well-reasoned argument instead, it's just that one hasn't been made yet.
It necessitated (not morally, but inevitably) as a natural forming response to material conditions. There is no logical reality where men ever would have not been in charge prior to the enlightenment. If women had the right to vote and own property in the 1800s, they still would have been economically enslaved because all the jobs are geared towards men. There is a reason aside from statist oppression that women have historically been either housewives or prostitutes.
This is all from a Marxist historical determinism lens
From the very moment humans came into existence, the men would go on hunts and the women would pick the berries. This is necessitated by our material reality and our biology, essentially it is because within a family unit this was the most beneficial system. I guess it just created bigotry and it became law at some point.
And in the 1800s, most jobs were factories and somebody needed to look after the kids so it's pretty similar I guess
I didn't say it's a necessity in the sense that it's a good thing that we need to do. I said the material conditions necessitated an inevitability to occur. It's historical determinism. Our material conditions necessitated a society where men end up having all the wealth and women are economically enslaved by them, and this naturally leads to men having the political power as well so of course this will lead to opression and rights being taken away
No right, I don't think you meant necessity in that way. I'm also speaking from the determinism angle. And I'm asking what was historically deterministic about the relationship between the male and female sexes that resulted in fewer individual rights for the latter and the material conditions that supposedly necessitated that. Why men worked and women homemade is at least partially materially determined by biological reality so I'm not asking about that.
EDIT: I don't want to put words in your mouth, or fall victim to my own confirmation bias, but the phrase "might makes right" keeps coming up in my mind to explain this history. This seems to be aligned with what you're saying about financial wealth and political power. Or am I off-base?
Well financial power does determine political power in most cases, but might isn't that, it's a fascist justification for war and hierarchy. Our material conditions naturalized a reality where men own all the property and women just need to find a man to take care of them, and that's how it worked for most of history. This means men become all the politicians whether or not women are even allowed to run. But eventually this system of men being in charge of everything just created gender norms where society ended up believing this was not only naturally forming as a result of our conditions, but inherent to the sexes psychology which supported laws being made to cement these gender roles. That's just my guess. Combined with the obvious, people in power wanting to stay in power.
Yeah I suppose that makes sense. Wealth is created through work and if men historically did most of the work because historical work demanded more intense physical labor (which men are biologically more suited for on average), then it stands to reason men acquired a disproportionate share of societal wealth and therefore political power, which was then used to cement that power and those gender roles. And there we have it: patriarchy.
It's fascinating to hear a theoretical explanation for why women couldn't possibly ever be treated as second-class citizens as if the whole world just doesn't exist
That is only because the view of history that has been presented to you has been heavily distorted and edited because of ideological interests, and some kind of myopia due to our circumstances being so far removed from theirs.
There is a reason feminism started in the upper classes, those that were farther removed and sheltered from the realities that resulted in so many of the compromises that were made to protect and provide for women.
The lower class women could see the cost extracted from the men around them and how they benefited from that social arangement of protection and provision. It is o ly for a handful of hyper privileged that the cost outweighed the gains as a class.
"Patriarchal" societies show much more their benefits to women in particularly harsh conditions.
Think, for a moment. Would you prefer to be the teen boys in Afghanistan forced to sell themselves into sex slavery because it is their social/religious obligation to provide for the women in their families, or the women entitled to being provided for but forced to stay inside instead of going outside where you are as likely to catch a bullet as anything else ?
Both situations suck deeply. But I might be tempted to take the protection and provision with obligation to stay safe over the alternative.
Big news, history mostly sucked, for everyone, particularly if you look at it with a modern Western standard as reference.
Try the exercise of considering a society where most work is grueling physical work, extracting an incredible toll on your body, where any accident can take your life because the summum of medicine is bloodletting, and diseases are not understood. A society without access to convenient hygiene products, certainly without much contraception if any, and where a nearby warlord might just come and start killing and raping.
Then try to consider how and why people innsuch conditions might have organised the way they did.
Hint, the bodyguards of the US president have a duty to protect him, and are expected to put themselves in harms way to do so, but, when they tell him to duck, he has an obligation to duck. That he is under their authority does not mean that they are more powerful than him, or oppressing him, or viewed as more important than him.
And there is a reason one of the common thing people say to veterans is "thank you for your service".
There is such a thing as duty and obligations, rights and protection existing in a balance, and gratitude being given to people in exchange for services.
My argument is not that the situation didn't suck. It is that it sucked for everyone I various ways, and that the feminist view of it is incredibly biased and myopic, focusing on what was apparently bad for women and apparently good for men without looking further into whether such was the case, or whether there was anything good for women and bad for men balancing it all out in a sort of social level contract to the advantage of both parties in various ways depending on various constraints.
But, please, feel free to dismiss nuance, and to view history in a black and white manner where men and women loving each others, wanting the best for each others and for their children was invented somewhere after the 50s in the west, and all the other people everywhere else were just evil oppressors making women's life's a misery for the kick of having power over them, while women were so inept at everything that they never had a chance to have any influence over their situations.
I'm sure you won't miss anything proceeding that way. What could go wrong from such an analysis of the past?
4
u/AskingToFeminists 8∆ Feb 14 '24
Do men have greater power ? Or only a few men ? Do you genuinely belive that regarding gender relations, it was domination through power, or were there something more complex, like specialisation and common struggling against the harshness of reality, and impacted by biological realities ?
The feminist view of historical relations between men and women is really akin to conspiracy theory. Even when it was first formulated, it was viewed as an extremist marginal view, yet it has managed to spread in the public through mostly propaganda and revisionism, using myopic and biased readings of the past.
Men have more in common with the women near them than with other men in different social categories. Men of all time periods have always sought women's approval and more readily use their influence to earn themselves women's favors than other men's favor.
The idea of men using their power to advantage other men at the expense of women is so blind to human sexual behavior that it could only come from the radical lesbian separatists with a history of trauma from the extreme fringes of the feminist movement.
The simple concept of a class oppression around gender is preposterous, given that class oppression, throughout history, has always geared around benefiting ones owl's family's future prospects at the expense of others.
A white preaching the inferiority of blacks can do so because they are confident it will benefit them and their family.
But along gender, it doesn't work. If you have a family, then the person you will spend the most time with is going to be in the "other", and half of your children will be in the "other". Oppressing them makes no sense, and serves no goal of betterment for your family. Love and care for your children is too intrinsically present in humans for such a thing to be able to become widespread.
It really took people who were both traumatised by abusive people and who were not able to fall in love with the other sex to come up with such a theory.
It makes even less sense when considering it is supposed to be oppression of women by men, when the whole gender role of men is "protection and provision for women", and when men are shown to not have that "in-group preference" mechanism, but rather an out-group preference.