Thanda
Well-Known Member
A recent thread on this forum brought up an old issue I have had with the use of the term Patriarchy. While discussing the influence of dress in female attractiveness the idea was put forward that patriarchy is the driving force behind women feeling pressure to spend a lot more time and effort on their physical appearance than men.
This to me served as a special case of the more general trend I have noticed among many feministically (new word) minded people who generally are able to find the patriarchal cause of just about any evil or injustice in the world (mild hyperbole - you get the picture
). To me it almost appears to be the classic case of person with only a hammer seeing every problem as a nail. It is one of the things I strongly object to in modern feminist discourse where it appears every problem's root can be reduced to two or three causes ("problematic masculinity" and male privilege in addition to patriarchy).
Now if there is anything I am sure of is that human beings are very complex creatures and as such their relations with each other are bound to be complex. Therefore almost any theory a person can come up with to describe why things are the way they currently are is almost always going to address only a subset of the issue.
I personally subscribe to the belief that a lot of human problems are the result of some of the common basic needs and urges most of us possess. And so before ascribing a problem to a grand conspiracy like a religion or a political party or a patriarchy I like to just see whether the problem cannot be adequately described with these basic needs and emotions.
E.g. why do women worry so much about their appearance - especially when compared to men? Maybe it's because they (naturally) want to attract men and they have learned by generations of experience that men are more visually stimulated (than women). So how they portray their features has an important impact of whether and how much of men's interest they attract.
Conversely men have learned by generations of experience that their six-packs don't have as much impact on women as a woman's breast has on them. And so they have devised other ways of impressing women (in my culture it was customary for men to say poems they were trying to woo).
This analysis may not be perfect but it does a much better job of explaining the phenomenon than patriarchy since it is observable in matriarchal and egalitarian societies as well as patriarchal ones.
So do you agree that there is an overuse and misuse of gender study terms like patriarchy, male privilege, problematic masculinity etc by many professed feminists?
This to me served as a special case of the more general trend I have noticed among many feministically (new word) minded people who generally are able to find the patriarchal cause of just about any evil or injustice in the world (mild hyperbole - you get the picture
). To me it almost appears to be the classic case of person with only a hammer seeing every problem as a nail. It is one of the things I strongly object to in modern feminist discourse where it appears every problem's root can be reduced to two or three causes ("problematic masculinity" and male privilege in addition to patriarchy).Now if there is anything I am sure of is that human beings are very complex creatures and as such their relations with each other are bound to be complex. Therefore almost any theory a person can come up with to describe why things are the way they currently are is almost always going to address only a subset of the issue.
I personally subscribe to the belief that a lot of human problems are the result of some of the common basic needs and urges most of us possess. And so before ascribing a problem to a grand conspiracy like a religion or a political party or a patriarchy I like to just see whether the problem cannot be adequately described with these basic needs and emotions.
E.g. why do women worry so much about their appearance - especially when compared to men? Maybe it's because they (naturally) want to attract men and they have learned by generations of experience that men are more visually stimulated (than women). So how they portray their features has an important impact of whether and how much of men's interest they attract.
Conversely men have learned by generations of experience that their six-packs don't have as much impact on women as a woman's breast has on them. And so they have devised other ways of impressing women (in my culture it was customary for men to say poems they were trying to woo).
This analysis may not be perfect but it does a much better job of explaining the phenomenon than patriarchy since it is observable in matriarchal and egalitarian societies as well as patriarchal ones.
So do you agree that there is an overuse and misuse of gender study terms like patriarchy, male privilege, problematic masculinity etc by many professed feminists?
