3 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)
View submission: capitalism's demolition will not dismantle misogyny.
one theory I read at one point (in Humankind: a hopeful history which cited a bunch of-apparently-flimsy history books, so take my word with a grain of salt) was that patriarchy started around when people started to settle down in society-why? I don't know, maybe the balance just fell out and it ended up like that, but that doesn't sound very likely to me
i really don't think the question of where patriarchy came from is easy to answer but i might be missing some sort of anthropological perspectives or smth that make the question a lot easier
Comment by TheMedPack at 01/04/2024 at 15:23 UTC
3 upvotes, 1 direct replies
There's a lot we don't know for sure, but the best explanation seems to be that the traditional system of gender roles (ie, the patriarchy) developed because it had an evolutionary advantage over other types of social systems in the context of the agricultural revolution. In other words, societies that instituted the traditional gender system (roughly: men are expendable for purposes of war/violence, women are expendable for purposes of sex/procreation) were able to outcompete their rivals and propagate themselves more effectively. But this doesn't mean that the patriarchy is *good*, or *morally acceptable*, or *the best social arrangement* or anything like that; it clearly isn't.
One of the *worst* explanations, on the other hand, is the conspiracy theory that says that a cabal of men got together and decided to subjugate women, because men are bad like that, or something.