The myth of patriarchy
On my Twitter account dedicated to politics, religion, and science, I find myself in frequent debates over abortion, a subject of controversy among American voters for decades that has elicited the vitriol of opponents especially since the 2022 Dobbs ruling and the social media platform’s greater present permissiveness to right-wing behavior. As a supporter of basic rights, I am as pro-choice with regard to abortion as I am for personal gun ownership—yes, I was once a fetus, too. No, that does not give me the right to use anyone else’s body without continuing consent.
Sadly, I am unsurprised by the number of men who oppose abortion, demanding that women perform what they regard as a duty to bear children that they will themselves never be obliged to fulfill. This attitude fits in with a general belief about what men and women are supposed to be and how each is supposed to act—the claim here being that a god issued this and many other oughts to humanity at the beginning of time, never to be revised. What continues to shock me is the number of women who see things the same way. I likely should expect this, as I grew up among fundamentalist Christians whose notions of sex roles were unimaginative and rigid, but I doubt that I will ever understand how someone could willingly see herself as inherently any man’s inferior.
One such opinion was expressed in a tweet that expressed one woman’s—that is how, anyway, the account presents its user—distaste with the idea of ever having to serve in combat, wishing instead to have muscular men who are bold enough to be dominant and aggressive if the situation calls for that.
Whenever I come across remarks like this, I am reminded of the line from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: “In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.” So much of the right wing’s ideology today is devoted to dreaming of some past time when all was right with the world, a time when all men wore tactical beards and settled disputes by dancing around each other with their swords in hand. That women often died in childbirth, that the general population rarely fared much better, thanks to the many infectious diseases of which no one knew how to explain or treat, and that the men who enjoyed the opportunity to engage in professional violence were few, while most people were peasants are facts that do not seem to trouble our contemporary fantasists dreaming of making this or that country great again. This is perhaps the same phenomenon that is at work among those who claim to be the reincarnation of some famous person. In both cases, the wish-fulfillment story is cooked up out of a romantic ignorance of the past and the personal certainty that if I were in said scenario, I would be the hero, not merely a minor character.
Bring anyone from fifth century Rome, from France in the Hundred Years’ War or any indigenous person from lands being colonized by Europeans to nations in the present developed world, and you will have someone who wants to stay, rather than go back to face famine, disease, and violent death. Or tell people from the hunter-gatherer stage of humanity that most of their calories come from mighty hunters who bring in slabs of meat, and you will get a good, if wry laugh.
Civilized populations have long feared and admired the muscle-bound barbarian, going back to Gilgamesh’s friendship with Enkidu, but civilization eventually defeats its disorganized and uneducated rivals, even if victory takes centuries. And while today’s office workers may seem soft, it is worth asking whether there is anything that our ancestors could do that we cannot. They built pyramids and cathedrals with the labor of beasts of burden, human or otherwise, but we constructed the Burj Khalifa, and it is merely a cultural choice that favors the one over the others. If we wanted to put up a new pyramid, we could do it. Europeans emerged from the Middle Ages to explore the globe, but we put humans on the Moon and have so far sent two objects outside the solar system. And it was we moderns who reached the top of Mount Everest. The fact that we can cure many previously fatal diseases and feed ourselves a nutritionally balanced diet does not require us to stagnate.
The reality is that surviving and thriving in any age is most likely for those societies who have a diversity of members—and who value that diversity, rather than seeing it as a threat. To say that all men should possess one set of characteristics, while all women should possess another set and be subservient would be to reduce us all to an inflexible condition in which continued existence would be a matter of luck, not choice.