Patriarchy? What Patriarchy?

"However, what I kept saying in Sexual Personae is that equality in the workplace is not going to solve the problems between men and women which are occurring in the private, emotional realm, where every man is subordinate to women, because he emerged as a tiny helpless thing from a woman’s body. Professional women today don’t want to think about this or deal with it." -- Camille Paglia

"The same, of course, is true of the colossal architecture which we call infant education: an architecture reared fully by women. Nothing can ever overcome that one enormous sex superiority, that even the male child is born closer to his mother then to his father. No one, staring at that frightful female privilege, can quite believe in the quality of the sexes." -- G. K. Chesterton, What's Wrong with the World, p. 97

Chesterton goes so far as to argue that feminism represents a complete victory for the male in the battle of the sexes: females have (almost) completely surrendered this enormous advantage. As someone put it at a conference I attended, American women have abandoned the unimportant task of raising and molding the views of the next generation of human beings so that they can do truly important things, like working as assistant human resources director at a marketing firm.

Comments

  1. Gene, have you heard of George Lakoff? He is a linguistics professor who studies cognitive science and philosophy. His book, 'Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things' argues that cognitive science is painting a picture that the very constitution of our bodies affects how we perceive the world. In other words, the sex that we are born with affects, to some extent, how we perceive reality itself. This is not to say that reality is subjective - Lakoff denies this (thankfully). But it does mean that we can't dismiss distinctions and differences between men and women as purely sociological constructs, as sociologists (and feminists) have been doing for decades.

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    1. I've heard of him, but I don't know his work. Contemporary feminism often tries to have this both ways: Whenever someone says "Perhaps women are less suited for role X," they complain bitterly: a Nobel Prize winner can be dismissed from his university post for even joking about this. But when asked to explain why we should work to have more women in (science / engineering / parliament / etc ) the explanation is often that women bring a unique perspective to these activities!

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  2. I have noticed that too. But feminism does not make much sense when you speak in terms of 'equality' and egalitarianism - at least, this has been my observation. It makes more sense when you think about it in terms of pure power - female narcissism marketed as an 'egalitarian' movement. One of the more comical views that feminists have is their condemnation of patriarchal societies. Patriarchal societies are typically seen as being unjust because they are dominated by males. But a tenant of feminism is that it is unjust to discriminate against a group solely based on their gender! Feminists have a real dilemma here - either they say that some patriarchal societies can be just, and swallow the bullet, or they can be inconsistent, and say that they are *never* just or justified. Even professional feminist philosophers have been immune to this strange (male? patriarchal?) thing called logic - and some feminist philosophers actually say that logic itself is a patriarchal invention, and should not hold the weight that it has!

    Hooo boy. Some Progressive religions are more crazy than others.

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