The the buy in for those men at the bottom is that even a lowly man gets to feel like they are better at least than women.
This hasn’t been my experience, most authorities in my life have been women (teachers, bosses, etc). Even upper leadership in the company I currently work for has slightly more women than men. Obviously not everyone has the same experience, but I don’t think the picture you tried to paint is a universal truth.
I don’t think it is a universal truth and never stated as such, particularly since we have a solid century of advocacy and protest dismantling these ideas. It’s more that the original idea of “patriarchy”(which is a single concept within the body of feminism as socio-political theory and feminism is not a monolith ) isn’t usually what people think. It doesn’t mean men overall are the oneswho benefit but rather hierarchical established powers which are still legacy holdings of male dominated structures.
If you are in a space that is female dominated that still is not the overall norm. If you look at the most powerful business empires in the world only 1 in 10 is lead by a female CEO. E
It doesn’t even have to be at the top.
For example : In my industry of film for instance the majority of departments are male dominated and even some of the ones that aren’t hostile to women can have invisible greased poles which keep women at the bottom. It can be simple as bosses hiring on their friends onto crews. If their all male beer and pretzels buddies are their first four staff picks and a crew is only seven people then that can leave less than half the open spaces that are filled by merit. Even if the boss’s motives aren’t overtly sexist their lack of comfort being around women socially and favoring people they feel they relate to with personalities they enjoy because of similarity of life experience can mean that a smaller share of options are available to the unfavored group. The less of a group is represented the less they self advocate as well because they cannot build easy consensus. This means the merit hires are also more vulnerable to being replaced if they speak up or the work pool narrows where the nepotistic ones have security so any dip in the industry can hit those merit groups that much harder.
Fighting patriarchy often requires being conscious of how your personal choices, which are often by no means evil, are potentially narrowing the open spaces actually available to people who do not closely resemble yourself as a man.
It’s not to say that women placed in positions of authority won’t also potentially recreate these structures if they are uncomfortable with the company of men… But examples of Matriarchies are more fragile. Historically they have a habit of collapsing because one feature of patriarchy that matriarchy does not often have is historically patriarchy seeks to physically or socially isolate women from the public sphere and if they cannot do that in their own society they go off an subjugate and enslave women outside of their culture by force. Most Matriarch societies value men for their physical labor over their reproductive qualities (because lineages are always secure) which means that social isolation is simply not on the table whereas patriarchy of antiquity values secluding women to ensure a reproductive lineage. If a group cannot gather in numbers they cannot organize or resist hence why a lot of societies that our modern society is based off of basically kept their women as pets confined to the domestic sphere and told that they as a group were simply expressing a different form of excellence.
Women’s equality is precarious. History is rife with examples of them rising in autonomy before men slamed them back down the into forced servitude once again and re solidifying their dominance over the social sphere.
This hasn’t been my experience, most authorities in my life have been women (teachers, bosses, etc). Even upper leadership in the company I currently work for has slightly more women than men. Obviously not everyone has the same experience, but I don’t think the picture you tried to paint is a universal truth.
I don’t think it is a universal truth and never stated as such, particularly since we have a solid century of advocacy and protest dismantling these ideas. It’s more that the original idea of “patriarchy”(which is a single concept within the body of feminism as socio-political theory and feminism is not a monolith ) isn’t usually what people think. It doesn’t mean men overall are the oneswho benefit but rather hierarchical established powers which are still legacy holdings of male dominated structures.
If you are in a space that is female dominated that still is not the overall norm. If you look at the most powerful business empires in the world only 1 in 10 is lead by a female CEO. E
It doesn’t even have to be at the top.
For example : In my industry of film for instance the majority of departments are male dominated and even some of the ones that aren’t hostile to women can have invisible greased poles which keep women at the bottom. It can be simple as bosses hiring on their friends onto crews. If their all male beer and pretzels buddies are their first four staff picks and a crew is only seven people then that can leave less than half the open spaces that are filled by merit. Even if the boss’s motives aren’t overtly sexist their lack of comfort being around women socially and favoring people they feel they relate to with personalities they enjoy because of similarity of life experience can mean that a smaller share of options are available to the unfavored group. The less of a group is represented the less they self advocate as well because they cannot build easy consensus. This means the merit hires are also more vulnerable to being replaced if they speak up or the work pool narrows where the nepotistic ones have security so any dip in the industry can hit those merit groups that much harder.
Fighting patriarchy often requires being conscious of how your personal choices, which are often by no means evil, are potentially narrowing the open spaces actually available to people who do not closely resemble yourself as a man.
It’s not to say that women placed in positions of authority won’t also potentially recreate these structures if they are uncomfortable with the company of men… But examples of Matriarchies are more fragile. Historically they have a habit of collapsing because one feature of patriarchy that matriarchy does not often have is historically patriarchy seeks to physically or socially isolate women from the public sphere and if they cannot do that in their own society they go off an subjugate and enslave women outside of their culture by force. Most Matriarch societies value men for their physical labor over their reproductive qualities (because lineages are always secure) which means that social isolation is simply not on the table whereas patriarchy of antiquity values secluding women to ensure a reproductive lineage. If a group cannot gather in numbers they cannot organize or resist hence why a lot of societies that our modern society is based off of basically kept their women as pets confined to the domestic sphere and told that they as a group were simply expressing a different form of excellence.
Women’s equality is precarious. History is rife with examples of them rising in autonomy before men slamed them back down the into forced servitude once again and re solidifying their dominance over the social sphere.