Blessings of the Breasts and the Womb

Intro

So,

J.S. Kasimir

has posted a response in the ‘Inevitability of Patriarchy’ letter exchange. I definitely advise you to read it. As I read it, it is about 1/3 dealing with the issue, and 2/3 combination wishful thinking and hope for the future.¹

It definitely answers one of my questions: What is being proposed as an alternative to patriarchy is ‘meritocracy’.  I think that is an interesting answer in several ways. One of which might be… yeah, we agree. Cause patriarchy is the most meritocratic of the various systems. But that’s kind of cheating :)

Definition

As we get into this post, I want to remind my readers what the definition is for patriarchy that I am using, that I am saying is ‘inevitable’:

A patriarchal society, both from the old definitions and from an examination of history, is one in which fathers rule. Societies with strong family jurisdictions where the male head of multiple households, even after he is dead, continues to have strong actual authority. People actually do what he says. Father-ruler.

Thus a patriarchal society is one in which fathers rule, and the more that fathers (and the adjacent) rule, the stronger a society is patriarchally.

And I strongly emphasised the issue of ‘adjacent’. Thus, the grandmother is ‘adjacent’ to the grandfather, and the father is ‘adjacent’ to the grandfather. Even the blushing bride is only a couple of steps away from the grandmother.

So, just to underline the point, I am NOT saying that ‘male rule’ is what is inevitable. That modern confusion is part of what I am arguing AGAINST.

Blessings of the Breast and the Womb

Another important part of the definition, explained at length in the ‘Problem with Patterns of Patriarchy’ post, is that of offspring. I said that the budding patriarch must:

1) Have lots of legitimate children

2) Have power over them

3)  Have that power over them carry on down through the generations

and that

Every time a patriarch engenders a new child, he potentially increases his patriarchalness. Why would women get married younger in a patriarchal society? Well, because the earlier they marry, the more children they are able to bear for their husbands, and the more adjacent they both will be to patriarchy! The younger a man gets married, the more time he will have to influence his children!

Now JS doesn’t mention this aspect except in passing: 

As humans, we should be able to understand that women are not wombs, just as men are not sperm. Women are not baby factories to sell off in “marriage.”

To understand the problem with this statement, we need to go back to the beginning of the post:

the most intelligent and/or physically capable members were given status within prehistoric clans. Ideally, high-ranking members were both strategic and athletic. Given that most males will outperform in the athletics department, it’s no surprise that men were given status much faster than women

(The post says considerably more than that, and I suggest you read all of it.)

 The issue, then, is ‘athletics’. By this, I assume is meant the dozens of ways in which biological men tend to outperform biological women in physical and adjacent activities. We will explore more of that later, but here I wish to point out a big but unmentioned factor in that outperformance: the reality of pregnancy and lactation. Or, as my title, “The Breasts and the Womb”.

Negative

First of all, looking at the situation in a purely negative way, women get pregnant. In a primitive society, they get pregnant easily, and they get pregnant often. And in a primitive society, their breasts are needed to keep the infant alive.

So, from a purely physical standpoint, a woman cannot be as prominent in battle as a man. (A woman who is having sex, that is. We will deal with the other kind below). In pregnancy, she becomes less and less physically able, and in nursing, she is forced to carry around a child, or he will die.

There is no way to manage that that will produce women who are a man’s equal in battle overall as an average. Battle, hunting, any of the ‘outside’ jobs that require physical strength, travel, etc.

Positive

The positive aspects of pregnancy and lactation are even more significant.  In order for any society, right now, at peace, high tech, to keep their population up, it is necessary for the average woman to have 2.2 children. That live… aborting them doesn’t count.

If we are going to look at what makes a society successful, a society that doesn’t reproduce itself will die. A society that doesn’t increase its numbers will not compete against other societies, so it, too, will die.

In a primitive situation, or one of war, that ‘2.2’ number is too low. Possibly far too low. A  primitive and/or war-torn society might need to produce four or even five children per woman on average just to keep its population stable! War, disease, disasters… these all take their toll demographically.

Now, let’s bring our warrior Amazon back in. Suppose there are some women who forgo sex in order to do their best at war, hunting, travel, etc. Physically, they still won’t be up to their male peers, but the result of their very existence will be to drive up the number of children the other women have to produce in order for their society to survive.

There is a difference between a woman who falls in battle and a man. When a man dies, another man can impregnate his woman. If a woman dies, that source of children is gone. One man could, if hard pressed, run around and impregnate a dozen women. (One might wish to examine the definition of ‘hard pressed’ in this circumstance.) But one woman, be she impregnated by ever so many men, will never produce more children.

When it comes to cultures, demography is destiny.

Outdoor Plumbing

I wish to reiterate the point I made briefly above. There are not merely one or two differences between men and women; there are thousands. Even the basic issue of outdoor plumbing… well, there’s a reason that women in primitive societies wear skirts. In our conversation in a comment thread, I suggested that if we are going for meritocracy, a system where if someone can do something, then they should be allowed to do something, I suggested (partially kidding, but a serious point) that we should have co-ed bathrooms (meaning the room with the toilet in it), changing rooms, showers, and sports teams. Sure, girls can’t use urinals very effectively, but everyone can use a toilet, right?²  Showers work the same for all of us. And maybe some guys want to play field hockey!

My point is that many of the ‘sexist’ rules we have in place are there because we know what would happen if we ‘treated everyone equally’. Anatole France once said, “In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.” (Except he said it in French: La majestueuse égalité des lois, qui interdit au riche comme au pauvre de coucher sous les ponts, de mendier dans les rues et de voler du pain. It’s actually better in French.) And we get the point, eh? The rich don’t need to sleep under bridges… they own mansions. And the men don’t need their own team… the women can’t compete.

I’ve lived overseas and used public toilets where men and women just went in and did their thing. No biggy. But the reason that we make a difference in our society is because one of the sexes (and it isn’t the men) feels vulnerable when the other is around, especially if they are undressed. (And maybe a bit of puritanism that says that boys shouldn’t get to see or even be around girls when they are undressed.)

System vs Individualism

One problem with ‘meritocracy’ is that it is a goal, not a system. We all know that if we gave everyone a million dollars today, then the result (other than massive inflation) would be that half of us wouldn’t be millionaires tomorrow. Similarly, if we give everyone an equal opportunity to ‘compete’, the ‘competition’ would quickly involve (as it does now) all sorts of issues that weren’t on the job posting, and the best wouldn’t arrive at the top. Your father is a friend of the boss. The HR guy liked the way your resume was formatted.

Just look at college admissions.

A ‘meritocratic’ system can only be a goal; the actual system would have to have some flesh and blood to it. It would have to be a system that used objective testing (and thus benefit people who were good at tests) or interviews (thus benefiting people who do well in interviews), or any of a dozen different processes for figuring out who was the most meritocratic, and for keeping them. And what would it do with competition? What if the best person for the job is working for another company?

No system can be designed at the level of the individual. It has to be designed with processes that attempt to find, hire, and give wages to the individual. Each individual then has to fit into the entire society… of the company and the overall culture. What if the best meat packer can’t get along with anyone? What if the best general keeps making PR mistakes? (I just made that example up. It bears no resemblance to any general, living or dead. Say, who died in 1948 just to pull a number out of a hat.)

It used to be that employers would deliberately prefer to hire married men with families. It seems prejudicial and stupid to us… but was it? The married man was supporting a wife and children… who were part of the society and culture that the employer was also part of! He was helping raise the next generation of the society that the employer, himself, was part of. It was kind of like ‘buy local’.

I think that if JS and I were to sit down and go over all of the details of a meritocratic system, we would agree on a LOT of points. But there are lots of others where I would just grin and shake my head. I have this feeling that there are a lot of times when the ‘meritocratic’ system would be set aside in order to promote some other value (like females getting to change sans the male gaze) and other times when I can just picture the feminists howling with anger at the result of the policies, because the men become engineers or the women nurses.

How many laws and/or legal principles are in place that, either in letter or in practice, mean that companies cannot hire the best man (ooops, person) for the job?

Not ‘men’ but Fathers and Adjacent

I’ve made this point above, but I’m going to give it its own section: the kind of patriarchy that I am saying is inevitable is not one where ‘men rule’. It is one where fathers and adjacent rule. And where the ultimate ‘patriarch’ is the one who has been dead for two hundred years!

It is one where women can be ‘adjacent’, where childless men who, say, run a company can be ‘adjacent’. Where important military leaders can be ‘adjacent’. George Washington didn’t even have any children… but he is called ‘The Father of the Country’!

Conclusion

I wish to remind everyone that the issue in these posts is not what kind of society we would like to have. Yes, I am a Christian, and yes, I think that patriarchy, properly defined, is God-ordained. But what I am arguing here is that it is inevitable because it is intrinsic to the human condition.

Remember the bloke in the car park? The one that the lady wished Big Brother would prevent from raping her? He, like the poor, will always be with us.

We can use our technological prowess and a multitude of laws to try to produce an artificial equality that will allow us to pretend that we can produce a meritocratic society in something like what JS would like to see. But we will need to run like the Red Queen to keep it going. The least thing… war, pandemic, catastrophe, social upheaval… and it will all fall down.

Indeed, even its success is proving its enemy. I understand that in the countries that have made the most strides toward equality in what men and women are allowed to do, the Scandinavian countries, they have the most number of women wanting to be teachers and nurses, and the most number of men wanting to be engineers. There just aren’t thousands of eager Swedish women running out to learn to be lumberjacks, or thousands of Norwegian men studying to be midwives.

And everything that I have read says that our societies are dying, demographically. There are whole islands in Japan that have no OB. The country is practically a nursing home. Hardly any children are being born to replace the elderly.

Father rule is the inevitable drift of all successful societies. Societies which ignore the fundamental principles of patriarchy will find themselves in the trash heap of history. This discussion, as I understand it, is based upon the facts of human existence… how we are created, our biology, psychology, sociology, demography, and anthropology, to name a few aspects. The production of strong and fruitful families is a cornerstone of every successful society.

Patriarchy, as I define it, is inevitable. It will not produce the same effects, to the same extent, at the same time, in all cultures. Nor will it always be at the same level. It will rise and fall, ebb and flow. And technological change will affect it.

But on the worldwide sociological level, it is inevitable.

Links

The (In)Evitability of Patriarchy

Why Two Parents Are the Ultimate Privilege

1. Some very brief examples: “If a woman realizes her purpose is to be the leader of a family, community, or organization, then we must respect her calling.” This is his desire and admonition, not a statement of inevitablity or fact. and “Patriarchal systems are a relic of the past. True matriarchs and patriarchs—founding members of bloodlines—shall always exist, yes, but the system of continuous rule based on sex is immoral. We cannot turn back the tide on women’s rights to reinstall pure patriarchies.” That quote is literally saying that the pressure will be in one direction (toward patriarchy), and calling on people to resist!

2. A serious application of this point. I have been to several conferences and the like where there was a considerable line at the women’s restroom, and no line for the men’s. I remember we were at an airport one time and I had to wait for my girls quite a while. In a system that works in a ‘can do should do’ system, there was no reason why the women’s overflow shouldn’t have used the men’s room. We had plenty of toilets free. Hardly anyone was using them. Given my ‘lived in African and Europe’ mentality I think it is pretty stupid that girls aren’t allowed in the men'ss room.