Sunday School

[AutumnParticipant]

_Robert_ wrote:

You can’t demand egalitarianism and then when the ship is going down, it’s women and children first in the lifeboat. That was the cost men paid to have their “patriarchy”.

It wasn’t the cost: It was literally a mechanism for retaining that inequality.

[Simon PayntonParticipant]

Unseen wrote:

“Solidarity” is a political term and it’s bizarre to talk about solidarity outside the human species. In nature, if anything, the females accept their role and don’t feel a need to conspire against males. Such would involve a degree of intent that would be absurd to apply to the lower species.

Have you read “Chimpanzee Politics” by Frans de Waal?  Why do you imagine, off the top of your head, that female chimps and bonobos are passive recipients of whatever happens to them?  The females are obliged to get together to stop each other being harassed for sex by males.  Female chimpanzees tend to spend their young years exiled from the group to avoid harassment.

That patriarchy is unfair to women ignores the tradeoffs which are unfair to men. Women, on the whole, for example, look forward to parenthood in a way that men do not. They prefer to be the parent primarily responsible for childrearing. They are happier with stability than men. Men (or patriarchs) do not force this on them.

Those things are not to do with patriarchy, but parenting, which is different, although both are methods of reproduction.

The alternative model is egalitarianism where males attempt to attract females by being an ideal mate, instead of dominating and controlling them into reproduction.

With individual exceptions, of course, that is exactly the situation we are in now. I, for example, have a daughter and did not dominate or control my now ex into getting pregnant.

Yes – patriarchy in the human world is set up differently from in the rest of the great apes.  Where other great apes live a competitive life, humans live a largely cooperative life.  Where great ape males compete to control females, humans cooperate to control all their females via social norms (ideal ways to be cooperative in otherwise competitive situations).

So, humans have society-level and family-level patriarchy.  Those countries that are the most patriarchal have the highest level of wife-beating, for example.  I suspect that patriarchal behaviour in the home can easily tip over into abuse, even if the man is not a narcissist.

If you go to the typical magazine rack, there will always be magazines directed at women and devoted to weddings. From their cover art, it will be clear they are not directed at the male market.

Many prospective brides find it frustrating that they can’t get their prospective husbands nearly as involved in wedding planning as they’d like.

I believe, that scientists believe, that on the whole, men invest in sex while women invest in relationships.  So men feel more jealous if their women sleep with another man; while a woman feels more jealous if her man falls in love with another woman.  This would not be surprising given the different gametes (millions of sperm versus a few eggs).  I know these are just crude stereotypes.

• This reply was modified 1 month, 3 weeks ago by  Simon Paynton.

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