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Comment by chongli | Hacker News Reader

Of course there is no "mysterious male cabal", that's a very gross (and unfortunately common) misinterpretation of patriarchy. Patriarchy is the cultural structure which preserves and reinforces traditional gender roles. That's not patriarchy being synonymous with them, just as Buddhism isn't synonymous with the cultural practice of meditation.

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Patriarchy is a gendered term that implies men are in control. Traditional gender roles are reinforced by men AND women.

If traditional gender roles included things like women can't vote or own property, then I could see making a case for calling that patriarchy. In the west there is no such thing though.

>Patriarchy is a gendered term that implies men are in control.

It doesn't even do that. It is an equivalent of 'God did it'.

Men get better treatment: Sexism by the patriarchy.

Whoops, findings were wrong, women are actually getting better treatment: Reverse sexism by the patriarchy.

It is like talking with a creationist.

Patriarchy is a gendered term that implies men are in control

It implies that, given its etymology, but that is not how it is defined in the literature. Tons of idiomatic words and phrases operate that way in our culture. If I were to tell you "break a leg" as you were heading out onto a theatre stage, would you imply maliciousness or benign well-wishing on my part?

I'm going by the definition in the dictionary.

From http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/patriarchy

Full Definition of PATRIARCHY

social organization marked by the supremacy of the father in the clan or family, the legal dependence of wives and children, and the reckoning of descent and inheritance in the male line; broadly : control by men of a disproportionately large share of power

Don't families in Western societies outside of, like, Quebec, "reckon descent and inheritance in the male line", via the vast majority of children adopting the surname of the father and not the mother?

They "reckon descent" by choice since it's legal to use any surname you want.

Definitely not inheritance though. Children of both genders are receiving their inheritance.

You keep invoking the word "legal" as if it has any relevance in this discussion at all; it doesn't. Patriarchy is a structure largely enforced through social mores, not laws (though there are lots of exceptions, obviously).

I continue to use the dictionary definition. Without legal enforcement there is no patriarchy.

lmao. I guess there's no institutional racism, or homophobia, either?

Misogyny is the word you're looking for. That exists, patriarchy doesn't.

Just like slavery is illegal but racism exists, gay marriage is legal but homophobia exists, there is no patriarchy but misogyny exists.

Slavery still exists though, even though it is illegal (not saying anything about western patriarchy).

The thing is, though, that there used to be. White male landowners and business leaders continued to pass power down to their male descendants and controlled the vast majority of political, financial and military power in the United States while denying minorities and women opportunities to gain any control. That lasted around 200 years.

White male landowners also passed great wealth and power down to their daughters. Female offspring weren't being abandoned, they were being raised in the same upper class environment as the males and retained much more power than the vast majority of men and women of lower classes who had essentially no power.

Patriarchy implies men hold some sort of privilege whereas it's really rich people that have the privilege. If all instances of "patriarchy" were replaced with "the upper class" I think we'd have much more accurate and fair representation of reality.

As it stands I don't think you'll ever get the millions upon millions of poor men out there to see themselves as part of the patriarchy, because they hold no power in society.

No, actually, men used to hold legal privileges that women did not. Legally, a poor man had more rights than a rich woman, and though he may have less power in society than a rich woman, he had far more power than his own wife or daughter.

Important note: that is no longer the case. It hasn't been for years. I'm just saying that this actually existed, the Patriarchy was a real thing.

I agree that there actually used to be a patriarchy. Only for a subset of society though. During much of this time period, males slaves couldn't vote or own property either for example.

Regardless, that's not how society works anymore. Trying to redefine patriarchy to "traditional gender roles" strikes me as disingenuous.

Dude, it's been 41 years since the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, which guaranteed that women could have equal access to credit cards in the US. My mom would not have been admitted to Caltech when she applied for colleges because of her gender, no matter how much money she or her family would have had. My mom is not that old. I appreciate the attempt to bring class consciousness to the discussion but just 41 years ago restricted access to basic banking and (non-basic) higher education was based on your genitals and your skin color, as well as how much money you had.

I think there was a much stronger case for the patriarchy existing 41 years ago. I'm not saying it never existed, just that it doesn't exist now.

At the time the vast majority of men and women didn't have access to consumer credit or higher education. I think a common mistake made in these discussions is to generalize the perks some elite men had to all men. In reality most people (men and women) have always had it pretty rough.

"Banking on the Unbanked" (behind a paywall, sorry; by Stafford in 1983) says that in the 1970s 60% of Americans had a bank account. All the women in that group had to have a male family member sign for it, remember. 60% of the US population: a firm majority of the population did have access to banking by the 1960s and 1970s, contradicting your statement.

Easier to check [1]: in 1970, 55.2 percent of graduating high school men and 48.5 percent of graduating high school women enrolled in college. Again, for men a majority, and close to half for women.

A common mistake is to forget how fast (and how slow) history can move. Certainly most people have always had it pretty rough, but my life is easier now that I can get a bank account without my husband's permission. Even one generation ago that wasn't exactly the case.

[1] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d99/d99t187.asp

I was talking about credit, not banking accounts. According to this:

https://www.bostonfed.org/education/ledger/ledger04/sprsum/c...

> The use of consumer credit had become a fixture of everyday life. In 2000, more than 70 percent of U.S. households had at least one gener- al-purpose credit card — MasterCard, Visa, Optima, or Discover. Thirty years earlier, in 1970, the number was only 16 percent.

Your point is well taken about bank accounts though. What you say about history moving fast and slow is very interesting. In this case it seems to have moved very fast. Did you feel you had any trouble getting a bank account as a women in your generation? My wife set up most of our accounts so I can only assume it's not a problem. That is indeed a very large change for one generation.

The university enrollment data is very interesting. The data you linked to only goes to 1998 but still shows a 15% increase in enrollment.

Even more interesting how the gender ratio has changed:

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_306.10.a...

1976: 53% male, 47% female = 6% difference

2012: 43% male, 57% female = 14% difference

Women dominate higher education now much more than med did in 1976.

> White male landowners also passed great wealth [...] down to their daughters

No they didn't. The money went to the sons. The daughters were kept by their husbands.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primogeniture

Those women were NOT living in poverty. They had access to the money, land and benefits of being upper class. They had servants and slaves. They didn't have to work or labor to survive.

While the law was clear that the men owned the money (I agree that this situation IS patriarchy btw), rich women enjoyed access to that money and power as well.

so it was a patriarchy and the men did have all the power and control of money and land and only passed those on to sons and...what exactly were you arguing against in this subthread again?

There existed women in rich households? I think that was pretty obvious.

> Patriarchy implies men hold some sort of privilege

There are plenty of things that men usually get to avoid because of their sex. The majority of sexual harassment, sexual violence, domestic abuse, pay discrepancies based on sex, the list goes on and on. All of that is even worse for lower class women and even worse then that for lower class women of color. What would you call those advantages besides privilege?

You list a lot of things that are definitely not proven. This very article is discussing the nature of the pay discrepancies based on sex.

Even if we take what you say as facts, there are many things women get to avoid because of their sex (warning, as speculative as your list): incarceration, violent crime, stressful manual labor, less representation in higher ed, weakened paternity rights...

I think it makes a lot of sense that differences between the sexes would offer different advantages and disadvantages. I don't see any one gender having a monopoly on advantage.

> pass power down to their male descendants

Because it makes sense. Passing money and power to a son will help him get a "better" bride. On the other hand, a daughter from a powerful family, even with no own money, will be able to marry a rich, powerful man and improve the overall family's power.

Power was far greater correlated with wealth than with being male. So while society was more of a patriarchy than a matriarchy, it really wasn't either.

You can have both a class system based on economics/birth and a gendered power dynamic. Society is complex.

Power dynamic is vastly dominated by wealth, one wonders why a disproportional focus is given on the vastly less influential gender dynamic.

Because it's better for the rich people if there's a war between men and women rather than a war between the rich and the poor.

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