I was just rereading this and realized that I missed the subheading the first time. The domination system IS the patriarchy. They are one and the same. Prior to the aspects of patriarchy that we tend to associate with that word humans lived in cooperative (non-domination) societies. It is only with the coercive control of women in order to ensure paternity (which only started 6-9 K years ago) that we start to move away from cooperation societies into ones that are built around social stratification, massive wealth disparity, etc., maintained by violence and the threat of violence. The two go hand in hand. Eisler doesn't use the term patriarchy, because it does have a discreet connotation in many people's minds, but it is an entirely appropriate one.

She says in this interview: "I saw that in tribal societies and in highly advanced industrialized societies, the more that society was rigidly male-dominated, the more it went along with a strong-man-rule approach in the family and the state, and the more it accepted institutionalized social violence — from child-beating and wife-beating to warfare — as part of the social system.

And there was another reason why I wanted to abandon patriarchy. It's a very emotionally-laden word. For some people, the "patriarchs" are the fathers in the Bible who begat and begat and begat. Patriarchy for them is all these guys begetting [laughs]. For other people patriarchy is this 5,000-year horror-story. So I just felt that I needed a new terminology. And because the language didn't give us alternatives to "matriarchy" and "patriarchy," I had to invent them."

But, this is what patriarchy truly is - a dominance hierarchy that hurts pretty much everyone in it, including men.