It is not human nature. Its only 10K years old. For 97% of human history we did not live this way.
“If we want to get serious about living out our evolutionary hardwiring, we’d do better to examine the human desire for collaboration and community, the emphasis on pleasure and partnership rather than hierarchy, and to look for ways to bring those more fully into our current culture.”
Today, most anthropologists would agree, regardless of their stance on issues such as the universality of male dominance, that an entirely different order of male dominance became associated with the rise of the large and populous agricultural states organized in terms of classes. The patriarchal systems that emerged brought women for the first time under the direct control of fathers and husbands with few cross-cutting sources of support. Women as wives under this system were not social adults, and women’s lives were defined in terms of being a wife. Women’s mothering and women’s sexuality came to be seen as requiring protection by fathers and husbands. Protecting unmarried women’s virginity appears to go along with the idea of the domestication of women and an emphasis on a radical dichotomy between the public and the private sphere.
I know way more women than you do and have lived my entire life as a woman. When I was younger I was routinely asked if I were a model. And yet, I have never once in my life been at a place where I could have my pick of men. No woman has that — it’s a myth.
You have been trained to blame women rather than the social system that disadvantages us all. How do I know that? Because most of your sentences begin with blaming women for something and denying that patriarchy even exists. You don’t see me blanketly blaming men for anything at all. That’s the difference between us.
I’ve already told you that I’m not a feminist, so trying to debate me about things that some amorphous group that I am not a part of believes is yet another red-herring to not have to have a real discussion.
Also, go ask your mom and grandma about their experiences with pervasive harassment throughout their lives. I dare you! Ask them about the times that they’ve been afraid of walking down the street because a man was following them or saying inappropriate things to them. Ask them if they’ve ever been groped by a stranger. It’s a very common experience. Ask them about if they’ve ever been pressured into doing something with a man that they didn’t want to do. You started out by saying that it would be wrong to discount rape as an issue, and then you go on to discount the pervasive experience of 95–100% of women as being valid.
“I live in a nice town where folks are friendly and it’s safer than many places. I don’t lock my doors during the daytime, although all the other women I know do and several will not even open the door to a delivery man if they are at home by themselves. They aren’t feminists for the most part. A couple of them are Trump voters. Maybe they watch too much news and CSI, but they also all have multiple stories of their own about the times that they were followed, harassed, groped, assaulted and raped. And that’s not just in my neighborhood or town. What #MeToo really showed is that the vast majority of women have had some kind of experience with sexual violence. It’s only now that we are beginning to talk about it more openly that we can really see that. And that’s a good thing. You can’t solve a problem that you don’t acknowledge even exists, and we as a society need to keep acknowledging that this is a real and pervasive problem. A problem that feminism did not create and that you don’t have to be a feminist to have experienced.”
“I don’t know about you, but I don’t spend much of my life feeling vulnerable. I’ve come to learn that women spend most of their social lives with ever-present, unavoidable feelings of vulnerability. Stop and think about that. Imagine always feeling like you could be at risk, like you were living with glass skin.
As modern men we must seek out danger. We choose adventures and extreme sports in order to feel like we’re in jeopardy. We make games of our vulnerability. That’s how differently men see the world from women.(Obviously, stated with full acknowledgment that there’s a vibrant community of extreme athletes that are women, who regularly risk their safety as well. However, women don’t need to engage in adrenalin sports to feel at-risk.)
Now, I stand about a finger of tequila under six feet. I work out and would say I’m in decent shape, which means when I’m out alone at night, I rarely ever fear for my safety. Many men know exactly what I mean. Most women have no idea what that feels like — to go wherever you want in the world, at any time of day or night, and feel you won’t have a problem. In fact, many women have the exact opposite experience.
A woman must consider where she is going, what time of day it is, what time she will arrive at her destination and what time she will leave her destination, what day of the week is it if she will be left alone at any point … the considerations go on and on because they are far more numerous than you or I can imagine. Honestly, I can’t conceive of having to think that much about what I need to do to protect myself at any given moment in my life. I relish the freedom of getting up and going, day or night, rain or shine, Westside or downtown. As men we can enjoy this particular extreme luxury of movement and freedom of choice. In order to understand rape culture, remember this is a freedom that at least half the population doesn’t enjoy.”
My point about “low-status men” is that it’s a patriarchal construct. It only exists within the social Darwinism of the dominance hierarchy. But instead of recognizing that, you instead want to blame women.
Here’s what I really think about men:
The social system of patriarchy began around the same time as agriculture- about 10K years ago. Prior to that (97% of human history), people lived in highly cooperative and egalitarian bands of about 25–50. But with agriculture, for the first time, you have substantial personal property, property that you’d like to go to your heirs. In order to ensure paternity (hence the name patriarchy) women had to be controlled and their sexuality policed.
What resulted was not just stratification between men and women, but a larger stratification of society in general for the very first time. You’ve got a social system that is based in coercion and control — a pyramid-shaped dominance hierarchy.
“Our social structure puts a small number of powerful men at the top of a pyramid, with an ever-widening base going down the pyramid, as the access to power and prestige declines. There is a gendered aspect, and more women are closer to the base of the pyramid than they are to the elite apex of power.
In the end, patriarchy gives only a few men access to power in society, and most men some small access to power in relation to women, robbing all men of core aspects of their humanity.”
