Oh, FFS! Your condescending psuedo-philosophical posturing is really not adding anything to this equation. Being authentic doesn’t mean you get to rape and pillage as you might want. It means you are not constrained by boxes within the prevailing civil society which dictate to you who you must be, how you must act, what it not allowed for your gender, etc. And you know that but feel compelled to defend patriarchy because you think its defending men — it’s not. Patriarchy is a social system based in a dominance hierarchy. It negatively affects both men and women, and it is upheld by both men and women. It’s not about men in an individual context. You are the one who is deeply confused.
And it’s not a feminist stance to note that half of all women who are murdered are killed by men who claim to actually love them — and who cares if it is? It’s an actual statistic that speaks loudly to a culture of male possessiveness where anger is one of the few emotions that is deemed allowable for men. Think like a sociologist rather than like an individual whose honor has been impugned and you begin to see the picture that kind of statistic paints and what it says about our society as a whole. Of course all suffering matters (did you really even say that? 🙄). That’s why trying to understand what is driving certain major pockets of suffering is valuable. Because you can’t improve a situation that you don’t even understand.
White lives matter just as much as Black lives, but White people don’t face the same kinds of systemic assaults on their lives and safety that Black people do. That’s why Black Lives Matter is an appropriate statement and movement. Men suffer systemic issues at the hands of society also, but they are quite often different than the ones that women face. Only about 5% of men are killed by current or former female love partners. I am under no obligation to speak about all of the ills of society at one time. Talking about the societal dynamics that harm women doesn’t negate or erase the ones that harm men. That’s dominance hierarchy zero-sum thinking. Why don’t you ponder that philosophy for a bit?
“What is important to note, though, is that once paternity becomes important (only started about 10K years ago), controlling women is inevitable, because only by controlling women can it be reliably known who the father is. There is an irreducible distance between the biological father and the offspring that can only be eliminated fully by imprisoning a woman and preventing any other man from having access to her. This is why patriarchal societies by necessity become societies of control and separation (not just for women, but for everyone). We have become so habituated to this state of affairs that most of us don’t even see that it is our own creation.”
“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.”
