Patriarchy is 6-9 thousand years old, less than 3% of human history. Prior to that we did not have matriarchies (which would also be a dominance hierarchy but with women oppressing men). What we did have is egalitarian societies - something that is supported by anthropologist of all sorts, both male and female. It has nothing to do with feminism. It's what the data indicates.
I suggest you read this for the details (or perhaps some of the 25 other stories I've written on this topic, filled with citations from anthropologists and science publications:
“FOR 5000 years, humans have grown accustomed to living in societies dominated by the privileged few. But it wasn’t always this way. For tens of thousands of years, egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies were widespread. And as a large body of anthropological research shows, long before we organized ourselves into hierarchies of wealth, social status and power, these groups rigorously enforced norms that prevented any individual or group from acquiring more status, authority or resources than others.*
Decision-making was decentralized and leadership ad hoc; there weren’t any chiefs. There were sporadic hot-blooded fights between individuals, of course, but there was no organized conflict between groups. Nor were there strong notions of private property and therefore any need for territorial defense.”
(The quote above is from an article in New Scientist)
Christopher Boehm is an anthropologist and primatologist who is currently the Director of the Jane Goodall Research Center at University of Southern California. He believes that suppressing our primate ancestors’ dominance hierarchies by enforcing these egalitarian norms was a central adaptation of human evolution. Enhanced cooperation lowered the risks of Paleolithic life for small, isolated bands of humans and was likely crucial to our survival and evolutionary success.
I've never asserted anything at all about a grand conspiracy against women. Patriarchy is a social system that came into being around the time of agriculture (something that is widely agreed upon) Anyone who doesn't acknowledge that is a crackpot with an agenda. It brought with it for the first time, not only a power differential between men and women, but also gross wealth disparity and social classes, which did not exist before this time. It's about not only the coercive control of women for the first time in history, but also the coercive control of anyone who could be dominanted through aggression (weaker men, racial or religious minorities, and in modern times, sexual minorities).
"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 dichtomy between the public and the private sphere."
What you are asserting is not logical and the evidence does not support it. It's a story, straight out of the dominance hierarchy of patriarchy that things have always been that way in order to justify the social system.
Based on our prior conversation in which you got showed up left and right as being entirely off base, I am confident that I have a much better understanding of and fluency with the most up to date theories of evolutionary history that you do, so I'll not be debating you further on this subject. My 25 or so well researched and thoroughly documented stories on the subject speak for themselves.
“Çatalhöyük was a large proto-agricultural settlement in what is now Turkey, existing from approximately 7100 BCE to 5700 BCE. At its height, the population numbered around 10,000, but all evidence is that the inhabitants lived a very peaceful and egalitarian existence. We know this is the case because Çatalhöyük is one of the most thoroughly excavated archeological sites in the world.
Archeological evidence indicates that most large scale violence occurred in the world around 8,000 BCE or earlier, with a few instances that took place later, with none older than 13,000 BCE. So it was really only around the time that this part of the fertile crescent was thriving that the first vestiges of systematic violence began creeping into the human experience. By way of context, Sumer would not be established until 4000 BCE, nearly two thousand years after Çatalhöyük declined and disappeared.
It also seems highly unlikely that this large proto-agricultural society would have been able to maintain order and to enforce egalitarianism if it had evolved from a social system that came out of a dominance hierarchy. If the people had been used to chieftains, social classes and wealth disparity, it doesn’t seem possible that they would have been able to successfully embrace this very different kind of organizational structure for such a sustained period of time. It is infinitely more likely that this was a continuation of the social structure used by Paleolithic hunter-gatherer bands, who even as they grew in numbers and began to acquire more belongings still maintained the cooperative evolutionary strategy that had brought them this far.”
