Thanks for reading and for your comment. I don't disagree that patriarchy allowed us to build "civilization" as we know it, but that as you have also pointed out, much of that has come at the expense of those men who are not at the apex of the patriarchal dominance hierarchy. The fact that you used the term "disposable" says a lot about what is wrong with this system.
I certainly like my air conditioning, indoor plumbing, modern medicine and such, but I can't help wondering if we would have been better off as a species without a lot of the things that we consider the gains of this sort of progress. Most of the great achievements of a patriarchal society took place on the backs of the people who were oppressed by it. This includes the unpaid labor of women, who kept homes and raised children, freeing up the men in their lives to focus on ideas and innovations, as well as the free labor of slaves, in many cases. The great railroads of America weren’t built by the men who financed them. They were built by the coolies who did the backbreaking labor for a meager wage.
There's a school of thought that the advent of agriculture was one of the worst things that ever happened to human beings.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/the-worst-mistake-in-the-history-of-the-human-race
The advent of agriculture meant that the population could explode, but it also brought with it a host of problems as well as unexpected new side effects. Hunter-gatherers work a lot less than agriculturalists, have a more diverse diet that is healthier and less prone to famine. They play more, and enjoy their families and their communities. They take care of each other and make decisions as a group but there is a high degree of individual autonomy. It's not perfect, but in many ways, a seemingly much better-rounded and balanced way of living. With agriculture, you get new social stratification and a class system, the advent of slavery, the oppression of women, etc.
“Labor roles became more gendered as well. Generally, men did the majority of the fieldwork while women were relegated to child-rearing and household work. Without contributing food (and by association, without control over it), women became second-class citizens. Women also had babies more frequently, on average once every two years rather than once every four in hunter-gatherer societies.
Because somebody had to have control over surplus food, it became necessary to divide society into roles that supported this hierarchy. The roles of an administrator, a servant, a priest, and a soldier were invented. The soldier was especially important because agriculture was so unsustainable compared to hunting and gathering. The fickleness of agriculture ironically encouraged more migration into neighboring lands in search of more resources and warfare with neighboring groups. Capturing slaves was also important since farming was hard work, and more people were working in these new roles.
This division of labor and social inequality had very real consequences. For instance, while the majority of people had disastrous health compared to their hunter-gatherer ancestors, the skeletons of Mycenean royalty had better teeth and were three inches taller than their subjects. Chilean mummies from A.D. 1000 had a fourfold lower rate of bone lesions caused by disease than commoners.”
Patriarchy is a dominance based hierarchy which was always benefitted those near the apex of the pyramid of power the most, often leaving a lot of the rest of the population in horrible conditions. This is to say nothing of the physical and mental cost that all this causes (and has caused) men to suffer. If 70% of all suicides are committed by middle age white men, who are the ones most often bought more fully into the Man Box demands, do we consider that an acceptable price to pay for "civilization"? If so, how civilized is that really?
But that question aside, we have modern democracies like Denmark that have thriving economies, high standards of living, good quality of life for all (not just an elite few), etc., and they have a whole lot less adherence to these Man Box standards. It's one of the ways that patriarchy justifies itself to pretend that we can't have good quality of life unless we operate this way and that it's OK to sacrifice certain people to the "cause" in order to do so.
