What makes you so sure the world has moved on? 25 years is 1 generation and just because a law changes doesn’t mean that attitudes necessarily do. If they did, we would have no more racism after 1964. Meanwhile, that isn’t actually the case, now is it? In other words, there are still plenty of people in the world today who think that a wife’s body belongs to her husband — some of those people are female even.
Your golf club response makes little sense. The clubs that still have no independent female members are the biggest and most prominent ones. Augusta only started allowing women in 2012 — and it started with just 2, one of whom was Condoleeza Rice. Even golf clubs that do allow women as members still overwhelmingly see them as antecedents of men. For example, tournament winners are listed as Mrs. John Stevens and not Kathy Stevens. This is common practice in all country clubs everywhere. The standard isn’t whether it’s all or nothing (or less than it used to be) — the standard is what are the current pervasive attitudes. You’ve shown me nothing that indicates that pervasive attitudes about marriage have actually shifted.
Refusing to acknowledge my personal experiences and those that I have personally collected from others is a patriarchal stance. It’s a way of dismissing me as being irrelevant — which is a dominance posture. Meanwhile, survey is a common method used by scientists to gather quantitative data all of the time. I know what I’m talking about from the inside out. You are talking about something that you don’t actually truly understand as an outsider imaging how it might be. 🙄
If you don’t see the relevance of cooperation in relationship dynamics then you don’t actually understand what the term patriarchy means. It’s a social system that is based in dominance hierarchy. Cooperative, partnership-oriented relationships (as are seen in true ethical non-monogamy) are the antithesis of this. That right there was the main point of my original comment. The fact that you missed that means you are persisting in talking about something that you don’t even understand. But you won’t back off of it even so, because that’s not what the dominance hierarchy of patriarchy allows for.
Weddings and the father giving the bride to her new husband is a perfect illustration of how patriarchal paradigms are deeply ingrained in our society’s understanding of and expectations of what marriage is — a dominance hierarchy where the man is seen as “the head” of the family. The fact that most people don’t stay married means they just go on to serial monogamy. That’s not some form of polyamory at all. Poly is becoming more acceptable, but has little to do with what you’ve said (again, talking about what you don’t even understand). We’re still a society that overwhelmingly believes in monogamy and in hierarchy in every aspect of life — including intimate relationships.
What you can envision for poly relationships is irrelevant since there is no one way to do poly and each relationship is co-created by the people who are involved in it. There are no set roles or rules as there are in heterosexual monogamous relationships. This is a big part of the reason that there is no inherent hierarchy. So, once again, you’ve kind of made my point for me…………..
