Modern humanity stands up on two feet about a hundred thousand years ago. An asymmetrical division of labor in which women trap and kill small game and concentrate on foraging, animal skinning and dressing, cooking and caretaking, while men hunt larger game, develops from the necessities of biology. These necessities of biology include the vulnerability in women of more or less constantly, in adulthood, carrying a child on the belly, on the hip, or on the back.
The small foraging family groups develop alliances in a deferred gift-giving system that decreases starvation in lean times, and join larger clans.
By 2500 B.C. women are the most valuable objects of raiding and exchange among clans. The reasons are manifold: they are valuable to keep the tribes' population up and they become the raiders' servants. Witness the maternal lineage in Iceland in the 15th century.
The cultural arrangements of hunting, exchange of women, writing, animal husbandry, religion, slavery, class, private property, agriculture, and raiding for women, cinch the deal women end up having to make: they and their children subordinate themselves to the most powerful man they can find in exchange for not being abducted, raped, degraded, enslaved, and/or killed. Sounds reasonable to me. MRAs call it hypergamy and pretend women just naturally do this sucker-attack-parasite-degrading activity (marrying an old ugly man with money). Naturally it is the men who have put women in this dependent position, because how else will young girls marry old men?
An enormous array of cultural institutions, practices, and symbols develops on top of this devil's bargain, entrenching and obfuscating the deal, including the outrageous hypertrophic crippling of Han women as a status symbol for their husbands.
Are you wondering what "hypertrophic" means? It means overdevelopment, like a peacock's tail or an elephant's tusk. Unnecessary swirls and furls, gigantism, general institutionalized hubris.
For almost five thousand years women and men accept the deal and its hypertrophic manifestations come to feel natural. Civilization lurches along male-sidedly as a florid warrior culture, developing ever-more-lethal weaponry for the endless wars and insatiably accumulating surplus.
Women don't exist in History except in the sense that slaves, horses, and spoils of war exist. Rarely, a woman acts as a temporary stand-in for a royal husband or son. And then there is Hatshepsut.
Some women serve the supernatural masculine icon in nunneries, rather than husbands. Women are kept from literacy, knowledge, economic independence (their work is unpaid), authority, control of their reproductive capacities and sexuality, ownership, custody, mobility, and a public voice. An ideology grows around their degraded status justifying the degradation. And that's not good.
True, they resist here and there all the way through. Individual women try to become independent. A few manage the feat because they are so useful to men; madam/owners of brothels, for instance. And true, their general dependence has not always resulted in absolute tyranny, because their men have a duty of support for them and the children, develop a fondness for them sometimes, and must sometimes answer for mistreatment to women's birth families. But running away inevitably only leads women to another waiting male, a father, brothers, lovers, male control in any case. (I realize women's history in the west sounds like modern Pakistan).
Also true, civilization is not just weaponization; there are beautiful pictures and fine palaces, epic poems and divine music for a few, and for the many, with exceptions, enough food and sex and reproduction. A few women once perched uneasily in those palaces and lorded it over their servants just like their men, but their whereabouts are currently unknown to history, and their social status was contingent anyway. Most women were too busy groaning in childbirth to notice the palaces.
No one is saying the patriarchy is a picnic for most men, either, for those of you who are vociferously wondering. They are sub-classes in the male hierarchy, exploited harshly. They are expected to give their labor and their lives when called upon. Their deal is that they are rewarded with women, as wives, slaves, spoils, or prostitutes. Needless to say, they prefer the deal they have to women taking their jobs plus not becoming wives any more. It must be admitted that there's nothing in Women's Liberation for Western men.
The Patriarchy lasts for a couple of millennia. It works, one might say. The species is still here, right? Right, Wrong? Good? Bad? Just Darwinism at work? After History is read and understood to an adequate extent, does it matter? These folk are dead, bless them, and now we are here for our brief trial on earth. An epic paradigm shift began to flow fifty measly years ago, and has continued to flow like magma. We can make out a new social structure accreting itself like a new volcanic island on the stratified sea-bottom.
Glorious overwriting has always been the purview of men. Let us continue to write, badly, but with our customary verve.
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