What Is Patriarchy Really?

Because if we don’t understand all the components we can’t combat the ways it harms us all

I’ve had more than one man ask me in the comments section of my stories on the dominance-based hierarchy, “Why do we have to bring patriarchy into the equation? Isn’t that a separate thing?” The short answer to that is No, patriarchy is the exact right term. In fact, I only add dominance hierarchy to help diffuse some of the knee-jerk reactions that people often have to a term that they think they already know the meaning of. Patriarchy isn’t a synonym for men, and it’s not only about male primacy.

Patriarchy is a dominance-based hierarchy system of society or government in which men hold the power and women are largely excluded from it. Up until about 50 years ago in this country, there were laws and overt social mores that upheld exactly this. But, some have said, “We don’t have that now.” It’s true that the US no longer has laws that afford different rights to men than to women, but aside from the fact that the legacy of those laws and mores lives on in our cultural subconscious, there is more to patriarchy than just a gendered power differential. We absolutely are still living in a patriarchy.

When group stability is important for individual advantage, selection will favor active peacemaking and cooperation in our closest relatives and ourselves.

Up until about 6–9 thousand years ago, most humans lived in egalitarian enclaves were taking care of everyone in the group was the primary survival strategy. Paleolithic hunters and gatherers collectively fed the whole tribe on a routine basis, with gatherers typically providing the bulk of the daily sustenance, just as it is in many current foragers tribes. Hunting is hit and miss, but knowing where to find the 75 or so different plants and animals you can forage is a much more reliable food source.

Organisms that work well in groups tend to have an evolutionary advantage. We have evolved as a highly social species, in part, because it kept us alive. Paleolithic hunter-gather tribes shared their resources amongst the members of their clan and most likely engaged in cooperative breeding as well. In addition, they also traded members with nearby clans in order to prevent inbreeding because most tribes of 20–50 were extended family.

As primatologist Frans de Waal has noted, “Destabilization of the social resource network decreases group stability and efficiency and lowers the average fitness benefit derived from cooperation. When group stability is important for individual advantage, selection will favor active peacemaking and cooperation in our closest relatives and ourselves.” (emphasis mine)

This all changed with the onset of patriarchy just a few thousand years ago. Not only did paternity suddenly become important for the first time, resulting in the social and sexual control of women, but other changing conditions brought about an entirely new social dynamic that coincided somewhat with the agricultural revolution. For the first time ever, a class system arose in which some people had better access to resources and power than their neighbors. Gross wealth disparity became a thing for the first time. Humans went from cultures largely based on caring for their tribe as a survival strategy to only caring for their immediate family — often at the expense of others around them.

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.”

Yes, the agricultural revolution made us unequal, but a large part of that inequality had to do with gender. Might makes right not only extended to the military and political arena, but it also became firmly entrenched in the home. A father gave his daughter in marriage to another man when he decided to do so for whatever economic or other reason he determined. And this woman went from being the property of her father to the property of her husband, for him to treat in any way that he saw fit.

All states made “wife beating” illegal by 1920. However, only since the 1970s has the criminal justice system begun to treat domestic violence as a serious crime, not as a private family matter.

“Until the 1970s, the rape laws in every state in the union included an exception if the rapist and the victim were husband and wife. In 1993, all 50 states had finally eliminated the “marital rape exception.” But the effects of these archaic exceptions persist and interfere with spousal rape prosecutions in some states.”

A patriarchal dominance hierarchy uses any and all weapons at its disposal to maintain traditional power. Sometimes this looks like people bullying each other to gain a higher place in the imagined societal pecking order, and those people might fit into any and all demographics. Mean girls exist and are a real problem. Sometimes brown people of one race treat other brown people of a different race with disrespect for their own hierarchical reasons. But none of that detracts from the fact that a patriarchal dominance hierarchy has long had and still does have a gendered component, and in the US, a white component as well. If aliens were to try to learn about our country through the media, including news broadcasts, they would conclude that white men make up the vast majority of our citizenry, rather than the 30% of the population that they do.

Until 50 years ago, white men held a dominant social position by law and custom. That hasn’t totally evaporated just because we’ve changed some laws and made a little progress. I have a lot of empathy for the way that the patriarchal dominance hierarchy hurts most men too. Having a modicum of societal advantage doesn’t necessarily feel all that advantageous when you are constantly having to vie for your place in the dominance-based hierarchy. Most men, unless they are near the apex of the pyramid, don’t have a lot of conscious awareness of the ways that patriarchy is still well and fully in effect. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t there though, even if certain aspects of it are not carried out with conscious malice.

Not only are women to be (consciously or subconsciously) dominated, but any individuals or classes of people that are deemed to be weaker or inferior will be because it is a zero-sum system. If you don’t win, you lose, so it’s imperative to always try to appear to be the dominant one in any interpersonal interaction. Racism is a form of patriarchy. So is homophobia. So is garden variety bullying. Much of this happens on a subconscious level through implicit bias.

Here is something that I recently said to a man who was complaining that I was using the word patriarchy as a part of the description of what a dominance hierarchy is. His thesis was that it was putting men on the defensive to do so.

If I use correct terminology, and explain what I mean by it, it is because I think it's imporant for people to understand all the aspects of this social system and how they fit together. That's my whole raisons d'être with these sorts of stories. If some people refuse to listen to that, it's the price I'm willing to pay for many others finally truly understanding the elements of the social system and how it functions - something I am often thanked for.

As I said before, gender is a not the only aspect of this but it is a very, very important one. Pretending that isn't the case because it feels uncomfortable to you or anyone else isn't really my concern. And although this social system is upheld by the society as a whole, and it wouldn't be fair to say it is a "conspiracy" there nonetheless have been hundreds if not thousands of years of laws that were made by men (women weren't allowed to make laws until very recently) which codified and perpetuated this marginalization and they fought tooth and nail against its ouster. 

It took nearly 100 years of constant agitation, protest, and advocacy for women to get the vote. Although there were women who opposed it, it is historically correct to say that the bulk of the the conscious, vehement, and intentional opposition to that came from men. So, let's not try to rewrite history here. Patriarchy has dominance hierarchy aspects, which include the intentional and willful maintenance of traditional power through intimidation, coercion, and violence. What this looks like in American history is the purposeful keeping of women (and others) in second class status -something that still continues to this day even though the laws have changed. Pretending that isn't the main aspect of what a dominance hierarchy is is willfully turning a blind eye to what is actually going on, and I'm not going to do that.

In other words, a gendered power differential isn’t the only thing that makes for a dominance hierarchy, but ours is a patriarchal dominance hierarchy, and glossing over the gender component is being disingenuous about what it really is comprised of. It’s forgetting about the history and some of the things that still go on in the present, I might add.

When Julia E Hubbel was in the Army in the 1970s, she wanted to be a pilot, but fighter jets were off-limits to women at that time. She describes in “Top Gun” Explains Why Men Hate Me, and Why I’m Not One Bit Sorry how her adventurous life has often felt threatening to many men.

One kayak guide got furious with me in Thailand for swiftly learning how to paddle rough oceans, then keeping up, then nearly beating him back to the main boat after a long day at sea. How DARE I learn that fast?

In the military it was much worse.

Senior officers raped me for wanting to be all that. I got raped repeatedly and then achieved anyway. Still am. Far too many of my talented sisters can tell you precisely the same story.

In other words, to discount that gender is still a huge part of the dominance hierarchy dynamic is to live in a fantasy world even though it’s not the only aspect. Differences in wealth, power, and status arose at the same time that men began to subjugate women and treat them as property. Ergo, our social system is aptly named a patriarchal dominance hierarchy even though we’ve made some progress towards greater equality. These elements all go together.

This is what patriarchy truly is — a dominance based hierarchy that comes out of a history of overt and intentional power differentials between men and women, but also between those who have the ability to take by force and those who do not have the power to resist that.

To sum things up:

• We’ve all grown up in a culture that has always supported and normalized stratification, and it’s hard to transcend that even if we have conscious beliefs about equality.
• However, rather than making us a nation of strong people, it instead has made us a culture of insecure bullies who fear other people having access to any advantages or power that we might have.
• Some people are so afraid of losing something if the playing field gets leveled that they are willing to go to great lengths to justify the continuation of the stratified system, including violence.
• To them, it feels only right, even though maintaining this system includes keeping some people forever at a disadvantage. They justify this by telling themselves that those people deserve disadvantages because if they just worked hard enough, they could transcend them. Besides, according to their thinking, the hierarchy is inevitable and therefore moral (even though it’s artificial).
• Analysis of how misogyny functions in our society can also be used to describe how racism, homophobia, and other types of entrenched discrimination also work in our culture as a deep-seated system of beliefs.
• Because the social hierarchy is so deeply entrenched and was largely considered to be only right a mere 50 years ago, any disruption to the hierarchy feels destabilizing to many people.
• This may or may not be a function of overt feelings of racism or other types of hatred, but none-the-less, continuing to defend a social hierarchy that is primarily based on immutable traits such as gender, sexuality, and race is harmful to society as a whole, not just to those who are marginalized or oppressed.

When we teach our sons “You are better then girls,” instead of teaching them, “Don’t put others down to make yourself feel better,” we prime their vulnerability to all forms of bigotry. You are better than gays, You are better than Blacks, You are better than Jews, You are better than immigrants, You are better than the poor, and so on.

This is what patriarchy truly is — a dominance-based hierarchy that comes out of a history of overt and intentional power differentials between men and women, but also between those who have the ability to take by force and those who do not have the power to resist that. It is not a “made up” construct; it is not something that was only in the distant past.

The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves. If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem. – bell hooks, The Will To Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, 2004

This social system is alive and kicking. It may have taken a few hits in the past 50 years or so, but we’re never going to truly have an equitable society unless we address the dominance hierarchy aspects and create a culture based more on mutual benefit rather than on social stratification and non-merit based competition. This would be of benefit to men, women, and everyone.

© Copyright Elle Beau 2022