Why do we have the patriarchy?
An Intrinsic Inclination deep dive into the topic.
If you trawl through both feminist and religious right articles online as I do, you’ll come across the concept of the patriarchy.
A quick dictionary definition is:
a system of society or government in which the father or eldest male is head of the family and descent is reckoned through the male line.
Some feminism is determined to overthrow the patriarchy, while other women seem either mostly ambivalent about it or even supportive of it. Meanwhile, religious men regard retaining and maintaining the patriarchy as natural and necessary while other men also want to get shot of it too.
But why do we even have the patriarchy? Why did it develop this way?
It turns out that the answer to why we have the patriarchy is really simple and straight-forwards in the intrinsic inclinations model. In fact, so straight-forwards that it must be the dominant force behind the patriarchy. But while it is so straight-forwards, that doesn’t mean that it can’t raise some other questions, which I’ll try and explore in this article.
Intrinsic Inclination Recap
Before we get to that, let me just quickly recap the intrinsic inclination model I’ll be using to make this argument (if you read my other articles, or are familiar with the work of Julia Serano, just skip this part).
The intrinsic inclinations model says that people have inbuilt inclinations (which I have sometimes called brain programming for brevity, but isn’t quite that). These intrinsic inclinations encourage them to behave in certain ways and form identities. These are the building blocks that inform our sexual orientation, gender roles and sex identities, among other things, and the combination of intrinsic inclinations we have adds up to a person’s intrinsic inclination set and we need to express our intrinsic inclinations to have good mental health.
The Patriarchy From Intrinsic Inclinations
Where we go from intrinsic inclinations to the patriarchy is noting that leadership, the act of telling people what to do, is part of the social gender role intrinsic inclination. It is the masculine one of that, to be precise.
Because most of our male bodied people are masculine, we have the patriarchy. It is as simple as that. Everything else flows from that.
It Really Can’t Be That Simple
Yeah. I thought that at first, but really it is. Fundamentally, all the articles, books and ideas I’ve encountered talking about patriarchy, usually as some kind of cultural phenomenon, miss a fundamental aspect of patriarchy. That is that patriarchy is really usually a post-fact justification for how our intrinsic inclinations make us feel. It’s then us who justify and then turn those feelings into massive cultural spanning institutions, such as religion and social hierarchies, which all then come with their own sets of problems.
However, going from the statement that most male-bodied people are masculine to the patriarchy existing takes a few more logical steps in the argument, so let’s break those down.
We have our Assumption Zero, in which we’ve said that most male-bodied people are masculine. A patriarchal society follows that with two further assumptions.
The first assumption (our Assumption One) is that most of our happiness comes from meeting our intrinsic inclinations. (This isn’t an assumption that holds up well for our modern times, but it’s a devastatingly effective assumption otherwise).
The second (our Assumption Two) is that we want to design societies where people are, on the whole, mentally healthy and the unhappiness we all feel collectively is minimised.
Take those two together and it becomes inescapable that you’ll be assigning leadership roles to male-bodied people simply on the basis that, when most male-bodied people are masculine, limiting leadership to male-bodied people and therefore masculine people makes everyone the happiest over all.
And, of course, if masculine people like to lead, feminine people like to follow. As a result feminine people, in the form of mainly female-bodied people, will also support the patriarchy and will also be happiest overall under a patriarchy.
Dissatisfaction with the Patriarchy
If you start with the intrinsic inclinations model and our three interesting starting assumptions, a patriarchy must be the best way to run a society. However, as I’ve mentioned, patriarchies are not perfect and have many criticisms. If we’re on the right track, we should be able to vary those assumptions we made and start to see why patriarchy is no longer as popular in modern times, as well as get back some of the common criticisms of it. So let’s do that.
The Matriarchy
Lets start with our Assumptions Zero: that male-bodied masculine people outnumber the female-bodied ones.
What this does is it allows you to take being male as a good external proxy for being masculine and have it mostly work. Indeed, this is what traditional societies have always been based on, and many traditional societies have chosen to sacrifice the mental happiness of masculine female-bodied people in order to simplify the mental health benefits for the overwhelming majority of masculine male-bodied and feminine female-bodied people.
Sacrificing the mental happiness of a minority comes with problems. The easiest solution is to just murder people. (If you find that a bit shocking, have a look at witch-burning statistics for Europe, with the assumption that many witches were probably masculine female-bodied people, it’s sobering stuff).
Another solution is also to engage in more acceptance and create exceptions for masculine female-bodied people, hopefully gaining the best of both worlds, while sometimes inconveniencing people by removing the male is masculine link. Many modern societies are doing this and it’s notable that many women end up with leadership roles who fit in the gender-variant mould, though I hate the fact that there are no statistics on this to make my point more valid. (Dear statistics people, please start asking the right questions).
Finally, there’s always the fun thing of looking at what happens when you create spaces of masculine female-bodied people that are separate and uncontaminated by pressure from the majority.
If you think I was exaggerating about the fact that most arguments for the patriarchy are post-fact justifications of people’s intrinsic inclinations, just watch female led spaces justifying how how women are capable leaders and men should never be allowed to run anything (many of which are just the same patriarchal arguments just sex-swapped and adjusted to sex/body differences). It’s honestly beautiful to watch, and the arguments are so similar yet different to the standard sexism of patriarchy.
Internal Happiness Isn’t The Only Game In Town
Now lets look at Assumption One: that the happiness due to meeting your intrinsic inclinations dominates all others, and its statistical version, Assumption Two: that societies seek to maximise that happiness across everyone in them. This seems like a crazy set of assumptions to make, until you realise that it works a little too well, even if it shouldn’t.
Although you’d think that people are not hugely dominated by these assumptions, the minute anyone strays too much from the path of intrinsic inclinations, all hell breaks loose and people rise up and start murdering people because “the Gods” are furious. Replace “the Gods” with your favourite religious bogeyman and this statement will work everywhere around the globe, regardless of what religion you are.
In fact, it’s quite marked just how easily violence historically erupts when people start to create societies that vary too much from the kind of ideal society you’d create trying to minimise the problems you get from not following your intrinsic inclinations over a whole society. Try to give women too many rights and men just rebel, while women let them.
However, as societies become more modern, other sources of happiness start to matter more, such as art, culture, science, material wealth and good health. We can live much more freely thanks to this, and that means we can choose slightly less efficient societies from a mental health perspective, in order to gain more mental health benefits from other sources of happiness. When that happens, it opens the patriarchy to criticism.
Obviously, the number one problem that reveals itself with the patriarchy is that, just because someone wants and needs a leadership role, doesn’t mean they are suited for it. History is full of evil father figures who asserted their paternal rights to absolutely destroy their families and these have been generally overlooked as the price of living in a society that otherwise works well for the greatest number of people.
At the end of the day, different people are suited for different leadership positions and some masculine male-bodied people should never be allowed anywhere near a leadership role, while some feminine people are the greatest leaders we never had. By building a society where leadership works better for everyone, we can build societies where people are clearly happier and where the happiness balance from better leadership outweighs the loss of a small amount of intrinsic inclinations happiness.
All of this starts to stray into areas where more traditional criticisms about patriarchy as a social and cultural system start to take hold and from here on out you can now use your favourite cultural/social arguments here.
Indeed, democracy, liberalism and many other traditional arguments are basically based on reining in the worst side-effects of intrinsic inclination based issues, and that means reining in the worst cases of patriarchy and the kind of thinking where feminine people are stripped of all autonomy to keep masculine people happy.
And of course, modern societies argue about what types of happiness to focus on when you can vary from the intrinsic inclinations optimum. Some policies benefit male-bodied people more than female-bodied people. We can sometimes see the patriarchy in the presence of the fact that we’ll choose, for example, to give people more freedom to found businesses and earn money, but not to control their body’s reproductive systems. Both of those violate intrinsic inclinations, but are powerful ways of organising and freeing societies to be more productive.
Summary
Starting from three assumptions:
0: Male-bodied masculine people vastly outnumber female-bodied masculine people
1: Most of the happiness a person experiences comes from meeting their intrinsic inclinations
2: Societies aim to maximise the happiness due to intrinsic inclinations through the use of social and cultural institutions
we successfully derived the patriarchy and saw it as a natural consequence of organising people and their mental health. We then saw how some of these assumptions could be relaxed, changed or mitigated to understand the patriarchy’s role in modern society and to develop criticisms and common exceptions to it.
This simple and really powerful way of looking at the patriarchy shows just how awesome intrinsic inclinations ways of looking at the world can genuinely be.
