I’m really, really grateful that people actually want me on this blog…I felt like I was being a dick to people, and I felt like I was not contributing positively to the discussion, so I withdrew myself. I would love to continue contributing to the discussion, though, and thank you for being so generous in allowing so many different voices (such as mine) in here. And please feel free, everybody, to challenge anything and everything I say! Anyway. I’ve been having all kinds of thoughts recently on the origins of Patriarchy, and I’d love to know what y’all think. Let’s all follow this train of thought for a bit, if you’d be so kind:
One of the first things the Patriarch realized was that he could not create. The Patriarch could surely make things–fashion objects, construct constructions (social and otherwise)–but he could not physically create life. From the Patriarch’s point of view, this is what separated him from the biological female. For him, at the most basic level, the difference between male and female is nothing greater than labels we slap on to organisms to indicate the “impregnator” and the “impregnated.” And yet, in the Patriarch’s world, this was all the difference in the world–quite literally. Within this world-view, the power to create life is indeed an inherently female power–and so it has been viewed as such, at least, for much of human history.
But, if the one unifying factor of all life on this planet is that it emerged from a female organism, then the very absurd myth of life itself is female. The flowering of nature, the evolution of animals, the taking root of trees and the evaporation of water: to even say that these natural phenomena occur at all is to give voice to their femininity. This natural occurance of life–the very essence of creation–is female. Our misunderstanding of this concept gives rise to all of the problems as in the world today, none so great as the Patriarchy itself.
The Patriarch, confronted with his inability to create life, desired power: power that seeks to dominate life in its pre-existence, and does so by clawing and grasping at everything around itself. The Patriarch could not create life and so sought to control the life that he had been created within–faced with the inability to conceive, he conceived instead of gods, of races, of classes, all in the vain hope that by imposing this order on the world he could take part in some of the creation that was never his to have, gain some power over the universe which he so obviously lacked. And so the Patriarch choked female roots by chopping down trees, silenced female voices by constraining them in corsets, took away female movement by balancing it on high heels and binding its feet, destroyed female freedom by beating it, marrying it, shoving cameras up its skirt and punishing it for not producing more males to carry on the same practices. The Patriarch took away the female body by teaching it to starve itself and value itself only in its relationship to others. In denying the female Other, the Patriarchs hid from themselves the truth that they were nothing more at heart but vulnerable skin and bone and muscles, who must be born and die without having even directly produced life. His removal from the entire process made it a concept that could be ignored, if he tried, and so he tried hard. He sought an all-powerful father, who would dispel all such ambiguity, and an all-powerful mother, to assuage the guilt of the destroyer and to grant unconditional forgiveness. This is the origin of the concept of religion: a search for answers to the great question of life–a question whose answer could be found in no obscurer place than between a woman’s legs. And so, to spite it all, this place was made obscure, made secret and made shameful. Unearthly spotlessness was the only realm in which man felt safe from the very human and substantive female body–so unnatural white was chosen over inscrutable black. In this way the world fall under the sway of the Patriarchy, from underneath which is has floundered ever since.
The very nature of power is circular–it dominates because it is weak. If it was not weak it would never have undertaken such a shallow enterprise as domination. And so, the Patriarch–by his very nature, weaker than women–created a world in which the male is powerful: the world of the Patriarchy. Only in a world of such unqualified oppression could the dominance of such a weak being be possible. Such one-eyed self-centered thinking is masculinity in its rawest form–the inability to look outside of oneself and one’s own interests, origins, and vulnerabilities. The Patriarch wishes to dominate because he knows he will die–his inability to create life plants in him the envious, greedy urge to destroy. Just as he wishes to dominate women, he wishes to witness lesbian sexual activity and to thereby totally remove himself from the concept of sexuality: he wishes to remove himself from the pressures of performance anxiety, responsibility, compassion, and recognition of simultaneous connection and irretractable distance. In other words, men wish to blind themselves from the very nature of our lot in life as human beings. Men, living, yet unable to create life, seek to affirm their own power while thereby tacitly admitting that they have none–they are, after all, male. Life is female–if the very concept of creation is a feminine act–so the very process of living must be so too. Every negative development in the history of the world has been a movement away from recognition of this supposition.
Gender Agenda 
welcome back ben!
this post is really poetic. did you write it spontaneously for the blog or like it is it a restatement of something youve written on in the past? ps im curious, what’s your concentration at vassar?
thoughts:
1. isnt creation also male? males provide half of what makes conception happen. after that the effort is female, but conception is critical to life creation too, isnt it?
2. i agree with your idea that men are threatened by women’s power, and patriarchal culture has to do with preempting women exercising any kind of power. i also think though that men think that women can be weak. during pregnancy, women are extremely weak (in being able to protect themselves from things like predators or other men) but also extremely strong (because theyre creating life during this time and protecting their offspring inside their very bodies).
3. i feel like women do bad things too. i think both men and women perpetuate really bad behaviors towards each other. men are way meaner to women, in general, but it’s not like women don’t oppress those weaker than them, i.e. their children, or weaker men. especially their children.
what do you think?
I tried to be careful in the post not to specify the gender of the Patriarch–maybe I didn’t make that as obvious as it should have been. This isn’t something I’ve even come close to figuring out on my own, but I feel like a woman can be a Patriarch. I tried to articulate the Patriarch’s way of viewing the world and the Others who populate that world, and not necessarily the way men alone view them. Thank you, though, for the compliments and for reading. It was spontaneous, but I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. My major is “Women’s Studies” (a weird term, in my opinion).
While the concept of “creation” might be male, I feel the dominant view in our culture is that re-production is gendered female (I’ve read about this in Carol Adams’s work, mainly–she also says that “production” is gendered male, conversely). For this reason, even if men do play a large role in the process, we are conditioned to think of it as somehow feminine. Also, in my opinion, men are taught that the reproductive process demands of them only about 90-seconds’-worth of effort (compared to the much, much larger amount of effort on the women’s part).
Women indeed “do bad things” but one of the things I was trying to get at is that the Patriarch would not be around to do “things,” good or bad, without the female Other.
interesting…i guess i always think of patriarch as being male because of the patri part of the word, but.
i definitely agree that the dominant view of reproduction in our society is female, that females should bear all the burden (and they atleast physically do) while the males need only ejaculate.
(aside: lol i giggled when i typed ejaculate.)
most interesting is your point about how production is gendered male. this is so so so so true. men seem to have all these ambitions, of traveling and climbing mountains and composing music and building furniture and writing novels and making paintings and having bands. ofc women want to do those things too, but in my experience, all the women ive met rarely talk about that kind of life. ive met women who want to do some of the above list, and much more. but not the entire list. most of the women i know want to either raise their family or take care of others, in the form of helping poor people or working for animal welfare, etc. whereas pretty much every man ive ever known has wanted to do almost ALL the things i mentioned, and like when they’re not “allowed” to do these things by the women in their life exercising power over them, who would rather they brought earnings into the family or do some household chores to take the pressure off the woman, the men typically get upset and feel stifled. i guess in a way they are being stifled, but certainly, the issue is more complex than a women trying to emasculate a man, which is how it is presented in every single argument i have heard about this, be it in real life or on tv.
i think that the patriarch wouldnt about around to do “things” were it not for the female, but ALSO the male who contributed to the patriarch’s consumption. im not sure that this male contribution is overlooked by the patriarch youre referring to–in fact, it is overemphasized. although how you can overemphasize that life cant occur without egg *and* sperm is beyond me…i guess in religion that happens. also parthogenesis in beings like sharks but that’s a rare example.
if anything, ive experienced men emphasizing that life couldnt occur without their help. of course, the woman has to do much more than contribute her germ, but men arent exactly slow to take atleast half the credit of conception.
maybe there is some problem of communication between us right now, because i read your argument as: the patriarch is threatened by the female, because life couldnt happen without females. and mine is: the patriarch is threatened for a number of reasons, but i dont think that the fact that females carry children is the biggest one, since the patriarchs that i have met are very vocal in their contribution to “creating life” as it were, and certainly without their sperm human reproduction wouldnt work.
ork – i think ben meant that creation vs. making things is the fundamental reason behind all others, not the main reason men are jealous of women.
also, people used to believe that women had all the baby material and potential inside of them and men just triggered it – modified spontaneous generation. i’m not sure when that was disproved. i would guess it was in the 1700s, but it might not have been until pasteur. plenty of time for jealousy and oppression to foment! (also, i learned this from the article on where babies come from in a 7-year-old’s science magazine.)
ben – i loved this post! i think you’re right. more later
Welcome back! The more voices the better!
“Life is female–if the very concept of creation is a feminine act–so the very process of living must be so too. Every negative development in the history of the world has been a movement away from recognition of this supposition.”
I think that a statement like this is dangerously reliant on the very gender binaries which need to be deconstructed and rethought.
you recognized this at the beginning of your post, “And yet, in the Patriarch’s world, this was all the difference in the world–quite literally. Within this world-view, the power to create life is indeed an inherently female power.” but I think you need to be very careful that, in constructing this view of how the patriarch is justifying himself, you are not accidentally reaffirming some of his flawed premises.
I also think we should be careful not to chalk up the entire oppressor-oppressed binary to the patriarchy. Oppression is a very, very complicated thing. To say that the act of oppression is a reaction to the inability to create life is not unreasonable, but I would be wary of such a statement (or I should say, I am wary of such a statement.) Rather, I would assert your argument to be a fragment, which may or may not have its place as we reconstruct our worldviews to discard the fallacies of our society.
I just read “Pedagogy of Oppression” by Paulo Freire, and one of the things he talks about it is how liberation is affirmative, where as cultures of oppression are obsessed with the opposite of life, machinery; to them, people are not alive, they are cogs, and the world is static and objective, something that people maintain, but don’t transform. I’m not sure how exactly all of this is relevant, but I feel that it is.
I guess I’ll finish by saying:
in searching for the deeper roots of oppression, we should try to be careful that we are deconstructing what we see, and learning from it, rather than reconstructing parallel models which merely relate to what we perceive. (if that makes sense).
Interesting post, though. I’m glad you decided to return!