Dr. Alice Evans- Ten Thousand Years of Patriarchy

[支持核绿派 (Greens4Nuclear)]

Wasn't sure if this belonged in this subforum given how US elections-centric the topics are, but I saw RINO TOM's thread on the cultural history of Denmark and SnowLabrador's thread on Christianity's historical impact (bless his heart) on the first page, so I think this'll be fine.

Overview-

Our world is marked by the Great Gender Divergence. Objective data on employment, governance, laws, and violence shows that all societies are gender unequal, some more than others. In South Asia, North Africa and the Middle East, it is men who provide for their families and organise politically. Chinese women work but are still locked out of politics. Latin America has undergone radical transformation, staging massive rallies against male violence and nearly achieving gender parity in political representation. Scandinavia still comes closest to a feminist utopia, but for most of history Europe was far more patriarchal than matrilineal South East Asia and Southern Africa.

What explains the Great Gender Divergence? It emerged in the twentieth century as a result of the great divergence in economic and political development across countries. In countries that underwent rapid growth, technological change freed women from domestic drudgery while industry and services increased demand for their labour. Paid work in the public sphere enables women to build strong supportive friendships. They build solidarity.

Democratisation is equally fundamental. Overturning men’s political dominance and impunity for violence requires relentless mobilisation.

Culture, however, mediates the rate at which women seize opportunities created by development and democratisation. Patrilineal societies face what I call an “honour-income trade-off”. Female employment only rises if its economic returns are sufficiently large to compensate for men’s loss of honour. Otherwise, women remain dependent on patriarchal guardians, vulnerable to abuse and control.

Why do some societies have a stronger preference for female cloistering? To answer that question, we must go back ten thousand years. Over the longue durée, there have been three major waves of patriarchy: the Neolithic Revolution, conquests, and Islam. These ancient ‘waves’ helped determine how gender relations in each region of the world would be transformed by the onset of modern economic growth.

Context for sharing this on TalkElections was discussion of differences in female labor force participation between 20th-century China and India and how that might've affected their postcolonial economic development.

Relevant and fascinating (if lengthy) historical discussion of gender relations across different cultures- Ten Thousand Years of Patriarchy. Would like to read the whole thing sometime

Patriarchy has persisted for at least ten millennia. Cereal-cultivation, the plough and irrigation increased agricultural yields, enabling a taxable surplus, state-formation and social stratification across much of Eurasia. Land and herds were inherited by men, who maintained lineage purity by guarding women.

Eurasia then underwent an important divergence. South Asia and the Middle East saw tightening endogamy (caste and cousin marriage), alongside religious authoritarianism. The more visible the woman, the greater the suspicion and moral ambiguity. By preventing rumour, men preserved piety, honour, and inclusion within vital kinship networks. East Asia remained exogamous, while Europe became increasingly nuclear, democratic, and scientific. But as long as women laboured on family farms (lacking both economic independence and their own social organisations), this global variation in kinship, institutions and religion may not have made an enormous difference.

East Asian women were certainly oppressed and unfree, but they had a latent advantage which would prove important under industrialisation a thousand years later. Marrying patrilineal relatives was sternly punished under the Song Code. Exogamy weakened clans and -  in comparison to the Middle East and South Asia - lessened their preference for female seclusion.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

I am generally skeptical of grand narratives about "patriarchy",  particularly the more widely and vaguely it is defined. The world of Mad Men and present day Iranian regime could both be called sexist, but they share little in common in what this sexism consists of and how it fits into larger cultural meanings and structures within those societies.  There is also often the assumption that all women everywhere basically want the same things, and it is far from clear that this is the case. It seems to me that a gendered division of labor is only significantly unsatisfying to women within particular conditions, and that is a big part of the story of why it is contested at some points in history and not others.

[Skill and Chance]

I am generally skeptical of grand narratives about "patriarchy",  particularly the more widely and vaguely it is defined. The world of Mad Men and present day Iranian regime could both be called sexist, but they share little in common in what this sexism consists of and how it fits into larger cultural meanings and structures within those societies.  There is also often the assumption that all women everywhere basically want the same things, and it is far from clear that this is the case. It seems to me that a gendered division of labor is only significantly unsatisfying to women within particular conditions, and that is a big part of the story of why it is contested at some points in history and not others.

In Western societies, more gendered division of labor also tends to be associated with times when things are going really well for you/your family economically, which complicates everything further. 

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

Equating unfettered freedom and getting a good lot in life in anything close to an absolute sense is very much dubious in the grand scheme of things. This is true for both men and women.

The more a society is described as being "patriarchial", the more women tend to dominate particular spheres, enough to reach effective parity. It's generally fantasy to mark one gender as having noticeably more authority than the other in a culture; it's more about where said gender decides to invest its time and energy. A pair of Japanese comedians on Youtube, in a video, called Japanese wives "house yakuza"; Japanese culture effectively socializes women to be rulers of the home, and housewives are the envy of other women.

[支持核绿派 (Greens4Nuclear)]

Will respond to your other points elsewhere later to avoid derailing this thread further. I agree with you on how Reaganism is perceived among many AAPI voters.

Part 1- added citations. This felt like the most appropriate thread to necro, given how it touches on how it touches on historical and spatial factors leading to certain routes of socioeconomic development.

Participated in the UK with US-style parties and vice versa thread some time ago so I feel qualified to answer.

The one demographic I have any confidence a CA Conservatives-type right-of-center party would overperform against the US Republicans would be ethnic Chinese. (This isn't to say that Chinese Americans would actually favor the hypothetical Conservative party over the Liberals or the NDP.) Canada has a higher proportion of non-indigenous visible minority groups than the US does and the CA Tories probably need to pander to those ambiguously brown people with funny accents and weird food more than the US GOP does. But I do actually think there are cultural factors inherent to Chinese culture- and the areas of greater China that are overrepresented among the Anglosphere diaspora- that would make Overseas Chinese more receptive to right-of-center political parties than the other Confucianist East Asian groups, let alone non-Confucianist East Asians or South Asians. Recent shifts and trends within local NYC politics seem to suggest this, as do pre-pandemic voting patterns among Chinese Canadians.

I'm not going to say this is purely wrong, but it's a huge oversimplification that glosses over a lot of the drivers of political affiliation. Because quite frankly, I strongly suspect these cultural factors are less Chinese and more specific to certain subgroups.

The Conservatives in Canada, especially in British Columbia, have historically done significantly better with Chinese voters than American conservatives. But a lot of that is Vancouver Chinese being disproportionately people who moved from Hong Kong before handover. Not only are they disproportionately likely to be conservative or anti-Communist, on net aggregate, Cantonese are also somewhat more mercantile/ bourgeoise and socially traditionalist relative to other Chinese. Vancouver is a Cantonese-dominant city, which is pretty much not true of anywhere in the United States besides small, very old Chinatowns.

What NYC and to an extent Canada both indicate is that Chinese voters can shift like mad if you engage in explicitly anti-Chinese politics. There are good estimates that the Conservatives under O'Toole collapsed to single digits among Chinese voters due to racebaiting against Chinese. Democratic policies on crime and education were widely viewed as specifically targeting Chinese. In those circumstances, there was a stampede against the party perceived to be racist.

Other than that, they tend to vote like...how you'd expect based on socioeconomic class and religion.

I'll respond to your commentary on Chinese Canadians in BC first- Metro Vancouver is the only part of Canada I have more than a little familiarity with, and I happen to have relatives who live there.

Cantonese culture is more mercantile and bourgeois, and it's been remarked in many corners of the Internet that Cantonese have a reputation for stronger in-group consciousness and a strong emphasis on familial ties.

However, the Yangtze Delta also has a strong historical reputation for entrepreneurship.  Shanghai historically was and still is the center for Chinese capitalism and bourgeois culture.

Early capitalism in China, like the rest of the world, was by no means equally developed across the empire. Some regions, such as the northwest or the southwest, were much less commercially developed than others, such as the Jiangnan area of the Yangtze River delta, the southeast coast, the corridor along the Grand Canal, or the long valley of the Yangtze. China’s early capitalism was most highly evolved in Jiangnan, where networks of urban production and distribution facilitated sophisticated systems of capital accumulation and deployment.

The Lower Yangtze area (containing Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces + Shanghai) also seems overrepresented among both KMT-affiliated exiles to Taiwan and Hong Kong- many of whom later immigrated to the US- and among post-Mao immigrants from Mainland China.

The latter group of "collectivist" socio-cultural stereotypes I listed aren't exclusive to Cantonese either- they also apply to other Chinese linguistic subgroups in South China like Hakkas, Teochews, Taiwanese speakers, and Fuzhounese speakers.

After the establishment of the People's Republic of China, Ye was placed in charge of Guangdong, which was to cost him his political career under Mao's reign. Ye understood that the economic conditions in the province were very different from those in the rest of China, since most Cantonese landlords were peasants themselves who participated in production without exploiting their tenants. He therefore declined to dispossess the landlords, and instead protected their businesses and land. However, Ye's policies contradicted the general directives of the Party-mandated land reform, which emphasized class struggle. His policies deemed too soft, Ye and his local cadres were soon replaced by Lin Biao's, and a much harsher policy was implemented and hundreds of thousands of Cantonese landlords were executed, with Ye's political career effectively over.

I remember seeing on Wikipedia that 20th-century Guangdong landlords were relatively egalitarian and more likely to come from peasant backgrounds themselves. Seems connected to the kind of just-world worldview and big-L liberal environment that would give rise to the Guangdong model of socioeconomic development.

I think the perceived social conservatism of Cantonese speaking communities in the US is due to Cantonese-speaking Chinatown enclaves not being filtered for postgraduate-educated immigration. (This also applies to Fuzhounese-speaking enclaves in the Northeastern US, which I have had no real life interaction with). Even if we exclude Taiwanese and Hong Kongers, Chinese Americans are still disproportionately of Guangdong and Fujian ancestry partly due to chain migration to Chinatowns, with the Shanghai region also being overrepresented.

While there are no methodologically sound surveys of the Chinese diaspora in the US that have good sample sizes that I'm aware of, I'm quite certain that a clear majority of ethnic Chinese Americans have roots from the coastal areas in blue shown in this map- Guangdong and Fujian are the bottom two provinces that border the purple area.


Anyways, the cultural factors I was alluding to mainly have to do with a particularly strong cultural belief in meritocracy, a more secular cultural identity less tied to major world religions (Pew's 2012 survey of comparative religiosity among AAPI groups lines up with my lived experience), and a general inclination towards being apolitical and not having strong political opinions. None of these seem Cantonese specific to me. I also suspect the conservatism of Vancouver's HK emigres has as much to do with class selection, religion, and other HK-unique factors rather than factors inherent to Cantonese culture.

Also- relevant 2019 post by DC Al Fine (R-NS avatar) on the Canadian Tories' coalition that I indirectly cited in my original post

[RilakkuMAGA]

Will respond to your other points elsewhere later to avoid derailing this thread further. I agree with you on how Reaganism is perceived among many AAPI voters.

Part 1- will add sources later. This felt like the most appropriate thread to necro, given how it touches on how it touches on historical and spatial factors leading to certain routes of socioeconomic development.

Participated in the UK with US-style parties and vice versa thread some time ago so I feel qualified to answer.

The one demographic I have any confidence a CA Conservatives-type right-of-center party would overperform against the US Republicans would be ethnic Chinese. (This isn't to say that Chinese Americans would actually favor the hypothetical Conservative party over the Liberals or the NDP.) Canada has a higher proportion of non-indigenous visible minority groups than the US does and the CA Tories probably need to pander to those ambiguously brown people with funny accents and weird food more than the US GOP does. But I do actually think there are cultural factors inherent to Chinese culture- and the areas of greater China that are overrepresented among the Anglosphere diaspora- that would make Overseas Chinese more receptive to right-of-center political parties than the other Confucianist East Asian groups, let alone non-Confucianist East Asians or South Asians. Recent shifts and trends within local NYC politics seem to suggest this, as do pre-pandemic voting patterns among Chinese Canadians.

I'm not going to say this is purely wrong, but it's a huge oversimplification that glosses over a lot of the drivers of political affiliation. Because quite frankly, I strongly suspect these cultural factors are less Chinese and more specific to certain subgroups.

The Conservatives in Canada, especially in British Columbia, have historically done significantly better with Chinese voters than American conservatives. But a lot of that is Vancouver Chinese being disproportionately people who moved from Hong Kong before handover. Not only are they disproportionately likely to be conservative or anti-Communist, on net aggregate, Cantonese are also somewhat more mercantile/ bourgeoise and socially traditionalist relative to other Chinese. Vancouver is a Cantonese-dominant city, which is pretty much not true of anywhere in the United States besides small, very old Chinatowns.

What NYC and to an extent Canada both indicate is that Chinese voters can shift like mad if you engage in explicitly anti-Chinese politics. There are good estimates that the Conservatives under O'Toole collapsed to single digits among Chinese voters due to racebaiting against Chinese. Democratic policies on crime and education were widely viewed as specifically targeting Chinese. In those circumstances, there was a stampede against the party perceived to be racist.

Other than that, they tend to vote like...how you'd expect based on socioeconomic class and religion.

I'll respond to your commentary on Chinese Canadians in BC first- Metro Vancouver is the only part of Canada I have more than a little familiarity with, and I happen to have relatives who live there.

Cantonese culture is more mercantile and bourgeois, and it's been remarked in many corners of the Internet that Cantonese have a reputation for stronger in-group consciousness and a strong emphasis on familial ties. However, the Yangtze Delta also has a strong reputation for entrepreneurship (Shanghai historically was and still is the center for Chinese capitalism and bourgeois culture). This region of China also seems overrepresented among both KMT-affiliated exiles to Taiwan and Hong Kong (many of whom later immigrated to the US), and among post-Mao immigrants from Mainland China. The latter group of socio-cultural stereotypes aren't exclusive to Cantonese either- they also apply to other Chinese linguistic subgroups in South China like Hakkas, Teochews, Taiwanese speakers, and Fuzhounese speakers.

I remember seeing on Wikipedia that 20th-century Guangdong landlords were relatively egalitarian and more likely to come from peasant backgrounds themselves. Seems connected to the kind of just-world worldview and big-L liberal environment that would give rise to the Guangdong model of socioeconomic development.

I think the perceived social conservatism of Cantonese speaking communities in the US is due to Chinatown enclaves not being filtered for postgraduate-educated immigration (this is arguably even more true for Fuzhounese communities in the Northeastern US). Even if we exclude Taiwanese and Hong Kongers, Chinese Americans are still disproportionately of Guangdong and Fujian ancestry partly due to chain migration to Chinatowns, with the Shanghai region also being overrepresented.

Anyways, the cultural factors I was alluding to mainly have to do with a particularly strong cultural belief in meritocracy, a more secular cultural identity less tied to major world religions, and a general inclination towards being apolitical and not having strong political opinions. None of these seem Cantonese specific to me. I also suspect the conservatism of Vancouver's HK emigres has as much to do with class selection, religion, and other HK-unique factors rather than factors inherent to Cantonese culture.

Agree mostly. My mistake on the confusion - I didn't mean social conservatism relative to other Americans - I meant social conservatism relative to other Chinese groups. In particular, the well-known divide between North China and South China on collectivism vs. individualism - and secularism vs. religiosity.

For the religion thing, I don't have a good source for that, but I think it's pretty well-known that Buddhism is much stronger in Southern China. Same with ancestor worship. Joss paper is something you see in stores in Southern China/Taiwan, but not in Northern China. Though I do think you're right that Buddhist Chinese don't strongly use their religion as a political identity the way say, many Burmese Buddhists do.

Also, I think most landlords everywhere in China were peasants. The median landlord in pre-revolutionary China was a peasant who owned his plot and the plot next over (and rented it out to one guy). Something like 10% of China were landlords in that sense. Online Communists love to go "we need to kill the landlords like Mao did", but landlord-icide was only possible because the Communists defined all anti-Communist landlords (or landlords that people already lynched) as landlords, and all other landlords as "well-off peasants." Landlord-icide only killed like...2% of the landlords (lol).

As an aside, the higher historic religiosity of South China is also why I think in the modern era, weird cults like Falun Gong and White Lightning are much more popular in the North than the South - established religious traditions inoculate societies against weirdo cults, lol.

That being said, the mercantile/coastal/sorta cosmopolitan nature of Guangdong I think makes it significantly more socially liberal than other rice-agriculture Confucian regions, like inland Southern China - or for that matter, Vietnam or Korea. But North China is honestly just a psychological aberration in Asia.

Funny enough in countries where Chinese immigrants disproportionately come from the North, the political reputation is very different. In South Korea for example, Korean-Chinese vote so monolithically left-liberal (probably in %s exceeding US blacks), Korean conservatives have imported American conservative talking points about Korean-Chinese vote-by-mail fraud to "rig" every election a Korean conservative loses.

Also yes, I think Cantonese and Shanghaiers have a reputation for not being political, but Northern Chinese have a reputation for being extremely political. Probably a result of the government being much bigger up there - Northeast China for example basically runs government as a % of GDP numbers comparable to Cuba.

[支持核绿派 (Greens4Nuclear)]

Agree mostly. My mistake on the confusion - I didn't mean social conservatism relative to other Americans - I meant social conservatism relative to other Chinese groups. In particular, the well-known divide between North China and South China on collectivism vs. individualism - and secularism vs. religiosity.

For the religion thing, I don't have a good source for that, but I think it's pretty well-known that Buddhism is much stronger in Southern China. Same with ancestor worship. Joss paper is something you see in stores in Southern China/Taiwan, but not in Northern China. Though I do think you're right that Buddhist Chinese don't strongly use their religion as a political identity the way say, many Burmese Buddhists do.

As an aside, the higher historic religiosity of South China is also why I think in the modern era, weird cults like Falun Gong and White Lightning are much more popular in the North than the South - established religious traditions inoculate societies against weirdo cults, lol.

Forum member RI made a map of religion around the world that showed a North-South divide in China. I didn't really know about this growing up, even though I was kind of aware that Taiwanese, Hong Kongers, and the older Chinese immigrant waves from Guangdong were more religious than the post-Mao Mainland China diaspora. It certainly explains things like Taiwan being very Buddhist and more steeped in Chinese folk religion.

That being said, the mercantile/coastal/sorta cosmopolitan nature of Guangdong I think makes it significantly more socially liberal than other rice-agriculture Confucian regions, like inland Southern China - or for that matter, Vietnam or Korea. But North China is honestly just a psychological aberration in Asia.

Yes AFAIK Northern China is the only part of agriculturalist Pacific-facing Asia with a history of a strong indigenous state where the dominant/default staple grain was not rice.

Funny enough in countries where Chinese immigrants disproportionately come from the North, the political reputation is very different. In South Korea for example, Korean-Chinese vote so monolithically left-liberal (probably in %s exceeding US blacks), Korean conservatives have imported American conservative talking points about Korean-Chinese vote-by-mail fraud to "rig" every election a Korean conservative loses.

I had no idea about that. My impression from learning about international elections on here is that Chinese Americans are more politically left-leaning than Chinese Canadians, Chinese Australians, and Chinese New Zealanders despite possibly being less Northern Chinese on average, due to differences in the history of Chinese immigration and in the political status quo (the US is more right-wing overall and has a more complicated history with race).

[Georg Ebner]

Genetical studies found out, that the mtDNA is in a far diffuser way spread, i.e. the very vast majority of human societies of all times must have been patrilocal (and thus usually also patriarchal).

[RINO Tom]

I am generally skeptical of grand narratives about "patriarchy",  particularly the more widely and vaguely it is defined. The world of Mad Men and present day Iranian regime could both be called sexist, but they share little in common in what this sexism consists of and how it fits into larger cultural meanings and structures within those societies.  There is also often the assumption that all women everywhere basically want the same things, and it is far from clear that this is the case. It seems to me that a gendered division of labor is only significantly unsatisfying to women within particular conditions, and that is a big part of the story of why it is contested at some points in history and not others.

It's also worth noting that the world of Mad Men arguably wasn't some "progression 'forward'" as far as sexism goes but indeed represented a far more unfair world to women than the more traditional societies that predated it.  Dr. Jordan Cooper has a great YouTube video criticizing the "Trad Wife" phenomena where he points out that the weird archetype of the 1950s suburban woman staying home and cleaning/cooking while her husband leaves to the office is NOT traditional in a historic sense, and truly "traditional" societies had much more of a cohesive family unit where the father was expected to work as a team with his wife in a much more meaningful way.

[PSOL]

Genetical studies found out, that the mtDNA is in a far diffuser way spread, i.e. the very vast majority of human societies of all times must have been patrilocal (and thus usually also patriarchal).

The aspects of Polygamy and taking women as spoils of war while using most of men to be used as cannon fodder or slaves in separate work camps—or dead—shows just how egalitarian current world society actually is. The expectation of mass genocide or being treated as a women through castration and parallel harems declining as barbarism, being driven by and progressing with female agitation, shows just how beneficial the rise of female autonomy actually is for the lower strata of men who don’t have to deal with the byproducts of civilization maiming them.

From Warren Jeffs to ISIS, from the Shi’ite ayatollahs to the Alt-right, and all the larping of Romans and Jaichind’s act really show is the reality of male life for most men under patriarchy and a lack of equality of the sexes—a short brutish one where they are denied their biological purpose of expelling the pangs of urges.

I am generally skeptical of grand narratives about "patriarchy",  particularly the more widely and vaguely it is defined. The world of Mad Men and present day Iranian regime could both be called sexist, but they share little in common in what this sexism consists of and how it fits into larger cultural meanings and structures within those societies.  There is also often the assumption that all women everywhere basically want the same things, and it is far from clear that this is the case. It seems to me that a gendered division of labor is only significantly unsatisfying to women within particular conditions, and that is a big part of the story of why it is contested at some points in history and not others.

It's also worth noting that the world of Mad Men arguably wasn't some "progression 'forward'" as far as sexism goes but indeed represented a far more unfair world to women than the more traditional societies that predated it.  Dr. Jordan Cooper has a great YouTube video criticizing the "Trad Wife" phenomena where he points out that the weird archetype of the 1950s suburban woman staying home and cleaning/cooking while her husband leaves to the office is NOT traditional in a historic sense, and truly "traditional" societies had much more of a cohesive family unit where the father was expected to work as a team with his wife in a much more meaningful way.

It was very close to true if you were the few that could get servants to do housework and had immense disposable income.

[RINO Tom]

Agree mostly. My mistake on the confusion - I didn't mean social conservatism relative to other Americans - I meant social conservatism relative to other Chinese groups. In particular, the well-known divide between North China and South China on collectivism vs. individualism - and secularism vs. religiosity.

For the religion thing, I don't have a good source for that, but I think it's pretty well-known that Buddhism is much stronger in Southern China. Same with ancestor worship. Joss paper is something you see in stores in Southern China/Taiwan, but not in Northern China. Though I do think you're right that Buddhist Chinese don't strongly use their religion as a political identity the way say, many Burmese Buddhists do.

As an aside, the higher historic religiosity of South China is also why I think in the modern era, weird cults like Falun Gong and White Lightning are much more popular in the North than the South - established religious traditions inoculate societies against weirdo cults, lol.

Forum member RI made a map of religion around the world that showed a North-South divide in China. I didn't really know about this growing up, even though I was kind of aware that Taiwanese, Hong Kongers, and the older Chinese immigrant waves from Guangdong were more religious than the post-Mao Mainland China diaspora. It certainly explains things like Taiwan being very Buddhist and more steeped in Chinese folk religion.

That being said, the mercantile/coastal/sorta cosmopolitan nature of Guangdong I think makes it significantly more socially liberal than other rice-agriculture Confucian regions, like inland Southern China - or for that matter, Vietnam or Korea. But North China is honestly just a psychological aberration in Asia.

Yes AFAIK Northern China is the only part of agriculturalist Pacific-facing Asia with a history of a strong indigenous state where the dominant/default staple grain was not rice.

Funny enough in countries where Chinese immigrants disproportionately come from the North, the political reputation is very different. In South Korea for example, Korean-Chinese vote so monolithically left-liberal (probably in %s exceeding US blacks), Korean conservatives have imported American conservative talking points about Korean-Chinese vote-by-mail fraud to "rig" every election a Korean conservative loses.

I had no idea about that. My impression from learning about international elections on here is that Chinese Americans are more politically left-leaning than Chinese Canadians, Chinese Australians, and Chinese New Zealanders despite possibly being less Northern Chinese on average, due to differences in the history of Chinese immigration and in the political status quo (the US is more right-wing overall and has a more complicated history with race).

Kind of OT, but it would be fascinating to see RI's map with the following adjustments:

1. Removal of "Religious Nones" as a category (i.e., literally the "most popular religion" in each area).

2. A map of only the Protestant (blue) areas but divided by most popoular denomination!

I'd tag him if I knew how, lol...

[Skill and Chance]

I am generally skeptical of grand narratives about "patriarchy",  particularly the more widely and vaguely it is defined. The world of Mad Men and present day Iranian regime could both be called sexist, but they share little in common in what this sexism consists of and how it fits into larger cultural meanings and structures within those societies.  There is also often the assumption that all women everywhere basically want the same things, and it is far from clear that this is the case. It seems to me that a gendered division of labor is only significantly unsatisfying to women within particular conditions, and that is a big part of the story of why it is contested at some points in history and not others.

It's also worth noting that the world of Mad Men arguably wasn't some "progression 'forward'" as far as sexism goes but indeed represented a far more unfair world to women than the more traditional societies that predated it.  Dr. Jordan Cooper has a great YouTube video criticizing the "Trad Wife" phenomena where he points out that the weird archetype of the 1950s suburban woman staying home and cleaning/cooking while her husband leaves to the office is NOT traditional in a historic sense, and truly "traditional" societies had much more of a cohesive family unit where the father was expected to work as a team with his wife in a much more meaningful way.

Yes, we have this odd tendency to project 1950's culture backward indefinitely: getting married age 18-21, having 4ish (surviving) kids, lots of people with below average incomes owning homes, ~75% of married women doing no paid work at all, etc.  None of this was historically normal!  The mid 20th century was a uniquely non-competitive time in the economy due to the aftermath of the World Wars.  Relatively unskilled workers enjoyed leverage in the labor market unseen since the generation after the Black Death 600 years earlier, which facilitated these early marriages (long run average age of marriage in Western Europe was mid 20's) and large households.  However, they still generally did work that depended on physical strength and favored men.

I would also agree that, historically, the mid 20th century was a uniquely bad time for relatively high status women, the manager/business owner's wife demographic.  They were generally expected to cook, clean, and do their own childcare like everyone else while their husband went off to do business and they were cut off from the support of extended family.  An ancient clan leader's wife almost surely had more power and influence (and with servants to do the dirty work), to say nothing of an earlier American yeoman farmer's wife.  This may even apply to more modern forms of social status.  Rates of higher education for American women actually declined 1900-1950!

In America, the historic political base for treating your wife equally was always small farmers in the Midwest and West, with city dwellers and Southern plantation aristocrats pushing back.  I think that speaks to a potential loss of status for many women during the early part of industrialization.

[支持核绿派 (Greens4Nuclear)]

Fantastic video by PolyMatter on the sociology and economics of contemporary India. Among other things, it touches on 1) the U-curve of wage levels and women's employment rates (wages in India are too high for women not to be forced to work for survival reasons, but also not high enough for work to thoroughly emancipate them from societal patriarchy as is the case in the West), 2) the ongoing impact of centuries of honor culture on a cultural preference for female seclusion [which Dr. Alice Evans mentions in the OP link], and 3) perverse regulatory incentives for small businesses to remain small. It also describes how India's shift away from agriculture-based employment generally involved increases in (very productive) services and (precarious, male-dominated) construction employment as opposed to manufacturing.

I'm not actually that familiar with the specifics of China's development, but one thing that greatly holds India back is overregulation, protectionism, and a total lack of coordination between the states and the federal government.

The License Raj still exists, and India still has relatively high levels of protectionism and state direction of the economy. I remember that one of the big problems that the GST reform was supposed to tackle was that different states taxed different goods at different levels, and had very dated and inefficient tax compliance systems. On highways along state borders, there would be massive traffic jams of trucks carrying goods because the truck drivers would have to stop, get out of their trucks, hand over paperwork or do the paperwork themselves, and pay any tax differences on the spot before they could continue.

One of the first points of economic liberalism is that internal trade should be as free and frictionless as possible; in fact, that the United Kingdom abolished internal taxes and levies centuries ago is cited as a foundational reason why the UK started its economic rise. India has still to learn and embrace this, and it's not just taxes, this License Raj still applies to everything.

I find the internal bureaucracy in Germany to be crippling compared to what I experienced in Sweden and the United States; I cannot begin to imagine how it is in India. India is fundamentally extremely hostile to anyone doing business (unless you pay major bribes), and is also deeply hostile and unhelpful to foreign investment. China has its problems with mandatory Chinese participation in foreign investments, and IP theft is faciliated by the government, but China also has a whole government agency whose jobs are to walk foreigners through the registration process and get their factories and offices up and running. India tried copying this, but that office is still frustrated by the entrenched interests in the federal, state, and local governments.

China shares a lot of issues with India, such as corruption, a heavy-handed state, protectionism, etc. but China has taken bigger strides to correct some of these (at least, in a way that promotes development). India for some reason is deeply wedded to the old way of doing things.

[支持核绿派 (Greens4Nuclear)]

https://www.ggd.world/p/what-prevents-and-what-drives-gendered

What Prevents & What Drives Gendered Ideological Polarisation?

Across much of the world, men and women think alike. However, in countries that are economically developed and culturally liberal, young men and women are polarising. As chronicled by John Burn-Murdoch, young women are increasingly likely to identify as ‘progressives’ and vote for leftists, while young men remain more conservative. What explains this global heterogeneity?

I suggest,

1. Men and women tend to think alike in societies where there is

• Close-knit interdependence, religosity and authoritarianism, or
• Common culture and mixed gendered offline socialising.

2. Gendered ideological polarisation appears encouraged by:

• Feminised public culture
• Economic resentment
• Social media filter bubbles
• Cultural entrepreneurs.

TLDR

Close-knit, interdependent, religious and authoritarian societies breed cultural conformity, since everyone is socially policed.

Older men and women in the West also tend to think alike, though for different reasons. They came of age at a time of common culture (e.g. the Simpsons) and mixed gendered socialising.

But now - in economically developed and culturally liberal societies - young men and women seem to be growing apart. Evidence points to economic frustrations, social media filter bubbles and cultural entrepreneurs. In economically stagnant regions, young men are struggling to achieve high status. Social media filter bubbles and cultural entrepreneurs have created echo chambers of righteous resentment, channelling frustrations and zero sum mentalities against females and foreigners. Meanwhile, many young women are immersed in filter bubbles that emphasise inequalities.

What might reverse the growing gap? The available evidence points to:

• Economic prosperity
• Breaking filter bubbles, regulating algorithms.
• Cross-gender friendships.

Failure to address this gap may impede heterosexual love, friendships and family formation.

[PSOL]

Our public spaces and entertainment are not “feminized” and the notion that women and men are voting differently is vastly overblown and when men are pressed, any nonsense they say on polling gets buyer’s regret when they actually get implemented. Abortion getting demolished through initiatives should have been a wake-up call.

[Blue3]

From the first post - how is Islam singularly (and separate from the very broad “conquests”) the third biggest wave of the spread of patriarchy after the Neolithic Revolution and “Conquests” in general?

Christianity’s spread through the Roman world (and a little beyond, into Armenia and Ethiopia early on) … and the. Especially its subsequent colonization of the New World plus latter colonial waves in Africa and Asia, not considered at least as influential?

This point just makes me doubt the sources entirely. If someone could justify or explain it?

[支持核绿派 (Greens4Nuclear)]

From the first post - how is Islam singularly (and separate from the very broad “conquests”) the third biggest wave of the spread of patriarchy after the Neolithic Revolution and “Conquests” in general?

Christianity’s spread through the Roman world (and a little beyond, into Armenia and Ethiopia early on) … and the. Especially its subsequent colonization of the New World plus latter colonial waves in Africa and Asia, not considered at least as influential?

This point just makes me doubt the sources entirely. If someone could justify or explain it?

https://www.draliceevans.com/post/ten-thousand-years-of-patriarchy-1

In the 7th century, Arabs conquered vast swathes of territory across the Middle East and North Africa. This catalysed a deterioration in women’s autonomy - most especially in Egypt. Conquered people gained rights and tax exemptions if they converted to Islam, recited the Quran, gained an Arab patron, and adopted tribal lineages. Patrilineal kinship was simultaneously reinforced (by Shariah law’s recognition of male agnates in inheritance and patrilineal ownership of children) and also threatened (by Muslim women’s inheritance rights). Cousin marriage provided a solution: consolidating family wealth, strength, and trust. It remains especially high in Muslim countries formerly under the Umayyad Caliphate. As Egyptians shifted from bilateral to patrilineal tribes, they restricted women’s rights and freedoms.

Iraq became the seat of the Sunni Muslim empire: Persian theologians managed state institutions of learning, and played a crucial role in developing Islamic ethics. They constructed men as intellectually superior, uniquely capable of reason, and thus rightful patriarchs. Men could only achieve piety by preventing fitna (moral corruption) and policing women. Clerics repeatedly prescribed gender segregation: barring women from communal prayers in the mosque. 12th century Damascan and Cairean women did defy these prescriptions (occasionally they even preached). But open dissent was increasingly inhibited by close-knit tribes, fear of eternal damnation, and religious authoritarianism. In the 13th century, Mamluk sultan Barsbary and clerics claimed that Egypt’s famines were Allah’s punishment for women’s unIslamic practices, they were ordered to stay at home.

The Atlas mountains and remote valleys of northern Pakistan were impenetrable, however. By escaping into rugged terrain, the Amazigh resisted Arabisation. The Kalash similarly stayed polytheistic, women exercised autonomy and moved freely.

[支持核绿派 (Greens4Nuclear)]

Romantic Love is an Under-Rated Driver of Gender Equality

On International Women’s Day, I’d like to highlight a hugely important (but widely overlooked) driver of gender equality. In fact, this mechanism is so powerful that it is actively suppressed by many patriarchal societies.
Curious? Well, let me share my historically comparative analysis of Pakistan, China, the Roman Empire, Early Modern Europe, Puritan settlers and present day USA.

Patrilineal loyalty is reinforced in several ways:

• Arranged marriages;
• ‘Family comes first’. Socialising with family, celebrating their weddings, mourning their funerals, helping out in hard times, and discussing business ventures all reinforce family loyalty. Outsiders are eyed with suspicion. Adults may thus freely choose to marry paternal cousins.
• Filial loyalty is revered. “Paradise lies at the mother’s feet” is frequently repeated. By recalling this Hadith, Pakistanis remind each other that filial loyalty was praised by the Prophet.
• Romance may be repressed. Regardless of how the marriage is formed, love may still be sabotaged. Even if couples marry freely, the mother-in-law may actively prevent closeness. Tensions between wives and mothers-in-law are global, but these appear most pronounced in poor honour cultures like Pakistan, where sons are crucial for support in old age.

Repressing romance

Hussein (who grew up in a poor part of Karachi) shared that his mother (Amal) chose to marry her first cousin (Mubashir). It was a love marriage, but romance was heavily suppressed.

“My grandmother (dad’s mum) would in all these ways try to limit my mum and dad’s relationship from being deeper than it was.

• She would get very annoyed if he would take her out to events.
• She didn’t like it if he spent time upstairs in the flat my mum had. She wanted him downstairs in her flat, with the rest of the family.
• She would keep him downstairs for as long as possible during the evening so he would not go upstairs with my mum. She once said quite bitterly, which I only understood when I was older: “Upper Kya milaga” (what will you find upstairs?). There was this implicit thing of you’ve already slept with her and had a son. What else can she give?

And she knew things like Eid shopping, intimate time in the evening, a Sunday afternoon were all possible ways they would get closer. But it was also economic. He was her main provider, so if he was swayed by his wife, then she may lose that support”.

Amal was bright, bubbly and craved independence: she wanted to play music, watch TV and go on fun trips. The standard donor intervention might be ‘income-generating activities’ or ‘female empowerment’. But that would be a gross misdiagnosis. Amal actually earned a decent salary - working as a senior administrator.

Amal’s biggest problem was in the home. Since she was barely permitted to spend any time with Mubashir, their marital bond remained weak. Tight restrictions inhibited love, empathy, consideration and understanding.

Mubashir’s prior affinity was to his mother and male peers. He valued their judgement and sought their approval. Fraternal solidarity persisted. When Amal rebelled against these strictures, he beat her to ensure submission and maintain status. Mubashir’s violence was highly strategic - designed to terrify, but not totally incapacitate. Amal’s bruises and broken bones hardly counted.

Amal wanted affection, so when Mubashir came to her room she would deny sex as a form of rebellion. But since he did not value her welfare, this just resulted in rape.

Weak conjugal attachments are an overlooked driver of patriarchy. 40% of Pakistanis think wife beating is sometimes justifiable. Even if a woman is employed, she’s just as likely to have been beaten. My point is that if men don’t love their wives, her welfare matters less.

For the sake of brevity I won't post the entire piece here.

"Pick me girl" syndrome may be more prevalent in certain patriarchal cultures where a general/familial cultural preference for sons can adversely affect childhood emotional and psychological development for both boys and girls. The TikTok series "mom obsessed with her useless son" explores one possible manifestation of "pick me girl" syndrome to comedic effect.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C0unkOhJ7Q4/  

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C1DNFc9pjRD/  

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C1XyZWNJMe0/
 
https://www.instagram.com/reel/C2N5qUUpr6K/

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C3D-bVApjj1/

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C3qmeY6pxOo/

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C4bZJKxp6Mh/

[支持核绿派 (Greens4Nuclear)]

"Pick me girl" syndrome may be more prevalent in certain patriarchal cultures where a general/familial cultural preference for sons can adversely affect childhood emotional and psychological development for both boys and girls. The TikTok series "mom obsessed with her useless son" explores one possible manifestation of "pick me girl" syndrome to comedic effect.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C0unkOhJ7Q4/  

Spoiler alert! Click Show to show the content.

Show

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C1DNFc9pjRD/  

Spoiler alert! Click Show to show the content.

Show

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C1XyZWNJMe0/

Spoiler alert! Click Show to show the content.

Show

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C2N5qUUpr6K/

Spoiler alert! Click Show to show the content.

Show

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C3D-bVApjj1/

Spoiler alert! Click Show to show the content.

Show

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C3qmeY6pxOo/

Spoiler alert! Click Show to show the content.

Show

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C4bZJKxp6Mh/

Spoiler alert! Click Show to show the content.

Show

There is now a part 8 for "mom obsessed with her useless son", in which the son's ex is mentioned in passing.

You have to be a pretty dense idiot to believe that feminism is the belief that there are literally no differences between men and women whatsoever. Unfortunately, Atlas, and this thread, is full of dense idiots, so we have to have this mind-numbing discussion. The concept of "the patriarchy" is not critiquing the idea that men and women are different; it critiques the notion that these differences must be ingrained in every aspect of society.

Men, on average, are physically larger and stronger than women, on average. In hunter-gatherer societies, this may have made the division of labor relatively straightforward. Even then, that narrative is hardly universal - or even descriptive of a majority, with the traditional imaginary perhaps a projection of our own gender roles onto the past. Even if it were true, it hardly lends credence to any sort of "natural division of labor" in agricultural societies, let alone industrial ones! The invention of tools and the domestication of beasts of burden meant that the natural average differences in size and strength between men and women were less relevant. The difference in strength between an ox pulling a plow and a human man is likely an order of magnitude greater than the difference in strength between the average man and woman. Industrial machinery further erodes any sort of biological difference; by the time we get to the contemporary economy, and the topic of the original article, the differences between men and women are so abstract and irrelevant to the role of businesses executive (or any other role of "authority") that advocates of it like VBM and TimTurder appear cartoonishly sexist. Indeed, there is no inherent reason we should think a good CEO is aggressive or metaphorically "strong" - but because of how deeply ingrained patriarchy is in society, we are conditioned to believe that a good CEO would share the same traits that make a good hunter, even though logically we understand these are wildly different roles, requiring different skills, and making different decisions. That is the very nature of patriarchy - larger than any one man or any one culture: differences between men and women are artificially exaggerated in society rather than minimized, creating the appearance that the roles each gender is funneled into are "natural" and "inherent". Take for example, the misconception or myth than boys are better at math than girls. There is no scientific, inherent basis for the idea that boys are somehow better at learning and understanding math or analytical thinking in general. But, because this misconception had been frequently repeated over the past century or more, girls have internalized the idea that they are worse at math, leading them to shy away from choosing to take higher level math courses, or pursue careers in mathematical and engineering occupations, or pursue further education in STEM fields, all leading to an underrepresentation of women in these classes, occupations, and fields, creating the appearance that, "yes, boys are just naturally suited to math - just look at who takes math classes, or works in mathematical fields, or publishes academic research in mathematics!"

Furthermore, the idea of women as the homemaker and men as the breadwinner are, again, a creation of, often explicit, patriarchal ideology. Child-rearing duties were not delegated solely to women in pre-agricultural society. In fact, I don't believe there was ever a period of time in which neither child-rearing nor "work" were shared between genders - both men and women contributed to the household. Unsurprisingly, duties that men gravitated toward became more valuable in society, which in turn further pushed out women of those duties and toward "household" duties. My favorite historical anecdote is that of the alewife , a profession common in many medieval societies. When ale was the drink of choice, men and women were both well-represented in the profession; since ale did not keep for long prior to the invention of refrigeration, it had to be made close to the place of consumption. This led to the proliferation of alehouses throughout Europe, and many women were employed as brewsters of ale - hence, alewife. Hops was first added to the brewing process in the Low Countries, and beer made with hops could keep, unlike ale. Suddenly, large-scale production was possible, creating in its wake a male-dominated field. Eventually, as beer overtook ale as the drink of choice, the alehouses gradually faded away, and the alewives with them. Women were shut out of this new profession, in an industry that now was significantly profitable and powerful. Even now, even within industries, the differences between women and men are purposefully exaggerated. Women are shuffled toward the "care" position of nurse while men are funneled toward the "analytical" doctor.  The imaginary of the stay-at-home mom emerges out of Victorian morality and full realized in the 1950s - even when (or rather, because) just a decade prior saw record women's participation in the open economy. In order for men to reclaim their jobs and position of economic power, women had to be pushed back into the home, a societal campaign reinforced by the media of the day. Yet, for some reason this entirely artificial, momentary image of society has become what many today believe is "normal", "natural", and, the worst among them, "desirable".


This is to say that these sorts of beliefs that there are "natural" causes for men and women's differences in roles of authority are based entirely in pseudoscientific feel-goodery rather than historical evidence, reliant entirely on circular reasoning. The difference between sexism and patriarchy is vast - an action can be sexist, an individual or a work of media or a concept can be sexist. A society is patriarchal - a thought rot that penetrates so deep that it predates the society itself, that is beyond one person to resolve or overturn. It is so overwhelming in its grasp on society that people are led to believe that it is in fact inherent rather than constructed.

I almost always regret effort posting on here, and I anticipate Atlas will live down to my expectations.

[支持核绿派 (Greens4Nuclear)]

"Pick me girl" syndrome may be more prevalent in certain patriarchal cultures where a general/familial cultural preference for sons can adversely affect childhood emotional and psychological development for both boys and girls. The TikTok series "mom obsessed with her useless son" explores one possible manifestation of "pick me girl" syndrome to comedic effect.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C0unkOhJ7Q4/  

Spoiler alert! Click Show to show the content.

Show

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C1DNFc9pjRD/  

Spoiler alert! Click Show to show the content.

Show

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C1XyZWNJMe0/

Spoiler alert! Click Show to show the content.

Show

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C2N5qUUpr6K/

Spoiler alert! Click Show to show the content.

Show

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C3D-bVApjj1/

Spoiler alert! Click Show to show the content.

Show

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C3qmeY6pxOo/

Spoiler alert! Click Show to show the content.

Show

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C4bZJKxp6Mh/

Spoiler alert! Click Show to show the content.

Show

There is now a part 8 for "mom obsessed with her useless son", in which the son's ex is mentioned in passing.

You have to be a pretty dense idiot to believe that feminism is the belief that there are literally no differences between men and women whatsoever. Unfortunately, Atlas, and this thread, is full of dense idiots, so we have to have this mind-numbing discussion. The concept of "the patriarchy" is not critiquing the idea that men and women are different; it critiques the notion that these differences must be ingrained in every aspect of society...

unofficial codetta for "mom obsessed with her useless son" starring Chris Cuomo    and Sarah Palin  

cyzorgg: Teaching boys to get revenge on girls that reject them just means later in life they are gonna get angry or retaliate whenever women reject them as adults.

And for some actual history content- an episode of Dr. Evans' podcast ROCKING OUR PRIORS,
What prevents Hindu-Muslim conflict? Saumitra Jha