Patriarchy theory is one of the fundamental dogmas of feminist propaganda, a narrative which has effected almost all public discourse on sex and gender in the past several decades. This has been to the extreme detriment and inhibition of understanding of male and female behavior, motivation, socialization and social power.
The conventional wisdom on the topic of patriarchy is that men, by establishing male favoring systems of hierarchy, patrilineal family structures and systems of inheritance, have – by conscious intent, suppressed and oppressed women for millennia.
This theory, taken in many different versions represents the popular and widely accepted understanding of society’s distribution of power. This theory is also without merit, without truth, and using a childish, foolish, and facile conception of human behavior. This infantile model should embarrass any social scientist or even any thinking adult who clings to it out of either ignorance or out of a deference to popular opinion.
The periodic contributor to a voice for men dot com, TyphonBlue, recently wrote an exposition of the selfish and hostile manipulation manifested in the phenomenon of the surrendered wife. Her article provides the basis for understanding how feminine cultivated absence of adult agency is used by females as a weapon, and exploits the use of culturally normal violence, enforcing male compliance by force brought by other compliant males. Deliberate feminine non-agency, or self infantilization is a way of disguising a woman’s adult agency, and weaponizing the protective instinct of males to enforce compliance and protective behavior in a husband or boyfriend. If that man avoids this manipulation – he risks retributive violence from other conformist males within the community. Those males, enforcing masculine protective socialization are the actuators of the surrendered wife. She not only provides the basis for their protective violence against a noncompliant male, she totally hides her indirect initiation of violence or it’s threat, by maintaining a cover of her own non agency, as the submissive wife.
She cannot be called out on this, as any challenge of her motivation and self interest in this manipulation game can be deflected by assuming a posture of victim of the challenge. The instinctive protective behavior of other males coming to her rescue will appear perfectly reasonable, and violence directed by them against anyone challenging her complicity and indirect agency is hidden, and attributed in a simplistic reduction to male aggression.
What’s worse is that within some traditionalist or conservative religious communities – female surrender of adult agency, and the transference of any possible responsibility, choice, and agency onto a man is praised by men and women within those communities. Unfortunately, this model of female non agency, and male hyper agency, when coupled with social enforcement of conformity and expressed masculine protective instinct turns men into slaves.
The perception of a male dominated household as if it is to male benefit requires the most reduced and simplistic understanding of human interaction, and should embarrass anyone who espouses this reading of the matter.
A woman who surrenders her agency to a man is the very worst tyrant, because she exploits his instinct to protect her as if she is an infant while retaining her .
What’s worse is that in a community in which feminine surrendered agency is viewed positively, men trapped in such relationship have no way to protest, since such protest is seen as victimization of the most helpless – the women whose social posture is that of a volition free child. Such a man, attempting to assert himself as a human with his own needs – he will forced back into his role of protector through social censure, including violence from other complying males. In fact, his identity as a human being of any social worth at all is totally tied to his conformance to be the actuator and the active agent of whatever his wife needs or wants. If her submission to his is more pronounced, she might not even communicate what her needs are, and he is left with a social requirement to figure out what she wants, with his validity as a worthwhile human hanging on getting it right, and always the threat of violence done to his person by other males if he ever deviates – because in this model, self expression, self actualization in any mode except service to his woman is perceived as attack on her. And brother, you don’t attack a woman.
And here’s the kicker, he cant even see it. A man given primacy in this social context – in which he is placed over his wife – and she is totally subservient to him – he cannot develop the social cognizance to even understand how he is both exploited and threatened at the level of eradication of his male identity in any deviation of his behavior. He is effectively blinded and silenced, because in this system of value – where he is the patriarch, and assigned agency over himself and his wife. His socialization does not include self reflection. He is enslaved in his own mind.
And his wife, subservient, without her own visible agency or exercised volition – she owns him, and owns no accountability. This is power, without any check, or thwart, hidden from those it controls expressed behind a veil of helplessness.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how Patriarchy works.
Women, for their part did not chose this behavioral model, this is the natural expression of our prehistoric hominid programming. This programming served our species very well when we averaged a 30 year life-span, regularly died of starvation, or during childbirth, and when the dark was full of predators, giving us a real reason for our fear of it. This primitive hominid programming, when its still being expressed in a modern environment of abundant food, shelter and safety doesn’t serve us quite so well anymore – and is being exacerbated and amplified in the form of a modern popular ideology of gender. You know, the one starting with F.
But here is the real definition of patriarchy – this is the operational definition that has always been relevant, but has been until now hidden behind the muddy thinking and self-serving dogma of infantalized adults with the power of not just communities of compliant males behind them, but the full deadly remote control power of violence of the modern state.
Patriarchy is a system of social cohesion which uses masculine agency, exploiting adult protective instincts towards infants to serve the reproductive benefits of females. This system is based on the masculine instinct to protect women, and maximizes the perception of male agency in service of this goal.
