There's No Patriarchy

In the west

Imagine someone claimed that there were a series of power systems designed to prop up Jewish interests and disenfranchise non-Jews. While they insist with great force that they don’t believe in a literal cabal, they make sure to constantly note the many areas that Jews are overrepresented in and complain about widespread Jewish domination. The more someone talks like this the more you’d suspect that they’re a big David Duke fan. Once they start talking about a Jewarchy which serves to bolster Jewish interests at the expense of others, you’d begin to suspect that they are David Duke.¹

This is how I see the notion of patriarchy.*

*(Obvious clarificatory note: this is not to say these two things are equally bad, just that the core error is the same).

Feminists talk a great detail about the patriarchy. Different definitions abound, but the general idea is that society is largely designed to oppress women and lead to men being in positions of dominance. People rarely give reasons to think that there is such a thing as a patriarchy—and when they do, it just involves rattling off ways that women are worse off than men—but instead treat it as wholly beyond doubt. One academic noted “the fundamental definition of patriarchy [is] as an institution of dominance,” and CNN helpfully defines patriarchy:

"Patriarchy does not refer to any man or collection of men, but to a kind of society in which men and women participate ... A society is patriarchal to the degree that it promotes male privilege by being male-dominated, male-identified, and male-centered. It is also organized around an obsession with control and involves as one of its key aspects the oppression of women."

I have no doubt that there are lots of ways that women are treated worse than men. For example, women are more likely to be the victims of sexual harassment and assault than men. They’re also less likely to read my blog, thus losing out on a great good. But the fact that some group is treated better in some respect doesn’t mean that there is a widespread system of power designed to protecting them.

Jews and Asians are less likely to be the victim of crimes than other groups, but this doesn’t mean there’s a Jewarchy or Asianarchy. Women are less likely to be the victims of violent crime than men, but this doesn’t mean there’s a matriarchy.

I suggest that, motte and bailying to make patriarchy trivial aside, we should think that there are multiple things that contribute to patriarchy, such that a weighted average of them is used to determine patriarchy: whether men are better off than women, whether women are treated better than men overall, whether women are treated better than men based on sex, and whether men dominate a disproportionate share of positions of power. It’s in this way analogous to white supremacy, which occurs if white people are treated substantially better than women based on race. This definition effectively distinguishes those who believe in patriarchy from those that don’t—across the board, those who believe in patriarchy think that women are treated much worse than men based on sex. It also explains why it would be reasonable to say that, for example, societies where women will be savagely beaten unless they wear a Hijab are patriarchies.

In a moment, I’m going to go through the point-scoring exercise, and argue that it’s not at all obvious which sex is treated worse—either in total or based on sex. But insofar as you need to do the empirical point-scoring to figure out who is better off, there’s no patriarchy. When gays could be killed for simply being gay, to figure out they were institutionally oppressed, one didn’t need to analyze crime rates to figure out that gays were the subject of institutional oppression. When women couldn’t vote and were majorly denied rights by the legal system, when they were legally excluded from most significant positions, to figure out that they were oppressed, one didn’t need to take a careful look at studies. When black people were the victims of Jim Crow laws, there was not debate about whether they were institutionally oppressed.

A notion like patriarchy is a similarly strong notion. It isn’t enough for women to be treated slightly worse for there to be a patriarchy. It would have to be that there’s widespread, massive, sweeping, institutional discrimination. Better looking people are also treated better—this result has been verified over and over again—but there’s no attractivearchy. Like with the notion of institutional racism, if one’s evidence for patriarchy involves pointing to some outcome rather than an oppressive law, there is probably no patriarchy.

But even if we engage in the point-scoring exercise, it’s not at all clear which sex comes out better off.

Clearly, the mere fact that one group has better lives than another doesn’t prevent them from being discriminated against. Even though Jews out-earn non-Jews, there could still be major discrimination against Jews. Nonetheless, an assessment of which group has better lives is still somewhat relevant to the patriarchy assessment: one reason it’s often assumed that society is white supremacist is that blacks lag behind whites.

On this metric, the evidence seems to favor women being better off. As I’ve noted before, women in the United States live about 6 years longer than men and women tend to be happier than men. Childless women out-earn childless men and women are much likelier to be the victors in custody disputes. Women excel far more in higher education, making up about 60% of college attendees.

I’ll discuss some other ways that men are treated worse than women later, for many of those exemplify clear instances of unfair treatment.

Regarding which sex is treated better based on sex, it is far from obvious precisely how we catalogue wrongs carried out to men vs women. Should we say that sexual assault is based unfair treatment based sex, on the grounds that many who commit sexual assault are heterosexuals, and commit assault because they’re physically attracted to their victims? This doesn’t seem adequate; if a society had mostly homosexual males, so that the majority of victims of sexual harassment were men, this wouldn’t be adequate to establish that there’s a matriarchy.

Even if one counts this, however, it’s far from obvious which sex is treated better. Millions of men all around the world are subject to unjust conscription, and forced to serve in violent and dangerous combat roles, where they often face injury and death. Despite this, the complaint typically raised by feminists about conscription is that women are occasionally banned from serving, rather than that substantially more men are forced to serve in the event of a war.

While we normally think that women are the near-exclusive victims of domestic violence, as David Benatar shows in The Second Sexism, studies tend to report similar rates of domestic violence between men and women, and even in extreme violence, rates of perpetration tend to be similar (though it does look like men are the perpetrators of extreme violence a bit more). Despite this, men are often denied access to domestic violence helplines and their abuse is taken less seriously, leading to less frequent reporting.

This is part of a more general attitude: that male lives are less valuable and more expendable than female lives. This is why, despite men being the overwhelming majority of victims of violent crime, bills are often dedicated to tackling violence against women, never against men. This would be a bit like if anti-crime bills were generally labeled “the anti violence against whites bill.”

Such things hold true historically. During most periods of grave injustice, men are the primary victims. Benatar notes in his book that in the Belgian rubber terror in the Congo, in Stalinist purges, and under apartheid, men were consistently the vast majority of the victims. He writes, “In the Kosovo conflict of 1998–1989, according to one study, 90% of the war-related deaths were of men, and men constituted 96% of people reported missing.” During the holocaust, the Nazis had their guards warm up by murdering Jewish men, for they found it much more psychologically difficult to get them to murder women.

Regarding sexual assault, the gap in victims is quite unclear, and not as large as people might suppose. Given the prevalence of prison rape, it’s not at all obvious that there is gap, and men might even constitute the majority of victims. While it’s often claimed that around 98% of perpetrators of sexual assault are men, studies tend to have much more mixed results. Benatar notes “Most studies, however, have found that the rate of abuse by females lies between the low and high rates just mentioned, with many studies finding the rate to be between a third and just under a half of all cases.” Despite this, one study found that clinicians are much more likely to conclude that a woman is the victim of sexual assault than that a man was, even in cases where the evidence is similar.

Generally, however, sexual assault against men is treated as far less important. In England, for instance, rape only includes using one’s penis to sexually penetrate another during a sex act—by definition, women cannot carry it out. This is reminiscent of marital rape laws, which said that by definition a husband couldn’t rape a wife.

This reaches a particularly grotesque crescendo in the way male victims of sexual assault are often treated. In one case, for instance, a woman had sex with a man when he was unconscious—normally we call this rape. Then, after getting pregnant, she sued him for child support and won the case. It would be hard to imagine the opposite happening.

Men are punished more harshly than women for the same crime and crimes with female victims are treated as more serious. This is especially true in cases of sexual assault.

If we are going to count sexual assaults against women as being strong evidence of patriarchy, then we should also count the fact that men are the majority of victims of crime as a whole as evidence against patriarchy. Most times crimes are committed against men, given the general aversion to randomly assaulting women, sex plays a relevant causal role. Around 70% of homicide victims are men, and while some of that is no doubt caused by behavior, some of it is also caused by greater unwillingness to harm women.

Men face a variety of forms of unfair discrimination, many of which stem from the fact that both sexes feel more positively about women than men. Gay men have more trouble adopting children than comparable lesbian women. Men are frequently institutionally discriminated against by affirmative action practices and hiring discrimination. Women are more likely to be hired than comparable men. John Tierney notes:

Institutions openly discriminate against men in hiring and promotion policies—and a majority of men as well as women favor affirmative-action programs for women.

Thus, it’s not at all obvious that women are treated worse than men based on sex. The primary way they might be is based on a greater likelihood of sexual assault but a) it’s not obvious how big the gap is and b) this doesn’t seem decisive in determining patriarchy, as it would imply that if some group of women was as likely to be the victims of sexual assault as men, that group of women wouldn’t be the victims of patriarchy. Feminists would mostly be reluctant to endorse such a claim.

On the last criteria, it’s true that men are in a disproportionate share of positions of power. But this doesn’t seem enough to make there be a patriarchy. To reuse the intro example, Jews also are overrepresented in positions of power. However, this doesn’t mean that there’s a Jewarchy or that society is run for the benefit of Jews.

You might reply that though Jews are overrepresented, they don’t make up a majority of people in positions of power. This is true, but it doesn’t seem to explain why we’d be reluctant to say that there’s a Jewarchy. If, given the Orthodox demographic boom, in a few hundred years Jews are a demographic majority and continue to be overrepresented at similar rates, we shouldn’t say that there’s a Jewarchy (obviously).

Ultimately, I don’t think this kind of point scoring is very productive. Generally, when patriarchy is cited, it’s as a Motte and Bailey way of arguing that the only salient harms worth caring about and doing anything about are crimes with female victims. It’s a way of making taboo talk about men’s problems, the way that it’s taboo to talk specifically about white people’s problems.

But what’s particularly galling about it is that it’s entirely built on sand. While white people probably have better lives on average than black people, and out-earn black people, the same is just not true of men vs women. Women are, in western societies, most likely better off than men—it makes no sense to treat them as a uniquely oppressed minority group.

1. Joke stolen from here https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/04/against-overgendering-harassment/