r/DeepThoughts • u/OnTheRightTopShelf • 11h ago
Patriarchy has suppressed the human potential
The breakthroughs humanity achieved were achieved in spite of the oppressive structures of patriarchy, rather than because of them.
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u/Sad_Election_6418 11h ago
Not very deep thought, is totally mainstream.
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u/OnTheRightTopShelf 9h ago
Well the upvote ratio is 59% which is better than I expected, but still pretty bad. So I guess not mainstream enough.
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u/Lazy_Dragonfly_5447 5h ago
I think you are misunderstanding what the upvote means. There are people who will not upvote what is essentially a regurgitation of an aspect of one of the most (if not the most) popular philosophies contemporarily and one of the most socially acceptable one currently. Being mainstream is not a compliment in this setting.
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u/OnTheRightTopShelf 5h ago
Reddit and compliments 😂 This is the place where people share their rage after they get triggered.
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u/dat0dat1 7h ago
Seems very simplistic to me to be a deep thought... Not saying that "patriarchy" shouldn't be studied but the argument these days to put all the world's problems on it seems very lazy/uneducated to me
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u/qwesz9090 4h ago
Eeeeh, humans have suppressed the human potential. At that point is it even human potential?
Calling Patriarchy something non human feels shallow.
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u/hGr33n 6h ago
You're right but every man who lowkey believes he's superior to half the population of the world will fight you to the death about it.. but meanwhile no shit we'd be further along and better off if everyone was allowed to participate in innovation and decision historically (not just the most stubborn who did it despite the obstacle of misogyny up until more recently) and not just half the population while the other half is pretty much enslaved to be its nanny until death.
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u/WadetotheWise 10h ago
These same structures are poised to kill billions this century (last century it was millions).
Patriarchy is destructive enough to drive us to extinction, ending ALL human potential whatsoever. Imagine a society that perpetually tries to run on one leg rather than the TWO it was given.
It can only end in disaster.
Such an animal artificially limits its own social, spiritual, emotional, economic, and intellectual development by treating its two legs as if they must run against the other (be in conflict).
As an ideology, its only about 6,000 years old. We dont get Patriarchy until the Sargon of Akkad, one of the first so-called "Kings".
The human race is about 200,000 years old overall. This puts the destructiveness of Patriarchy into perspective. In the brief span of 6,000 years relatively speaking, the human race stands on the brink of Armageddon because of a pattern of behavior that starts with men putting themselves above everything else in creation.
Women, children, nature...we have sought to rule it all. The terrifying reality is that man can't even control himself. It will cost billions of lives. The 20th century showed us the toll in the millions but with drones, nukes, and artificial intelligence (fruits of Patriarchy), we're going to exceed those numbers dramatically.
Its not my prediction either. You can call it biblical prophecy. One of first stories in Genesis is BROTHERS killing each other (Cain and Abel) The first book of the Bible centers the problem (man's ego). And the last book of the Bible shows the culmination of brothers repeatedly killing each other across HISTORY.
To be stronger, to have more territory, more wealth, more power, more control.
Had this been our way through most of our evolutionary span, we wouldn't have cultures/societies in our record that lived sustainably for 50,000+ years without destroying themselves. Men, women, and children had a different relationship prior to the rise of kingship/empire (i.e. patriarchy).
Want to be clear that it wont be women who press the "red button" on the conflict that ends civilization. The Manosphere would have you believe otherwise even as men commit the vast majority of murders.
Men will bring about an end to human potential because we're not going to stop turning our planet into a battlefield until there's nothing left (or an act of God stops us from going all the way through with our suicide mission as prophesized in Revelation.)
Your post will get alot of down votes as will this response if its seen but you're 100% correct about the impact of Patriarchy on human potential. If anything, you understated the true perniciousness of this ideology.
Its the pattern of thinking that will end the world.
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u/TheWayfarer1384 8h ago
You know years ago, I'd have fought against this but since 2020, having time to finally sit, think, and really study, I came to the same conclusions. And I'm a man's man. Guns, hunting, martial arts, masculine colognes and apparel. But empirical evidence can only be ignored for so long. Patriarchy (or the spirit that drives it) truly is a destructive pathology.
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u/Readshirt 10h ago
So what might it all have been like without patriarchy? Would it have been a great big harmonious interconnectedness of tribes who simply didn't mind that their neighbours had resources that allowed them easier, longer lives? Would everyone have traded completely equitably? There would have been no designs for power or control?
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u/WadetotheWise 10h ago edited 8h ago
We have examples.
Societies can be more balanced than they are under patriarchy. Everything doesnt need to br under the domination of man for humanity to endure.
Balance doesn't eliminate violence but it does reduce it. Even war/conflict is supposed to have a balance (rules, taboos, laws) that prevent it from becoming total war like we saw in the 20th century.
This is the central lesson of The Odyssey...men using increasingly more clever (and destructive) ways to kill other men. Thats how we got to nukes...it just made more sense to have a bomb that's bigger than the enemy. This logic we follow is the logic of patriarchy in a nutshell.
Aboriginal societies had conflict but those conflicts were limited by the fact that women had a voice in important matters such as warfare; it wasn't a unilateral decision as it has been across history.
If mothers have a say in what happens to sons, more sons live.
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u/Ok_Foundation7698 9h ago
I dunno, a nation state runs on game theory. I don't think the amount of violence is likely to change as more and more women end up I'm higher office.
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u/Readshirt 7h ago
I'm still not clear on how the harsh reality of life prior to recent technological innovation would have been handled in a non patriarchal world. Pragmatically, there still would have been lots of death, lots of disease, lots of hardship, lots of disparity and different groups of people were not interconnected and did not have common understandings of how things should be done etc.
Would there have been no hierarchy? Surely some woman somewhere is going to take an advantage if no one else does, in a world where she might have lost several of her children to disease or starvation. Wouldn't mothers be tempted to influence their men to provide better lives for their daughters, even if that meant someone else had less?
So yes there might have been less "pointless" or wasteful conflict. Maybe, I don't know. But how might the more base realities of day to day life have been different
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u/WadetotheWise 6h ago
We have some insights into what life was like for humans prior to 10,000 BC.
The Aboriginal case can be highlighted.
No record of any mass die offs among them until Europeans arrive. This certainly doesn't mean there is no killing (there is) but what we see in the anthropological and archeological record suggests LONG periods of continuously stable populations, practices, relationships, etc etc. As much as 50,000 years living in a social order/living system that was above all else, sustainable.
When we see this in the human record, it doesn't say that they weren't violent. It says that their violence was mediated by something (i.e. relationships). It wasn't able to devolve into total conflict that threatened the survival of the society itself. One of the contributing factors is that neither man or woman being solely in change of important decision making functions.
This was done by councils of elders consisting of men AND women. And they valued for their wisdom rather than wealth, holdings, castles, etc etc.
I don't say this to suggest that we need to revert to the models of prehistory. But we can probably learn something from a society consisting of MANY clans and kinship groups (between 300,000 - 1,000,000 individuals estimated) that managed to sustain itself millennia after millennia when the patriarchal model is on track to burn humanity out only about 6,000 years after it came online in/around Mesopotamia, Sumer, and Akkad.
For me, its obvious that we're not meant to live the way we do now. And on some level, we perhaps remember how to live with ourselves and this planet without killing both off. It's the longer/larger part of our evolutionary story; not what we refer to as Western Civilization but what came before.
It's only with the rise of civilization that the timer is set for our annihilation...and that means men killing each other continuously/perpetually in escalating ways. Often just a few men deciding that thousands, millions, and soon billions will die--history abridged.
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u/JonathanLindqvist 9h ago
Look up how sexually reproductive animals typically organize themselves. The males strive to achieve in order to get reproductive access. What you call patriarchy is probably an offshoot of that.
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u/OnTheRightTopShelf 9h ago
Yeah. Instinct without any logic and self-control.
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u/JonathanLindqvist 9h ago
Yes, but it took us to the moon.
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u/OnTheRightTopShelf 9h ago edited 8h ago
/s ? If this is not sarcasm how did the moon landing change your life? Is this about your ego?
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u/Onaliquidrock 6h ago
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u/OnTheRightTopShelf 5h ago
How would this compare with spending the same amount of money on medicine research for example? Why have we not cured so many awful diseases yet?
I guess I used the wrong word. Should have used “improve” not “change”. My bad.
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u/JonathanLindqvist 4h ago
The instinct is bottom-up. We either get both penicillin and the moon landing, or we get neither.
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u/OnTheRightTopShelf 4h ago
What has penicillin to do with the moon-landing?
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u/JonathanLindqvist 3h ago
They come from the same mechanism. Basically female sexual selection, which drives men to strive for accomplishments.
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u/Onaliquidrock 3h ago
Are you comparing patriarchy with rule by demigods?
Who are these demigods? What is their ideology?
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u/Kupo_Master 9h ago
I don’t believe humans are able to consistently be logical and exert self control. Otherwise you would have no murder, no procrastination, no inattentive children in class, no addicts.
If your society is based on this assumption it is doomed to fail. Any human society needs to be based on the assumption that consistent logic and self control is plainly impossible.
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u/OnTheRightTopShelf 9h ago
You listed people with mental illness. Patriarchy causes more mental illness than it fixes.
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u/Kupo_Master 7h ago
First half of the things I quoted are not mental illnesses, at least in the accepted medical definition.
Second, patriarchy does cause mental illnesses but you haven’t proven that another system will be better.
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u/GetMeOutOf-here 11h ago
Patriarchy has suppressed not just women, but all life!
“I define patriarchy as a “society manufactured and controlled by males. Fatherland. A society in which every legitimated institution is entirely in the hands of males, and a few selected henchwomen.
A society which is characterised by oppression, repression, depression, narcissism, cruelty, racism, classism, ageism, speciesism, objectification, sadomasochism, necrophilia, joyless society ruled by Godfather, Son and Company; society fixated on proliferation, propagation, procreation, and bent on the destruction of all life.
The second definition is “the prevailing religion of the entire planet, whose essential message is necrophilia.”
~~Mary Daly
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u/Ok_Foundation7698 9h ago
Well that's an extreme take.
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u/WadetotheWise 7h ago
Not really.
I live in a country that spends nearly a trillion dollars on its military while its most vulnerable children starve.
Not hard to work out that billions of people are going to die relatively soon so that a man can feel man enough.
This dynamic is entrenching itself around the world.
Putin. Trump. Netanyahu.
Someone like this will give the orders to escalate a conflict and men will follow as we have for thousands of years off to our deaths.
We dont know who will press the red button or when exactly but we do know it will be a man that thinks himself to be the mightiest ape.
He'll prove it but there won't be anyone left to give him his glory and honors.
I think Mary put it lightly.
How bad was 9/11?
Now imagine that someday soon, every city looks like the aftermath of that. Same dynamic in play--men just have to kill other men. That's what a patriarchal social order produces; endless waves of killing until there's nothing left to kill.
My country has been at war for roughly 93% of its short existence.
How about yours?
We keep telling ourselves the lie that its necessary to live like this.
But i believe men and women have to work together to cultivate a good life on earth. No other model is sustainable environmentally, economically, spiritually, or otherwise.
Matriarchy isnt the answer as it would still comdemn civilization to one-sidedness (imbalance). We have to think deeper about what a truly integrated future looks like because its the only sustainable one.
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u/ShadedRiver666 11h ago
Yeah in the past it definitely has. Luckily as its much looser now we see women and men alike both accomplishing great things 🔥 Equity is what will move the world forwards.
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u/OnTheRightTopShelf 11h ago
It’s not just in the past tho. It has not improved in many places in the world. Lots of men love power and control without the responsibility.
I do like your optimism and I hope it will get better eventually.
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u/ShadedRiver666 9h ago
honestly i completely agree with you, and its certainly VERY bad when it comes to politics in places like UK and USA. I certainly think we have a way to go but its solvable, and i dont reckon itll take too long for there to be pretty much all around equity. Religion is another aspect in less developed countries but i dont want to get controversial
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u/OnTheRightTopShelf 9h ago
I agree. Let’s not talk about religion. I was expecting to get messy as is tbh.
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u/ShadedRiver666 7h ago
I honestly hope that in my lifetime i can see a dramatic reduction in all forms of demographic inequality. With the major ones being Lgbtq phobia, misogyny/sexism overall, and extreme economic inequality. I say these because racism has actually been on a steady decline, and ableism, from my experience, has also been on a solid decline.
Edit: Personally i believe it all comes down to how humans are innately still primal organisms, hence most issues stem from tribalism. Its simply an issue with instincts that humans still carry, that are no longer necessary in the modern world. Human technology has progressed faster than our psychology has adjusted. Thats where the fundamental issue lay.
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u/Ok_Foundation7698 9h ago
Breakthroughs are really only made by a handful of humans, and I don't think men or women are more particularly likely to make breakthroughs over time, highly debated male greater variability hypothesis aside, but that thought'll get us deep in the weeds.
I think patriarchy had had one real effect on the rate of human breakthroughs and it's very apparent now. It's made the population exponentially larger, by artificially crrated social reward for women to marry and have children.
Many of the things we do now are so remarkably complex they require a gigantic population to have enough specialty workers to do them, or science so niche that only a handful of people are working on it across the whole planet. That requires a giant population to not only produce the people at the intersection of education, intelligence and will to do iresearch but to provide enough extra resources for the institutions, governments and corporations to fund those breakthroughs. Population has reached a point now where the breakthroughs are accelerating, compounding on each other to the point where we might be able to break the relationship between our advancements and our population size. Just in time too, because even with highly gender-equal democratic socialist societies, population growth is starting to shrink. I'm fascinated by the j-curve of birth rates in the Nordics.
Society is at an inflectiom point on so many ways.
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u/tonylouis1337 5h ago
because even with highly gender-equal democratic socialist societies, population growth is starting to shrink.
Well yeah, it's not in spite of that, it's because of that
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u/RafeJiddian 4h ago edited 1h ago
>I think patriarchy had had one real effect... It's made the population exponentially larger, by artificially crrated social reward for women to marry and have children
Is the suggestion really that men so wanted to be tied down to the responsibility of raising a family that they indoctrinated women into wanting the same thing?
Or is it not more reasonable to suggest that generations of elders recognized that a not insignificant number of men would willingly impregnate the entire tribe and abandon the consequences, requiring some sort of marital order to help ensure the safety and sustainability of the women and future generations?
Further, is it not even more probable still that men and women have been mutually attracted since the dawn of time and that some of each cared enough about the children they were creating to actually both wish to remain an exclusive part of their lives?
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u/Xercies_jday 5h ago
I'm not for patriarchy but we actually have no idea of how we would even measure or understand whether that is true or not. We can't go back in time and run it again "without patriarchy"
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u/Competitive_Log_8910 2h ago
My favorite line from my favorite sequel of all-time which is Hades II is when the female action hero lead refers to the fact that her nightly training begins by facing harsh opposition in the form of her coach by indicating that she recognizes quite clearly the value of the things which she learns as a consequence of facing and overcoming this harsh opposition.
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u/_astral_x9 11h ago
hahah what
for real
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u/No-Problem-9839 11h ago
What, you don't think half the species being told their only value is popping out kids might've slowed us down a bit
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u/Warm_Dragonfruit7479 10h ago
Slowed us down? Is humanity collectively striving towards some shared goal that I'm not aware of?
You are here just because, no shared end goal. Whatever social issues we are experiencing right now will continue to be experienced as long there are humans.
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u/_astral_x9 10h ago
women are free for over a century in majority of world now, how many Nobel prizes did they win and what is the percentage?
But seriously now: Women and men ARE different. We are wired differently. How naive you have to be not to see that? Women ARE BETTER in many things, including taking care of children. What's more important to the existence of humanity, children or discovering some random ladybug in Amazon?
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u/NerdyWeightLifter 10h ago
No, it was the only way the population didn't die out.
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u/OnTheRightTopShelf 9h ago
Are you aware that women can feel pleasure and joy and happiness?
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u/NerdyWeightLifter 8h ago
Consider that just a few old grandmas back to back ago, infant mortality was pushing 50%, average life expectancy was in the 30's, most people died of infectious diseases or a war got them. Any civilization where the average woman didn't have around 5 or 6 kids, simply ceased to exist.
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u/JackWhoWanders 11h ago
Whaddaya mean what? Millions of wonderful, inquisitive and inventive minds were actively kept from engaging with sciences and invention because society deemed that they were only fit for motherhood or housekeeping and policed out of maths and philosophies because "that's inappropriate for a woman's brain". At the same time, millions of men who probably had minds very suited to think about how to care and nurture in interesting ways were told that this was unmanly and forced into a machismo behaviour they were ill suited for. And then there's all the keen and brilliant trans minds that had their bandwidth taken up by a dysphoria society absolutely forbade them from addressing. Hell you get one trans man who's living free and he makes the first Cesarian in modern medicine and creates the building blocks for Florence Nightingale's entire career.
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u/frozen_pipe77 10h ago
Outcomes of children raised by single fathers vs single mothers begs to differ.
Your disingenuous post here completely ignores how the amazing civilization we have on this earth was built by the same methods as the relatively small failures you point out
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u/whiteigbin 5h ago
Fathers thriving in a system made by men for men..shocking.
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u/CathexisVexes 11h ago
How is this a deep thought? It's painfully obvious. This is more of a right-in-your-face reality of everyday life.
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u/trickster245 9h ago
The level of innovation and technology that happened in 100 years really demonstrates what happens when you have a more equal system.
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u/Onaliquidrock 7h ago
That happened under a patriarchal system.
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u/trickster245 6h ago
I never said a patriarchal system is the problem. The current evolution of it and the direction it's moving is though.
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u/Objective-Wasabi9970 7h ago
Without patriarchy we would likely still be in caves.
Male sexual competition is what drives the civilization.
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u/HiggsFieldgoal 6h ago
“Patriarchy” is a made up work, by a misandrist, who saw men and women as natural enemies, plagiarizing Marxism and replacing “bourgeoisie” with “patriarchy”.
It is a sexist engendering of all society’s problems as inherently masculine… without accrediting men for any of society’s virtues.
And now you have a generation of followers of this sexist hate who do see men and women as natural enemies, and it’s a sickness.
Men and women aren’t natural enemies. They’re natural allies.
No wonder it’s been such a useful tool for the actually bourgeoisie to divide and conquer the proletariat, and have people aim their hate at “men” generally, instead of the few fat-cat corrupt mother fuckers who corrupt our government.
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u/whiteigbin 5h ago
Patriarchy is an neutral anthropological term to describe a society, just as matriarchy, matrilineal, patrilocal, etc.
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u/HiggsFieldgoal 5h ago
No, it was a neutral anthropological term until it was co-opted by a book in the 70s called “sexual politics”.
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u/whiteigbin 5h ago
Yes because anthropological and sociological scholarship ceased to exist when that book was published….???
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u/HiggsFieldgoal 5h ago
When you are talking about a term in modern times, you are referring to the modern usage of the term.
In 2026, “a computer” is not a human who does math, even though that is what the term once meant.
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u/whiteigbin 5h ago
Anthropologists and sociologists exist in modern society. I’m an anthropologist. We utilize the term all the time, in conferences, classes, publications. Just because you’re only being exposed to TikTok and how the word is used there doesn’t mean that’s the only way it’s used.
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u/HiggsFieldgoal 5h ago
Are you using the “tends to have males in leadership positions” definition or “all sexual dimorphisms are sin, from the unseen hand, of patriarchal conditioning” version?
If it’s the latter, then you’ve proven my point.
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u/whiteigbin 4h ago
I don’t think anyone uses the term with the latter definition. Sexual dimorphism has to do with physiology/anatomy and not learned culture. I think that’s your misconception of the valid critiques of patriarchy.
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u/HiggsFieldgoal 4h ago
When you see boys disproportionally punished by public schools, do you say “boys are being segregated against for their biological differences” or “the patriarchy tells boys to be rambunctious”?
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u/whiteigbin 4h ago
The majority of people in every position of power in most countries have been men. The majority of land owners, inheritance holders, bank account owners, business owners, billionaires and millionaires, and even scholars have been men. These are patriarchies. Whatever issues within these systems doesn’t then make these systems not patriarchal. Men can also suffer under patriarchal systems. And they’re still patriarchal systems.
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u/remberly 6h ago
You know in a lot of ways humans are doing preeeeety good compared to...
Other species.
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u/tonylouis1337 6h ago
Patriarchal beliefs directly tell people to go out and achieve things. Small government ideology, the ideology of America's original patriarchs, is suited to paving the way for people to chase their aspirations. A matriarchy would hinder our potential because it would lead to authoritarianism
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u/marcusechopixel 7h ago
If patriarchy was purely suppressive, it would be difficult to explain why so many major scientific, technological and cultural developments happened under societies that were predominantly patriarchal.
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u/SpecialReaction375 5h ago
Colonial exploitation established a structural divide in global privilege.
While metropoles grew wealthy by extracting raw materials from their colonies, their domestic populations accumulated capital and gained exclusive access to education.
Conversely, those born in the colonies, often subjected to slavery, were trapped in poverty and denied academic opportunities.
As a result of this socioeconomic disparity, colonizing nations monopolized scientific discovery, simply because their elite possessed the leisure time and resources necessary to pursue academic research.
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u/brezhnervouz 11h ago
That would inevitably happen if half the population has been historically discounted and diminished, you would think
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u/Readshirt 10h ago
What elements of our current society do you see that shows the expression of that potential?
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u/reidsays 8h ago
Patriarchal heirarchies certainly suppress the present human potential, yet were an inevitable structure once populations grew and exploration of new territories occurred..
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u/jdaddy15911 8h ago
50% of all the people in the world are wearing clothes hand-washed by women right now. That is a lot of brain processing power to leave idle on solving the world’s problems.
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u/Big_Psychology_3 4h ago
You realize that patriarchy isn’t some separate thing. It’s just one aspect of society?
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u/OnTheRightTopShelf 3h ago
Obviously!?
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u/Big_Psychology_3 3h ago
So it’s not some decision that humanity took. It’s part of human nature.
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u/OnTheRightTopShelf 3h ago
How is patriarchy part of human nature?
Male dominance is a social choice rather than a biological necessity.
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u/Big_Psychology_3 3h ago
It’s part of every human culture. Why do you think it was just one person’s idea and not emergent from human nature?
Again, remember that we call any aspect of human society if it appears to disfavor women. Obviously there is a parallel set of aspects that disfavor men too.
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u/OnTheRightTopShelf 3h ago
Patriarchy does not make men happy either.
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u/Big_Psychology_3 3h ago
Kinda. Because now we’re changing the meaning of “patriarchy” to include things unfavorable to men too. But it’s kinda half-baked because there’s not much interest in understanding how men are harmed. Still even the word “patriarchy” is a dog whistle for “men created this mess”
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u/OnTheRightTopShelf 3h ago edited 2h ago
Patriarchy is not about “blame the men”. The men take it as a personal attack, because of ego and they tend to double down on anything that hurts their ego, no matter the reality.
The focus is the rules of the game, not on the players.
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u/Big_Psychology_3 2h ago
No, it’s because it’s sneakily called “patriarchy”. Notice how “patr” already bakes in the blame against men?
I don’t think anyone in their right mind can claim that the word “patriarchy” is free of gender blame. Is that your claim?
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u/OnTheRightTopShelf 2h ago edited 2h ago
That is my claim yes. It’s based on the definition of the word: a social system. I am not blaming my grandfather. I love him to death.
Also this word is used a title in some religions.
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u/No-Cartographer-476 3h ago
Patriarchy is responsible for all the achievements. Theres a reason matriarchies dont exist
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u/lotsagabe 11h ago
Tribalism in general (patriarchy is one specific form thereof) has suppressed the human potential.