The Patriarchy Paradox
Why the patriarchy will bury its undertakers
Patriarchy is a theory that says the differences between the sexes and their social roles are not the result of biology. Instead, they are socially constructed. And they have resulted in the pervasiveness of male domination in women’s lives.1 This has led the Good Lads Initiative to claim that traditional ideas of masculinity need to be reimagined. But it has also led, according to Doris Lessing, the novelist and feminist icon, to an ‘unthinking and automatic rubbishing of men which is now so part of our culture that it is hardly even noticed’.2
Despite this rubbishing of men, however, the Marvel movies show that, in popular culture, masculine archetypes such Captain America, Thor and Iron Man – described by the philosopher Edward Feser as ‘a patriotic soldier, the son of a heavenly Father come to Earth, and a strutting capitalist alpha male’3 – retain their appeal. And one of the best-established findings of modern psychology is that greater gender equality in a society leads to greater gravitation towards traditional gender norms. In the literature on this topic, sex is the biological distinction between male and female, whereas gender is how the difference between male and female is shaped by culture. So researchers have termed this result ‘the patriarchy paradox’: shaping men and women culturally to be more similar actually exaggerates their differences. It is the opposite of what the social constructivist theory predicted.4
But it isn’t paradoxical if patriarchy is, rather than being merely socially constructed, partly based in biology. Contrary to the claim that patriarchy is about male domination of women, it also at least partly results from women’s choices because it benefits them.
Much of what follows might bruise the feelings of some people, so here, from the philosopher Stephen Hicks,5 is a reminder of the elements of the traditional arguments for freedom of speech:
(1) Reason is essential for knowing reality (Galileo and Locke). (2) Reason is a function of the individual (Locke, especially). (3) What the reasoning individual needs to pursue knowledge of reality is, above all, freedom – the freedom to think, to criticise, and to debate (Galileo, Locke and Mill). (4) The individual’s freedom to pursue knowledge is of fundamental value to the other members of his society (Mill, especially).
In a cross-cultural study of manhood, David Gilmore, Professor of Anthropology, concluded that ‘three moral injunctions seem to come repeatedly into focus’: ‘one must impregnate women, protect dependents from danger, and provision kith and kin’.6 None of these three roles – procreate, protect, provide – is exclusively masculine, but the protector role is the least shared, making it the core of masculinity. It is the least shared because it is the one most firmly rooted in anatomy and physiology. In lion prides, this is very clear: although lionesses do 90% the providing, the males are responsible for protecting the pride. They only help kill the largest, most dangerous prey that would otherwise cost the lives of too many lionesses.7
Accordingly, in all cultures, war has usually been men’s work: it is Gilmore’s universal protector role. In mythology, this is embodied by Thor, who – because of his physical strength – alone stood between Aasgaard and destruction. By contrast, women have very rarely fought, and no country as ever obliged women to fight. Even though they had the right to if they chose, Delaware women seldom went to war.
The advanced weaponry of the modern age hasn’t made much difference. When the Russian army went to war in Chechnya in 1994-95, its female officers – roughly 14% of the officer corps – simply refused to go. Knowing the outcry that would follow, the army did not force them to. Female Israeli soldiers, despite mandatory military service, do not join frontline-combat infantry brigades.
Arguably the most important reason men fight is precisely to protect women from the horrors of war. In the Iliad, Hector says he would rather go to hell, covered in soil and ashes, than witness his wife being carried away as a crying captive.
War has usually been men’s work because men – as a result of natural sex differences that aren’t socially constructed – are physically adapted to fighting. Recognising that gender roles will be less fluid if sex differences are natural, some feminist theorists, such as Judith Butler, have argued that not only gender but sex is socially constructed, claiming that intersex people or people with only an X chromosome or XXY chromosomes show sex isn’t binary or natural.
The biologist Emma Hilton, however, has described the idea that sex is a social construct as ‘false at every conceivable scale of resolution’.8 Sex isn’t defined by chromosomes. In all species, even those with different or no chromosomes, females produce large gametes (reproductive cells), and males produce small ones. There is no third, intermediate gamete size. Intersex people are not exceptions. And the philosopher David Byrne has pointed out that there would have been sexes in plants and animals even if there were no human societies and therefore nothing socially constructed at all.9
To support the idea that there are limits to the fluidity of identity, other philosophers have argued that, logically, ‘considerations that support transgenderism extend to transracialism’ and even trans-speciesism.10 Although some people claim race is a social construct, ‘by taking just a few measurements, physical anthropologists can tell police departments the race of a skull’s former owner with better than 80% accuracy’.11 And biologists can use DNA elements to assign people to their race (or races if they’re of mixed parentage). So race isn’t fluid. Nor are species. People who identify as lizards aren’t actually lizards. Similarly, if you’re biologically male but identify as female, Hilton says, you still have small gametes.
So what natural sex differences are relevant to the protector role? The shoulders of boys and girls are equally broad until adolescence; then, at puberty, the shoulder cartilage cells respond to testosterone, the male sex hormone newly produced by the testes, by growing. Pubertal girls, by contrast, get wider hips when their hip cartilage cells respond to oestrogen, the female sex hormone. The sudden acceleration of shoulder width in boys is associated with relative enlargement of the upper-arm muscles. The result is that men have far greater upper-body muscle mass and strength than women. Men also have 4% faster nerve transmission speed. A major Marine Corps study found that women are at a significant disadvantage in combat compared to men.12 Even untrained males outperformed trained females: the Amazonian warrior women are merely a myth for a reason.
Biological reasons for performance differences shouldn’t be controversial. Women are 0.6% faster than men at running distances above 195 miles even though men are 17.9% faster over 5k,13 and ‘scientists suspect this is because estrogen helps make more fat available to the body as a fuel source once initial energy stores of glycogen have run down’.14 In addition to their higher body fat levels, this is also why women, who need fewer calories anyway, survive starvation better than men.15
And the adaptations are not merely physical: men are more violent by temperament. Richard Wrangham, Professor of Anthropology at Harvard, observes that ‘the 5-million-year-long-trail to our modern selves was lined, along its full stretch, by a male aggression that structured our ancestors’ social lives and technology and minds’.16 Some scientists have argued that early humans first stood up to fight17 and that fighting shaped the evolution of the hand.18 As a globally consistent trend, the sex of the criminal population correlates predictably with the violence of the crime.
War has also usually been men’s work because they can afford to treat their lives more cheaply. A population can survive the loss of men more easily than that of women. In 2008, ecologists Rebecca Sear and Ruth Mace published a paper called ‘Who Keeps Children Alive?’. Across twenty-eight cultures, the answer was that mainly mothers do: a mother’s death was more likely to lead to a child’s death, especially among nursing infants.
For the same reasons – physical strength, greater aggression, relative expendability – the protector role goes beyond warfare to include protection against the destructive forces of nature. In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1915 utopian novel Herland – in which all the men are killed by a volcanic eruption and the women discover a miraculous procedure for stimulating virgin birth – wild beasts are conveniently absent. But a world without men would be awful for women:19
Mining, oil extraction, heavy and chemical industry, long-distance transportation, most forms of construction, many kinds of agriculture, such as forestry and the herding of large domestic animals, would all but cease. So would deep-sea fishing. Under such conditions, over 90% of the world’s present-day population would die of starvation. The women that survived such a calamity would likely revert to a primitive life based on horticulture, dwelling in huts and suffering from a permanent shortage of animal protein. Judging by historical and pre-historical precedent, their life expectancy would be reduced to less than 40 years.
Throughout history, women have always been spared the worst work. Only male slaves were conscripted to die in their thousands for the pyramids, the canals in the ancient Middle East, the Great Wall of China and the roads, industrial-scale corn mills and Coliseum in Rome. Even in mythology, there is no female equivalent of Sisyphus.
And men invented well over 90% of the inventions that have improved women’s life expectancy and quality of life.
Some common objections to this protector idea are the witch hunts, the coverture laws, the vote, and rape. Marianne Hester, for example, claims the witch hunts were about men trying to suppress female sexuality – patriarchal power at its most tyrannical. But most accusers were women, Mary enacted the Scottish Witchcraft Laws, and persecution reached its apex under Elizabeth, who reinstated all the penalties against witchcraft that Edward VI, sixteen years earlier, had repealed – acting on the advice of his all-male entourage. Furthermore, the fewer women involved in the trials, the fairer the treatment witches were likely to receive.20
The coverture laws are claimed to show patriarchal oppression of women because they prevented women from owning property, but the married couple was regarded as one legal entity. The husband assumed responsibility for his wife’s debts, including her pre-marital ones. He could even be imprisoned on her behalf, while she was immune to prosecution.
Regarding the vote, women have always had it at the local level – in both parish and manor – and only 4% of the male population had the vote in ancient Athens, which remained an historical high until mid-nineteenth-century England. Even as the year 1918 began, it was still the case that well under 50% of adult men had a usable national vote. Unlike women, all these men shouldered some form of taxation without representation, and they could also be conscripted to bear arms.
Lastly, rape is not a unique claim for male oppression of women because male-on-male rape in jails dwarfs male-on-female rape outside them.21
Not only do the most common objections to the idea that women are protected fail, but numerous recent studies provide strong evidence for it:
People prefer to spare the lives of females over the lives of males
Awad, Bonnefon, Shariff, & Rahwan, 2019
People support more social action to correct female underrepresentation in careers than male underrepresentation
Block, Croft, De Souza, & Schmader, 2019
Both male and female faculty preferred hiring a female over a male applicant for tenure-track assistant professorships in STEM
Offenders who victimize females receive longer sentences than those who victimize males; males who victimize females receive the longest sentences
Police respond more negatively toward hypothetical male rape victims than hypothetical female rape victims
Women receive more help than men
Women are evaluated more favourably than men
People are less willing to harm females than males
FeldmanHall, Dalgleish, Evans, Navrady, Tedeschi, & Mobbs, 2016
In vehicular homicides, drivers who kill women are given longer sentences than those who kill men
People are particularly intolerant of aggression from a male and aggression directed toward a female
Harris & Knight-Bohnhoff, 1996
People adjust essay performance evaluations upward when they learn the writer is female
Women are punished less than men for the same crime
Controlling for numerous characteristics, men receive longer prison sentences than women
People have more empathy for female than male perpetrators and female than male victims
Women are more easily seen as victims and men as perpetrators
Reynolds, Howard, Sjåstad, Zhu, Okimoto, Baumeister, Aquino, & Kim, 2020
People attribute less guilt to a female-on-male sexual aggressor than a male-on-female sexual aggressor
People have less sympathy for male than female perpetrators and more sympathy for female than male victims
Savage, Scarduzio, Lockwood Harris, Carlyle, & Sheff, 2017
Female sex offenders are given shorter sentences than male sex offenders
Women’s aggression is perceived as more acceptable than men’s aggression
People evaluate science on female-favouring sex differences more favourably than science on male-favouring sex differences
Stewart-Williams, Chang, Wong, Blackburn, & Thomas, 2020
Psychologists agree more that it is possible that women evolved to be more verbally talented than men than that men evolved to be more mathematically talented than women
People evaluate science that suggests that women score higher on IQ tests than men more favourably than science that suggests the opposite
Winegard, Clark, Hasty, & Baumeister, 2018
People wish to censor a book that suggests that men evolved to be better leaders than women more than a book that suggests the opposite
Winegard, Clark, Bunnel, & Farkas, 2019
Kary Mullis, Chemistry Nobel Prize Laureate, said ‘it doesn’t take a lot of education to check things out. All it takes is access to resources and a feeling that people might be trying to put something over on you.’
In response to this evidence, which puts the claim that society is characterised by male oppression of women into reasonable doubt, a desperate, bizarre objection is that chivalry itself is oppressive – that Chief Justice M. C. Chagla somehow oppressed women by ruling it lawful, under the Constitution of India, to discriminate in favour of women against men but not in favour of men against women.22 It is worth remembering here that the overwhelming majority of women, according to 2019 polling, don’t describe themselves as feminists – as few as 8% in Germany, 17% in Finland, and 22% in Denmark, with even Sweden, which had the highest percentage, coming in at only 40%.23 Moreover, according to the Education Research Centre,24 one of the characteristics of indoctrination is a closed system, meaning immunity to criticism: all data must conform to the theory of patriarchal oppression. Women who don’t feel oppressed have just been oppressed into believing they’re free to keep them oppressed. To use Karl Popper’s term, patriarchy is non-falsifiable. Suppose, as G. K. Chesterton put it, you have a theory that all ginger people are trying to kill you. When you ask them whether they are, they say they’re not, but you’re too clever for them: that’s exactly what they would say. Your system is closed.
As Elizabeth Anscombe pointed out, however, corrupt minds cannot be reasoned with. The protector role is universal. What virtues does it require? Because he faces great risks and must therefore overcome fear, the protector requires courage. Beginning in infancy and across all different kinds of cultures, men are less prone to fear than women are. Women self-report greater fear of crime, public speaking, accidents, darkness, cancer, heights, and high-risk mutual funds. Lab studies back this up. Women have a stronger reflex reaction to fearful scenes: they startle more violently, their hearts race faster, and they sweat more.
Although less prone to fear than women are, however, men are not fearless. The average soldier on the battlefield regresses and acts passively under enemy fire. Commanding officers sometimes have to force men to fight at gunpoint. Phobos or fear was the god of the battlefield for the ancient greeks. Worldwide, the various masculine rites of passage worldwide therefore aim at the development of courage, tempering and toughening the initiates. They differ, but they all test a boy’s ability to handle pain and fear. Feminists such as Eleanor Leacock25 have said the !Kung Bushmen of Botswana represent an ideal of sexual equality, offering them as a model for the West, but even boys there have to kill an antelope to become men, showing they are providers rather than mere consumers of meat. They are also subjected to a severe form of hazing involving gruelling tests of masculine stamina. The boys must ‘man up’.
The Good Lads Initiative claims the phrase ‘man up’ is meaningless. In procreating, providing and protecting, however, men can fail in a way that women can’t. In procreation, they can fail in a very visual and humiliating way by being impotent. On the island of Truk, women laugh at a man’s sexual failure, telling him to ‘take the breast like a baby’. In providing, they can fail to kill the animal. Unlike roots and berries, traditionally gathered by women, large and dangerous animals fight back or run away. And in protecting, the temptation to succumb to fear is almost overwhelming. The ground at the Hot Gates was slick with faeces and urine. Childbirth demands courage of women, but you can’t lose childbirth by fleeing.
Closely related to courage is honour – the concern to protect one’s reputation and that of one’s family and lineage, pointing to ‘the need to establish and defend boundaries’.26 Only male honour is inseparable from strength and courage. Calling a woman a wimp isn’t really an insult. Anne Campbell, in her studies of aggression in female adolescents,27 found that physical fights were rare, but they usually began with girls calling each other sluts, slags or whores. (Season 3, Episode 6 of Sex in the City is called ‘Are We Sluts?’) This is because women’s honour is tied to ancient standards of sexual propriety. These insults advertise a woman’s propensity to be unfaithful and therefore make men less likely to consider her as a potential partner. Calling a man a slut would probably just provoke a confused look. Women mostly harm each other with words, and behind the back rather than face to face, using gossip to alienate and defame.28 You can’t prove chastity in a fight.
Apart from fighting, sport and games are a public display of men’s fitness to defend boundaries. Boys are around fifty times more likely than girls to engage in games involving direct, head-to-head competition. Adult men are also more interested competition, broadcasting who is stronger, fitter and abler to the community. Men compete harder and perform better when women are watching. And women often instigate the competition, as among the Mursi of Ethiopia, where they start stick-fighting contests among the young men and lavish their attention on the winners.
Male athletes aren’t motivated by dominating female athletes. The dominance contests apparent between males of all species (and between females of some species) are within, not across, sexes. Biologically speaking, the idea that men exert ‘power’ over women is nonsense: across species, ‘females can exploit their power of sexual choice to get males to compete in ways that do things for them’.29 In most species, females could refuse the dominant male if they chose. But they don’t. An elephant seal cow will cry out in protest if a low-ranking male tries to mate with her, summoning all the males within ear shot to come and fight over her. And human ‘women prefer the smell of dominant males, more masculine male faces and men behaving more dominantly when at peak fertility than at other times in their menstrual cycle.’30 This is because ovulation makes women desire a strong protector. Pregnancy and childbirth make them vulnerable.
And it is wishful thinking to believe that boundaries can be established and defended without violence and the values of strength, courage and honour that accompany it. George Orwell expressed this hard truth: ‘those who “abjure” violence can only do so because others are committing violence on their behalf.’ You might think that a real man prizes showing vulnerability and talking about his feelings, but he can’t do that if he’s dead.
In attempting to vanquish violence and oppression from the earth, Marxists broke all records for mass slaughter, murdering over 100 million people. Male aggression is a biological fact that will be with us whether we like it or not. The traditional ideal of chivalry is the attempt to deal with it. The virtue of chivalry is the virtue of one who has internalised the ethos of the protector: courage, prowess in battle, mercy to the vanquished, courtesy towards women, gentleness towards children, and piety towards elders. Machismo is a deformation of chivalry for men who forget that their strength is to be put in the service of the weak. The feminists’ horrified reaction to domestic violence acknowledges men’s special duties towards women: it is worse for a man to beat up a woman than for him to beat up a weaker man.
Anthropologists have never found a genuine matriarchy. As Wrangham explains, ‘patriarchy is worldwide and history-wide, and its origins are detectable in the social lives of chimpanzees…[It] has its ultimate origins in male violence, but it doesn’t come from man alone, and it has its sources in the evolutionary interests of both sexes’.31 Patriarchy will remain worldwide and history-wide until women start getting men to compete over being weak, cowardly, impotent and poor providers.
Rather than oppressing them, the fact that women get men to compete over them gives them tremendous power. Shakespeare scholar Marilyn Simon, in her article ‘Feminism’s Dependency Trap’, reminds women that ‘men adore us, and almost all their efforts at work or at home or in social settings, are made to win our approval, if not our admiration’.32 James Watson, for example, Nobel Laureate and author of The Double Helix, said that ‘almost everything I ever did, even as a scientist, was in the hope of meeting a pretty girl’. As James Brown put it, ‘it’s a man’s world, but it would mean nothing, nothing without a woman or a girl’.
Despite its universality, however, cries of ‘smash the patriarchy’ continue, even though this ultimately amounts to saying smash human nature and biological reality. But what is the alternative offered? Andrea Dworkin has been described in The Guardian, as recently as 2019, as ‘the visionary feminist we need in our troubled times’.33 This was her vision:34
“Man” and “woman” are fictions, caricatures, cultural constructs….Unambiguous heterosexual behaviour is the worst betrayal of our common humanity… The destruction of the incest taboo is essential to the development of cooperative human community based on the free-flow of natural androgynous eroticism…The incest taboo can be destroyed only by destroying the nuclear family as the primary institution of culture… As people develop fluid androgynous identity, they will also develop the forms of community appropriate to it…Children are fully capable of participating in community, and have every right to live out their own erotic impulses…The distinctions between ‘children’ and ‘adults’, and the social institutions which enforce those distinctions, would disappear as androgynous community develops.
Attacking the nuclear family, she advocates incest and paedophilia. Not only are the sexes cultural constructs, but so is the distinction between children and adults. It is worth noting here that Simone de Beauvoir, the founder of modern feminism, signed a petition calling for paedophilia to be decriminalised.35 By contrast, the core of masculinity – the protector role – makes it the antithesis of paedophilia. This is why, in prison, child abusers are the most despised offenders.36
Dworkin wants to ‘destroy patriarchal power at is source, the family…and destroy the structure of culture as we know it.’ But the family offers numerous benefits not only to men but to women and children. Children who live with their own two married parents enjoy better physical and mental health, on average, than do children in other family forms. Married women live longer and enjoy better health and lower rates of injury and illness than unmarried women. They are substantially less likely to commit suicide, and they have lower rates of depression. They are also at lower risk of experiencing domestic violence or being the victims of crime.37
The Harvard sociologist Carle Zimmerman, in his masterwork Family and Civilization, described ‘childbearing as the main stem of the family’.38 Only a man and a woman can bear children. And for as long as childbearing continues, the nuclear family will continue to bury its undertakers.
The Concise Encyclopedia of Sociology edited by George Ritzer, J. Michael Ryan (Wiley, 2010), p.441
James Tooley, The Miseducation of Women (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), p.132
Stephen Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism (Connor Court, 2019), p.224
David Gilmore, Manhood in the Making (Yale, 1990), p.222-223
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-truth-about-lions-11558237/
Nicholas Wade, A Troublesome Inheritance (Penguin, 2015), p.70
Demonic Males (Bloomsbury, 1996), p.172
David R. Carrier, The Advantage of Standing Up to Fight and the Evolution of Habitual Bipedalism in Hominins, PLoS ONE, 2011; 6 (5): e19630 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0019630
Michael H. Morgan, David R. Carrier, Protective buttressing of the human fist and the evolution of hominin hands, Journal of Experimental Biology 2013 216: 236-244; doi: 10.1242/jeb.075713
The Privileged Sex (DLVC Enterprises, 2013), p. 236
Christina Larner, Witchcraft and Religion (Blackwell, 1985), p.28
Robert Dumond, ‘The sexual assault of male inmates in incarcerated settings’, International Journal of the Sociology of Law 20
Anjani Kant, Women and Law (APH, 2003), pp. 138, 141
Scruton, Ellis-Jones and O’Keefe, Education and Indoctrination (Sherwood Press), 1985
Leacock, Eleanor, et al. “Women's Status in Egalitarian Society: Implications for Social Evolution [and Comments and Reply].” Current Anthropology, vol. 19, no. 2, 1978, pp. 247–275. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2741993.
Manhood in the Making (Yale, 1990), p.76-77
Campbell, A. (1999). Staying alive: Evolution, culture, and women’s intrasexual aggression. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22(02), 203–214. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X99001818. See also Vaillancourt, T., & Sharma, A. (2011). Intolerance of sexy peers: Intrasexual competition among women. Aggressive Behavior, 37(6), 569–577. https://doi.org/10.1002/ab.20413.
Moxon, The Woman Racket (Imprint Academic, 2008), p.54
Richard Wrangham and David Peterson, Demonic Males (Bloomsbury, 1996), p.125
Andrea Dworkin, Woman Hating (Dutton, 1974), pp.190-192
Tewksbury, R. (2005). Collateral consequences of sex offender registration. Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, 21, 67-81. doi:10.1177/1043986204271704; Winick, B. J. (1998). Sex offender law in the 1990’s: A therapeutic jurisprudence analysis. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 4, 505-570.
Carle Zimmerman, Family and Civilization (ISI, 2008), p.197
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