Why is patriarchy bad

But take heart, would-be patriarchs. In academia, we have a saying: Personnel is policy. And because most people tend to stay for a long time, and because people tend to hire people like themselves, those changes will be long-lasting.

Which brings me to the unprecedented mass-migration being experienced at present by Europe and, to a lesser degree, by the United States. Hundreds of thousands of people — soon, it seems likely to be millions — are coming from countries where the patriarchy really is a thing.

These are places where honor killings , female genital mutilation and the legal and social subordination of wives and daughters to husbands and fathers are considered the norm.

The Dutch are already getting upset about the Syrian refugees who are bringing child brides with them. Some of these people, of course, will eagerly adopt the culture of their new lands, and try their hardest to assimilate. Or a poor man as opposed to a rich man? A trans man, a disabled man, an immigrant man, or an uneducated man as opposed to a cis man, an able-bodied man, a male citizen, or an educated man? What the patriarchy wants men to believe is that these other factors of race, ability, class, etc.

This means that as opposed to just looking at someone as a man, they recognize that man as also being black, disabled, and poor, for example. Intersectional feminism allows for a multi-faceted analysis of the various experiences, histories, and biases that affect a person. While the focus of feminism is primarily on gender, feminism with an emphasis on intersectionality can help men, women, and nonbinary folks alike understand where they are most negatively affected, how they experience various forms of oppression, and what they can do to eradicate those oppressive systems.

There is no logical or reasonable way to deny that we live in a society that perpetuates rape and rape culture. Our society has been historically set up in a way that makes rape, sexual violence, or romantic manipulation not only possible, but rather a normal, expected occurrence for many people.

Much of the recent focus of feminism is completely ridding our society of rape and rape culture. Feminism is out to protect everyone from the terrifying outcomes of rape and rape culture by making sure it can not only be talked about more openly, but it can also be more openly villainized and dismantled. What all of this comes down to is the simple fact that the masculinity that patriarchy has bred and enabled is extremely toxic. Men are hurt by their own dedication to toxic, patriarchal masculinity by allowing themselves to hurt others.

This is one of the goals of feminism: to enable men to be less toxic and be more caring and supportive, to be willing to share and create safe spaces. Anatomically and cognitively, there are more differences within the two sexes than between them.

There is no evidence that women are any less capable of the jobs and social positions that men predominantly hold. Researchers recently calculated that it was bias against women, not under-representation, that accounts for the gender distribution seen in the Nobel prizes, for instance.

Women are not less intelligent, less logical or less able than men. The roots of patriarchy, in other words, cannot be found in our biology. Male supremacy, for all its ubiquity, is surprisingly recent. Humans probably evolved as an egalitarian species and remained that way for hundreds of thousands of years. One clue is in the similar size of human males and females, which show the least disparity of all the apes, indicating that male dominance is not the driving force in our species.

In fact, equality between the sexes in our early ancestry would have been evolutionarily beneficial. Parents who were invested in both girls and boys and the grandchildren from both gave our ancestors a survival advantage, because this fostered the critical wider-ranging social networks they depended on to exchange resources, genes and cultural knowledge.

Today, hunter-gatherer societies remain remarkable for their gender equality, which is not to say women and men necessarily have the same roles, but there is not the gender-based power imbalance that is almost universal in other societies.

In contemporary hunter-gatherer groups, such as the Hadza people of Tanzania , men and women contribute a similar number of calories, and both care for children.

They also tend to have equal influence on where their group lives and who they live with. Matriarchal societies may also have been more common in our ancestral communities. Strong female relationships would have helped to glue a larger community together, and being able to rely on friends to babysit would have given our ancestors the time and energy to support the group through food provision and other activities.

These are communities in which women are the landowners and decision makers. In other words, humans are not genetically programmed for male dominance. This is because, unlike other animals, we are cultural beings — for our species, culture is our nature, and key to understanding our behaviours and motivations.

Social, technological and behavioural invention are part of our nature — part of what it means to be human. We are driven by culture more than instinct.

And our culture influences our environment and our genes. Our extraordinarily flexible, cumulative culture allows us to make ourselves even as we attribute our successes and failings to our genes.