a-di-tea

[a-di-tea]

Can you imagine a world without patriarchy? The success of the liberation of women? What does that world look like to you? I love your blog -- I'm learning a whole lot.

That’s a complex question, and I’m going to answer it in a somewhat simplified manner. And I’m about to get a little utopic here.

The way I understand it patriarchy started when men realized their own contribution to reproduction, and at the same time the concept of inheritable property appeared. Men wanted to make sure their legitimate heirs would inherit their property, so they started controlling women. It was also a period of constant war, where they forced women to be constantly pregnant to breed new soldiers. A bit more to the future, men exploiting women’s labor allows them to pursue other activities, effectively using women as a platform for them to have a more leisurely life. So let’s eliminate these three factors:

1 - Forced sexual intercourse and forced pregnancy.

2 - Unrewarded, unpaid, unrecognized work performed by women.

3 - Gender indocrination that allows the two factors above to happen.

First of all, without gendered socialization, men would not feel entitled to women’s bodies, time and effort. And women would not have the need for male approval and would not be socialized for submission. This would allow men and women to communicate and form relationships as true peers. Rape and sexual assault would be unthinkable abominations, akin to cannibalism or even worse. I won’t say it would never happen again, but it wouldn’t be the huge epidemic thing that it is today. It would be a rare occurrence and treated by society as a heinous, unforgivable crime.

Without being trapped in a patriarchal society, women would be free to pursue work in every possible area of knowledge and would be in every kind of activity. Work that is nowadays performed mostly by women like cleaning, cooking, farming, garment making and child-rearing would be considered of the highest importance, since it’s essential for the maintenance of a society, and rewarded accordingly. Men would likely want to perform this work too, since there would be no stigma tied to it.

I also believe that, with women back in control of reproduction and without it being used as a weapon against us, and with men having no need to dominate each other and women all the time, we could focus on creating a more sustainable, more humane society for everybody. Instead of a competition-based society where the main objective is to gain profit and power, a system that only mantains itself by having a big part of the world population being constantly exploited and discriminated against, we could have a more cooperative model of society.

You see, things like sexism, racism, etc. do not exist because people are “mean” or “ignorant”. They exist to keep specific groups in society permanently disadvantaged so a minority can exploit them for their own benefit. And men oppressing women is the most primordial, most basic form of resource exploiting. It happens in every level of society. It happens inside homes, inside families. If we can do away with that, we can pretty much change everything. We could build a culture that values human well-being and the maintenance of the community over personal gain. We can make our main objective be to keep everyone fed, healthy and safe. We could do away with nuclear families that keep women lonely and isolated and let her get much more help in raising a child, for example. We could destroy the model of vertical hyerarchy, which is the favorite model of the male supremacy, and do away with corporate bullshit. With a more community-based kind of society, we wouldn’t have things like profit-driven companies letting people starve because they can’t pay for food. Or letting people die because their illnesses are not profitable to research and develop medicine for. There’s so much that can be done once we do away with this violent, selfish way of life that is male supremacy.

Hell, I, for one, would appreciate greatly not having to look over my shoulder all the time when I’m going home at night.

[a-di-tea]

seriously why people always wanna talk about how patriarchy affects men

like how do you hear something like “you throw like a girl!” and not realize that while one boy is being teased, literally the entire female sex is being told they suck at physical activity.

how can you look at that and just want to say “see! patriarchy hurts boys!!” No i doesn’t, not systemically. It tries to train them into actually being the stronger than women, meaner to women. It teaches them that weak, and stupid are Girl things, and therefore all things girls do are stupid, inferior to things Boys do. How you want to look at that and say “yes, and look how that can hurt boys’ feelings!!” ???

Like no. i don’t wanna talk about boys. I don’t want to hear how their feelings got hurt when they got called a girl, as if their feelings getting hurt somehow overshadows the fact that being female is a shame, an insult, a curse. And I don’t understand why someone would want to make a boy’s feelings a priority in feminism. It’s a side effect, one that can be easily fixed if men wanted to fix it. They could start standing up for women, the women and girls in their life, they could teach their sons that women are not inferior, that the people who use ‘girl’ as an insult are in the wrong. 

But for some reason it has become feminism’s job, women’s job, to take care of boys’ and men’s feelings and comfort them. Just like always. Color me shocked.

[a-di-tea]

“i kept being alive when i should have been burning”

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