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Restoring the Patriarchy?
I think it would be a good idea. Oh, not the legal aspects of it: with two narrow exceptions, I think men and women should be treated the same under the law. Rather, I think we should restore the cultural aspect of patriarchy, the idea that the father has a special authority and a special responsibility within the home, and that men, in general, have special obligations within society.
Men are, in general, more powerful (by which I mean more powerful than women; all the comparatives here refer to men relative to women because there are only two kinds, male and female). Men do most of the creating and most of the destroying, impose most of the structure, cause most of the mayhem. Men are the principal actors in society by virtue of their greater drive and aggression and strength, their lesser interest in people, their greater interest in things and in the manipulation and control of things.
Biology made us that way. We don’t have to like it, but not liking it doesn’t make it untrue.
The problem with pretending that men aren’t more powerful than women, or that this isn’t an intrinsic quality of masculinity, is that by ignoring this reality we necessarily ignore the responsibility of managing it. Pretending that little boys aren’t, by their very natures, more aggressive than little girls discourages us from teaching little boys to channel that aggression into positive and productive pursuits. The aggression doesn’t go away, as the mean streets of Baltimore and Chicago sadly attest every single day.
We know how to discipline young men, how to shape the expression of their growing power. We do it by imposing a beneficent authority upon them, an authority that they can look up to and respect, that itself exhibits the kind of self-control and nobility we wish to see them express.
What does that authority look like? It looks like a father — a father, or the martial surrogate for a father represented by the military. Most pointedly, it looks like a father who embraces his role as the primary leader and disciplinarian.
Our culture is moving in the wrong direction as regards the sexes. It encourages men to be ashamed of their strength, women to be ashamed of their vulnerability, and both to deny that these traits are natural and intrinsic to the respective sexes. Under the illusion of freeing men and women from artificial constraints, it urges women to behave with less caution even as it erodes the cultural constraints on male behavior that served to keep men in check.
We are in denial and would be better served by greater honesty about the fundamental differences between the sexes, and the unique role fathers play in raising rough boys to be gentle men.
Published in Culture
Amen to that.
There is a rich source of data that validates the devastating impact of children growing up without fathers, especially boys. These men serve a role that women simply can’t provide.
Dang, baby!
Good luck with this… (meant sincerely; I think you’re onto something…but whoo-boy, would it be a hard sell…)
A healthy society needs both men and women working well together.
In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth … Genesis 1:1
Yes. And the foundation for restoring the patriarchy is restoring God.
Exactly. There are two worldviews … One that acknowledges an Almighty God who created the heavens and the earth, and placed a very ordered structure within it. Male and female He created them. Only two genders. And a second world view which tries vainly to deny simple biological facts and truth about mankind, the earth and even weather itself. The heavens are telling the glory of God … if we but only stop and contemplate the majesty.
Even His created animals have this same male and female orientation.
Do you think female lions are confused about this?
I think that the liberals will be hoisted upon their own petard with this.
Consider women’s sports. I applaud its creation and the opportunities provided to women for athletic achievement from grammar school all the way to professional versions of the various sports. ‘You go girl’, and all.
However, now the liberal/socialist/atheistic/biology-denyng SJW’s are so confused about their God-created genders that they are supporting boys pretending to be girls, and competing with them in sports.
Imagine Serena getting beaten by a 20-year-old boy pretending to be a girl. Imagine Megan Rapinoe being benched in favor of a 22-year-old boy, who looks just like her with pink-colored blonde hair, and decided that his self-identity was a woman rather than his given biology at birth.
It’s coming girls. It’s already there in our grade schools and high schools.
It’s ironic. The married peers of these same SJW’s have created the new phenomenon of “gender-reveal” celebrations for their soon-to-be-born children. Blue or pink. Boy or girl. What’s up with that? You can’t have it both ways.
And this fight by entrenched SJW’s is not with Christians. It is with fact, biology and truth.
Good luck with that SJW’s.
“A healthy society needs both men and women working well together.” (comment 4)
And , I think, to gain power within a society, a group first has to make or keep the society unhealthy. That’s why the goal of the Left, for the past 50 years, has been to prevent men and women from reaching any new and clear understanding and re-establishment of norms based on that understanding.
I also think patriarchy is inevitable. By trying to suppress it you empower more of the kind of men who would, say, claim to be a lesbian, transgender woman and would try to force some female masseuse to wax their testicles. By trying to suppress it you leave boys without the emotional support and guidance of fathers.
The problems we’re having over men might be because, without usually consciously knowing it, men have gone on strike.
Imagining is easier when we remember the Woman of the Year in 2015 was Caitlyn Jenner.
I have long thought that both men and women have equally destructive instinctual and sexual appetites that if fully unleashed would help destroy civil society.
Now some may want to argue that men’s appetites are more destructive than women’s , but I would only say that those appetites both came from nature and are intertwined in nature’s system. Arguing one is better than the other misses the point- both men and women’s appetites in today’s world individually often make little sense in and of themselves, but only make sense when seen as a system working together. These appetites both male and female, that largely favored a strong, ruthless, but often blackhearted and cruel Alpha Male who accumulated a great harem, were protection against a very violent environment where human survival was constantly at risk.
I believe what has been called “the Patriarchy” was a cultural answer in many societies ( that was not always the same) to tame these appetites in the transition from a very violent hunter-gatherer tribal situation that was constantly fraught with danger to a more complex and protected agrarian society where attributes other than brute force were needed.
But as we as a society transitioned again from an agrarian society to an industrial one and then again to a information based technological society, the necessity of nature’s natural division of labor between women and men lessened and allowed a greater emancipation of women into roles formerly limited to men. Yet the positive and negative aspects of the differences between men and women still remain, as does the need for the traditional roles in many facets of contemporary life for it’s optimum functioning, most prominently in the nature of child raising and the family.
All that said, I think that the latest transitional phrase of societal emancipation in what is called “the Patriarchy” which should have brought if properly pursued a greater quality of life for all, has been hijacked by the Progressive Marxist Left and used instead to bring about discord and destruction of society for the purposes of overturning the societal order. In fact, these same Progressive forces, while proclaiming “women’s rights” have often in effect advocated through a veiled, sophisticated campaign of almost unhindered sexual freedom a return to the barbarian ways of the blackhearted Alpha Male dominated culture where might makes right and many segments of society are left unprotected to be oppressed.