Patriarchy and Violence

 

Patriarchy and modern men's rights groups are notions that could only be acceptable in a world that still believes women are inferior.

Patriarchy is a belief system in the same way that earth centrists of the Middle Ages dominated the scientific community during the medieval ages. Then along came Galileo and the future and it was decided and accepted that the earth wasn't the center of anything, much like feminists have debunked, if nothing else, the notion that males are superior to females in any way whatsoever, except the artificial definitions men have imposed on all of us.

Men's rights groups then are an artifice of the belief that men somehow once they had been equalized by women, somehow got victimized by the equalization.

It's true that truth and science swings like a pendulum and in every regard has it's median to settle into but for scientists to argue that the earth is the center of the universe and for men to argue they haven't gotten a fair shake is tantamount to mass stupidity.

It's much like the recent "scientific" discovery that "modern" humans may have bred with Neanderthal types, who have always been regarded as a dead-end branch of the human species. It's probably because Neanderthals have always been considered brutish, unsophisticated, apeish, not the elegant, hunter and cave drawer, (what's better than that, the warrior artist), like Cro Magnon. So now science has supposedly proven that maybe these two branches of the human tree got together when anybody who ever looked at the "old" anthropology should have understood when it comes to sex, reproduction, and slaughter, humans do it better. Considering that Cro-Magnon wandered around Europe at the same time as the "extinction" of Neanderthal should give any good Sócio-anthropologist, such as myself, reason to believe that there's a good chance the upstanding Cro Magnon probably had a hand in the "extinction,” but not before taking the women and children for the purposes for which we all strive for.

(It's only in modern warfare where, not for humanist principals, do we leave the women and children dead on the battlefield just like the enemy. Warfare, of course, presents the perfect opportunity to rape and pillage, probably one of the reasons we love it so much. It stirs our inner Neanderthal, but like all victims, Neanderthals get the blame, I guess because they were ugly. 

Anyone who thinks that the world's population isn't more diverse than the "ugly" American simply hasn't been around it, or if they have, hasn't been paying attention. Americans are so hung up on guns, looks, and arrogance that it's hard to imagine any other culture as being so Neanderthal like. 

We all know that religion and culture make us what we are or at least what we are confused about. Despite the books women write, the media indulgence toward sexual equality in the workplace etc, from the looks at statistics, domestic abuse is still prevalent, women still earn less than men, (more unfortunate, and maybe more telling, is the fact women no longer want to realize the ambition to simply become plumbers, but supposed must reflect the more mundane ambition of childhood dreams of becoming president, more inclined to the hype that CEO or president makes things right), and mostly, women are still considered sex objects.

Yes, some women have discovered that having positions of influence, having money, makes the catcalls less cumbersome but nowadays when the media says women (or men) regarding certain middle class standards it thinks it means "all" much in the same way Jefferson meant "all" men but didn't mean it literally.

So, women, like Neanderthals have their work cut out for them. Scientists will meander looking for some purpose in regard to Neanderthal while women will have to keep their heads low in a world that is always on the verge of decapitating anything that resembles thinking equality. 

Yesterday I was watching democracy now and there was an advocate for trying to convince the video gaming industry to limit the violence against women in video and other media venues. I'm torn whenever I see these sorts of advocates because it seems almost an overwhelming  attempt to stem violence against women in this society because this society is as violent as any Taliban controlled locale. In so many ways, it's nearly impossible to move forward toward any solution without a complete existential cultural changeover. The media just represents whatever reality already exists. 

The examples shown in the interview were clipped to demonstrate examples of violence against women but to me, it's almost incomprehensible trying to isolate the examples shown and the rest of the video, which is filled with violence, most of it men on men, a type of violence we seem to relish and embellish in American culture. How can anyone say that violence in America is one sided? It completely saturates just about every aspect of our culture. The problem is, it is mostly acceptable. Not only what we watch, it's what we believe. Our government uses such a typically abstract form of violence we can't find any reason to stop it. All violence is twisted up in security, fear, sexual mores, religious/legal restraints, and psychological/sociological myths. 

Over the course of centuries, religious beliefs have put us in the position of having to deny our sexuality, our independence, our existence in a real physical world rather than the made up one modern humans live in. We opted for the surreal and can't expect anything else except the surreal.

We look at primitive or agrarian people's way of life and we're so ingrained with "superior" that we see the way they exist as sexist, inegalitarian, ignorant. And yet, in most social groups that are independent on each other, solutions to problems come a lot easier than in the monster we've created for ourselves. In our heads and in reality.

One can't cleanse this society of the violence it loves. Rape is horrible, domestic violence is too. So is murder, corporate larceny, and the Prince of all violence, war, the basis of nearly all the other violence.

In the coming decades, long after I'm gone, the last of the Neanderthals, If drought continues, if revenge war continues, if economic hardship (both naturally created and politically motivated) continues, and if religious and cultural intolerance continues, the world will be even a worse place to try and live for even more people.

They say that when the last ice retreated out of Europe it left the Neanderthals exposed to the imminent migration of more "modern" humans who always relish the idea of going where the grass is greener. That's where two cultures clashed or maybe, contrary to our notions that culture clashes rather than integrates, and a new human was invested with different genes, different ideas. That's what it's all about. It's about us, not the invention of a new IPhone. We better start appreciating each other outside our own boundaries, especially the wall of violence we've erected.

No violence, anytime, anywhere. Believe me, the ones who knock us down, need us more than we need them.