Articles and notes on Patriarchy

  1. Yet_Another_Boring_Marxist
    Yet_Another_Boring_Marxist - 20th January 2013, 16:24
    Why Patriarchal Men Are Utterly Petrified of Birth Control -- And Why We'll Still Be Fighting About it 100 Years From Now

    By Sara Robinson

    Link: http://www.alternet.org/story/154144...now?page=0%2C3

    . Modern industrial economies have undermined the authority of men both in the public sphere and in the private realms; and since they're limited in how far they can challenge it in the external world, they've turned women's bodies into the symbolic battlefield on which their anxieties over this play out. Drill down to the very deepest center of any of these movements, and you'll find men who are experiencing this change as a kind of personal annihilation, a loss of masculine identity so deep that they are literally interpreting it as the end of the world. (The first rule of understanding apocalyptic movements is this: If someone tells you the world is ending, believe them. Because for them, it probably is.)
    In this quote we see that male privilege, which has manifested it's self in terms of both the economic sphere of life (material advantage) and in social relationships (the masculine identity and patriarchy), represents what Mao would call a contradiction amoungst the people. To put this in material terms, the male proletarian represents a privileged subset of the working class that desires to maintain it's social and material advantage over it's female counter part and therefore finds it's self many friends in the patriarchal bourgeois for the sake of maintaining its realitive privilege.

    However, the material base for this privilege is fading in the era of contemporary industrial capitalism. As this privilege fades, patriarchy will attempt to claw and scratch it's appoints like a cornered animal This beast left over from the feudal era, will die off just like the class that produced it. Yet while patriarchy in the traditional Male vs female sense might die off, it will be replicated in some matter under capitalism and manifest its self in new ways. This question of how and if patriarchy exists under capitalism is worth examining.
  2. Yet_Another_Boring_Marxist
    Yet_Another_Boring_Marxist - 14th February 2013, 02:07