Rise of the Matriarchy
In academia, denying the existence of the patriarchy is about as popular as denying the existence of God in front of Torquemada. Honestly, anything that untouchable needs a little critical investigation. I thought I’d try my hand at it. I have no vested interest here, but I thought I’d put a little pressure on the usefulness of “the patriarchy” in understanding the contemporary US.
There’s more than one historical conception of what the patriarchy is supposed to be. Here’s four different notions:
Patriarchy = the traditional man is the head of the family idea. This is the sense in which Abraham was a patriarch.
Patriarchy = the normative claim that men ought to be in charge of things like the family and the state. Robert Filmer defended this in Patriarcha (1680) to support the divine right of kings.
Patriarchy = the descriptive claim that men have most of the social and legal power. It’s this version that J S. Mill criticized in On the Subjection of Women (1869) when he argued that women should be allowed to vote, be educated the same as men, have access to the same jobs as men, and other radical things.
Patriarchy = the systematic of oppression of women.1
It is easy to prove that (3) and (4) are distinct ideas. In a family, the parents have the power over the children, but that does not mean that children are oppressed in every family. At work your boss has power over you, but that does not entail your oppression; maybe you love your job and your boss.
I’m interested in whether we have a patriarchy in the 4th sense, because I think it’s oppression we should worry about. What’s the methodology for figuring this out? I think if there is the systematic of oppression of women in the US, the evidence for or against the existence of such a system will be found in how the lives of men and women turn out relative to each other. I just don’t understand why anyone would care about whether we’re living in a patriarchy if the concept is disconnected from life outcomes.
Here’s my thesis: the United States used to be a patriarchal society, but no more. Now, I’ll argue, we are a nascent matriarchy.
You don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to believe in patriarchy or matriarchy. Our lives are governed by invisible forces and reality is filled with invisible things. There’s the four fundamental forces of nature: gravity, electromagnetism, the strong and weak nuclear forces. Descartes famously argued that the mind is an immaterial substance, unextended in space. More modern functionalist theories of the mind largely agree with Descartes, but think the mind is more like a bit of software that runs on the hardware of your brain. Software—information in Shannon’s sense—is abstract, which acolytes of the singularity believe in their fervent hope for digital immortality. Religious folks believe reality is supervised by an immaterial God.
The social world is also spun by abstract forces. There’s capitalism, legal duties, the force of custom and expectation, the meaning of gestures, expected courtesies, the value of money, private and public property. Those things are all genuine parts of reality, but we’re the ones who collectively brought them into existence. The patriarchy is one of these, a piece of invisible social reality that we once called up. But what can be called up can also be put down.
The patriarchy is not just sexism or misogyny. Those are about individuals and their actions and don’t constitute a system. Even if those things are widespread or popular, that doesn’t make them systematic. Compare: eating marmalade is popular, but is not systematic. If we’re going to test for either patriarchy or matriarchy, we need to look at the life outcomes for men and women across a wide variety of categories and see how things hang together.
The Counterfactual Test
I propose a counterfactual test.
Take some fact that’s true about the lives of men. Suppose that fact were instead true of women. If it would then be counted as evidence of the patriarchy, its being true of men should count as evidence of the matriarchy.
Here’s a quick example to illustrate. Mansplaining, manspreading, and toxic masculinity are all common expressions. Fifteen years ago those expressions did not exist. Here’s the relevant Google nGram:
Suppose the last 15 years had instead seen the expressions “toxic femininity,” “womanspreading,” and “womansplaining” rocket up from zero to commonplace. Would you think that (1) men discovered new things about women and given those things names, (2) men finally labeled things women have always done, (3) women have changed their behavior to ways best described by these new expressions, or (4) this kind of sexist language is a sign of the patriarchy in action? I’ll put my money on (4). If you agree, then by the counterfactual test you ought to think that that Google nGram above is a sign of the rising matriarchy.
The counterfactual test is essentially what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
Enough metaphysics, you promised I could get angry
“The patriarchy” is not some unquestionable, self-evident axiom. It is an explanatory model. Like all such models, we need to see whether it really is the best explanation of what we observe and the best predictor of what we will observe in the future (as I argued for in Doomsday Prophets and Dead Parrots). The old model is now obsolete. US women are better off than men on nearly every measure.
Education
Nearly 60% of college undergraduates are women
Over 60% of students pursuing postbaccalaureate degrees are women
80% of veterinary school students are women
The majority of dental school students are women
The majority of medical school students are women
The majority of law school students, including at 17 of the top 20 programs, are women
Housing
Nearly 70% of homeless people are men
More single women than single men own their homes
Crime
78% of homicide victims are men
Slightly more men than women are likely to be the victim of some kind of violent offense
More than 93% of prison inmates are men
Men’s prison sentences are over 40% longer than women’s sentences
Women are 40% more likely to get probation than men
Lifespan
At birth, women can expect to live six years longer than men.
92% of on-the-job deaths are men
Almost 98% of military deaths in recent wars are men
70% of preventable opioid overdose deaths are men, and the number is increasing
Mental health
Four times as many men than women commit suicide
More than 75% of opioid addicts are men
It is a little hard to compare apples-to-apples in medical care because men and women have different needs. Men don’t give birth, go through menopause, or have cervical cancer and women don’t have erectile disfunction, Peyronie’s Disease, or prostate cancer. However, the facts about lifespan and mental health point strongly in favor of women.
Here’s a more subtle point. Breast cancer research vs. prostate cancer research. Women are overwhelmingly the ones plagued with breast cancer, and men are exclusively the ones afflicted by prostate cancer. 42,000 women die of breast cancer every year in the US, and 35,000 men die from prostate cancer. Breast cancer is definitely more lethal, but not massively so. What about research funding? The NIH/National Cancer Institute budgets $581 million per year for breast cancer research, and $281 million per year for prostate cancer research. That comes to about $14k per life for breast cancer, and $8k per life for prostate cancer. Women’s lives are almost twice as valuable.
You might object that, while uncommon, men die of breast cancer too. What about cancer that is exclusive to women, like ovarian cancer? Good point. NIH funding for ovarian cancer is $140 million per year and 13,000 women per year die from it. So that’s just about $11,000 per woman’s life the NIH is trying to save. Even more striking is cervical cancer, where the NIH spends $77 million per year to save the lives of the 4000 women who die from it annually, a cost of over $19,000 per life. For women-only cancers, the NIH is spending substantially more than on men-only prostate cancer.
As far as the NIH is concerned, women’s lives are more worth saving. Again, apply the counterfactual test—suppose the NIH were valuing men’s lives more than women’s. Everyone would chalk it up to the patriarchy.
Given all the statistics cited, ask yourself this: if you were a new parent, would you fear more for your son’s future or for your daughter’s?
I have objections!
Objection 1: If men are worse off, it is their own fault. Men are the ones dunking bacon into their breakfast beer and dying early of heart disease. Men are the ones choosing violence, deciding to work dangerous jobs, and skipping college. And what is more self-inflicted than suicide? The suffering of men is hardly the matriarchy in action, it’s just men being idiots.
Even under the most generous interpretation the preceding rejoinder only goes so far. Are we really going to blame men for being ¾ of murder victims, or getting harsher prison sentences? What’s more, it’s a risky critique for those who want to blame the patriarchy for the plight of women. If men are to blame for their suffering, then women are to blame for theirs. If we are forbidden from accusing the matriarchy of harming men, then we can’t hold patriarchy responsible for harming women by the exact same reasoning.
Objection 2. Hold on, buddy, women can’t be blamed for their suffering. Women aren’t accountable for substandard outcomes in their lives because they are unfree under a patriarchal system. Their “choices” are made under coercion. It is men alone who can freely make choices and are therefore liable for how their lives turn out.
Apart from the insulting and sexist claim that women are not real agents but mere passive receptacles of male power, the above claim just begs the question. The issue at hand is whether patriarchy or matriarchy better explains contemporary American society. Insisting that women’s outcomes are the result of their unfreedom under patriarchy assumes the very thing that needs to be proven: that patriarchy is a real thing and the best explanation of how our lives turn out. You can’t just assume the very point under contention.
Furthermore, just how much of our lives is the result of powerful social forces over which we have no control and how much is due to our own free choices is a long-standing challenge. I’m not about to solve the problem of free will and determinism here. One thing I’m sure of, though, is this: whatever the solution may be, it’s going to apply equally to men and women.
Objection 3. Men are worse off on the metrics cited above because they too are victims of the patriarchy (a common claim: see here, here, here, here). They’re not going to college because it’s now a feminine space, and real men work with their hands in dangerous manly jobs. Patriarchal masculinity means that men swallow their emotions, never seek help for mental illness, and so are led more often to addiction and suicide.
I’ve never used this word before, but now’s the time: that’s gaslighting pure and simple. The argument of objection 3 is this: when women are worse off, it’s the patriarchy. When men are worse off, it’s still the patriarchy. Got a hangnail? It’s the patriarchy! Burn the toast? You know what to blame. At this point, “the patriarchy” is sounding a lot like “the will of Allah,” just an unfalsifiable shibboleth that pretends to explain everything but in fact explains nothing at all.
Another way to get at this point is the counterfactual test. Suppose we reversed all those statistics above and it is women who are overwhelmingly homeless, less educated, opioid addicts, committing suicide, dying on the job, getting murdered, and going to prison. I guarantee that everyone would (reasonably!) ascribe it to the patriarchy. Since the opposite is what’s happening in the real world, we should ascribe it to the matriarchy.
C’mon, you are just cherry picking the stats
A completely fair worry. So let’s think about how women are worse off than men. Here’s some ideas.
An obvious one: sexual violence. While not negligible for men by any means, sexual violence is much worse for women. The CDC states that over half of women and almost one in three men have experienced sexual violence involving physical contact during their lifetimes. One in four women and about one in 26 men have experienced completed or attempted rape. About one in nine men were made to penetrate someone during his lifetime. One in three women and about one in nine men experienced sexual harassment in a public place.
Gender pay gap. It is widely believed that women are paid substantially less than men. A commonly cited figure is that they earn $.83 for every dollar earned by men. That figure is arrived at by comparing the median salary earned by all women at all jobs with the median salary earned by all men at all jobs. The problem with that approach is it doesn’t take into account the kinds of jobs people are doing, how long they have being doing them, or how many hours they are working.
When those factors are controlled for, then the pay gap shrinks to $.99 on the dollar; i.e. basically zero. The uncontrolled pay gap seems to be almost entirely due to parenting: more women than men take time off work to be parents, or work less when they have children. Employers also may see women as less committed to the job if they have children.2
All this suggests that the gender pay gap debate really reduces to whether the “motherhood penalty” should be seen as (1) the patriarchy driving women into being stay-at-home parents and primary caregivers, or (2) many women preferring child rearing to paid work. If we’re going with the patriarchy answer, then by the counterfactual test we should view the matriarchy as compelling men to sacrifice being a stay-at-home dad in favor of being a breadwinner.
Here’s another way to look at it. The motherhood penalty idea is that by being pushed into a primary-parent role, women are paying the opportunity cost of higher wages. Conversely that means that by being pushed into the primary-breadwinner role, men are paying the opportunity cost of more time with the kids.
Overall I’m going to rate the gender pay gap as a real, but not particularly significant, disadvantage for women.
How about online bullying/harassment? 49% of teen girls have experienced online bullying/ harassment, and 43% of boys have, so girls are slightly worse off. However, the numbers are reversed for adults: 43% of adult men and 38% of adult women have suffered online harassment, with equal shares of the most severe kinds of abuse. This one looks like a draw.
What about the Dobbs decision or Trump getting elected? Aren’t women’s rights getting rolled back? It’s not very clear. Abortion is a vexed topic in the US, but 61% of men and 64% of women support legal abortion. This is awfully close to parity, and certainly a solid majority of American men support legal abortion. The majority of both men and women also disapprove of the Dobbs decision. You might think SCOTUS should have respected stare decisis instead of overturning Roe, but it’s hard to see why we should attribute their action to the patriarchy instead of religious conservatism, which is not the same thing. What’s more, the number of abortions in the US has actually gone up since Dobbs. As far as Trump, he is a chaos agent, so who knows what he will do.
Jobs? Women are CEOs, college presidents (including ¾ of Ivy League presidents), astronauts, admirals, senators, surgeons, Supreme Court justices, every kind of job there is. Two of the last three Democratic candidates for president were women, one of whom won the popular vote by three million votes. Women are not precluded de jure or de facto from any career, and given the statistics about education, we should expect the number of women in prestigious, high-paying positions to accelerate.
All that’s left for the patriarchy fans on this front is to count how many men or women are in each kind of field and claim patriarchy when there are fewer women. About ¾ of philosophy professors are men, but ⅔ of anthropology professors are women. I guess the patriarchy is paying off for male philosophers, but the matriarchy is working for female anthropologists.
Let’s face it. More sophisticated sociology is needed to see why men or women are drawn to different career paths. “Patriarchy” is a blunt tool for careful work. In the end, women are definitely worse off than men when it comes to sexual violence, and slightly worse off when it comes to pay, but really, that’s about it. Men are behind on every other measure looked at.
If you think I’m completely wrong about all of this, here’s the question: what would you take as sufficient evidence that “patriarchy” is a poor explanation of modern American society? A tempting, but inadequate, answer is “everyone is equal.” Patriarchy is also a bad explanation when matriarchy is a better one.
Suppose you have a coin that comes up heads 70% of the time, and I accuse you of having an unfair coin weighted to heads. Are you going to say, “no I don’t! Watch this flip: see? Tails. It comes up tails plenty. It’s not biased at all.” I certainly hope not. Now replace “heads” with “men are disadvantaged” and “tails” with “women are disadvantaged.” Patriarchy is a lousy explanation of getting tails 30% of the time.
I hesitate to add this point, simply because I loathe politics (see Elections as Kayfabe), but if the left is interested in winning future elections, they might consider paying attention to what’s actually going on in the lives of men and women instead of clinging to outmoded ideologies like “the patriarchy.” If the Democrats are seen as the party of patriarchy-hating women, don’t be surprised when even more young men vote Republican. It’s not because those young men love the patriarchy.3 It is because they rightly see themselves as victims of the matriarchy. Keep denying the obvious, Democrats; see how well that works out for you. N.B.: I’m saying this as someone who voted for Harris in the last election.
I know any discussion like the one I gave will open me up to some knee-jerk accusation of being a men’s rights advocate, or red-pilling, or being a misogynist, or some kind of cognitively convenient cliché like that. I find that all very sad. I provocatively titled this essay “Rise of the Matriarchy,” and I do think matriarchy is a more plausible understanding of current American society than patriarchy is. Even more than that I would like to get rid of both labels as generating more heat than light. We should dispassionately examine how women are doing poorly and help them, and we should equally dispassionately see how men are worse off and help them too. Perpetually setting everything up as a battle of the sexes leaves only casualties.
In case you’re worried I’m fighting a straw man, Shulamith Firestone, Sylvia Walby, and plenty of others explicitly define patriarchy as oppression.
This is often claimed, anyway. I’m not sure what the evidence for it is.
Some do, sure. But there’s nutters in every group.