Patriarchy and the Benefits of "Inequality"

https://alexanderfang.wordpress.com/2015/05/10/on-preponderance-of-the-evidence-patriarchy-and-trust/

Here’s a preliminary question: if there are two parties to a relationship and they are both 50% responsible for the state of the relationship, which party is responsible for keeping the relationship together? The answer of course is both.  For a single party to be presumed responsible at the onset of problems, they would need to have at least 51% of the responsibility.  Before someone can have 51% or more of the responsibility they need to have 51% or more of the power.  This isn’t a radical proposition, we call it “preponderance of the evidence” in law.  If the prosecution doesn’t cross the 50% threshold, the defendant cannot reasonably be found guilty.

In a relationship, the person who is “in charge” has the weight of responsibility, at least in terms of social judgments.  This is because power should be paired with responsibility.  Power without responsibility is tyranny and responsibility without power is scapegoating.  The “passive” party in a relationship (traditionally the woman) may be better off if she lacks power because then she also lacks the presumption of responsibility: she doesn’t have to be put on the spot rhetorically when the relationship fails if she had less responsibility for that relationship.  Short of adultery or severe insanity there is simply no way to hold the less powerful party responsible for a failed marriage.  This benefits a woman because she needs protections against a man leaving her and her children.

In contrast, when a relationship is 50% the man’s responsibility and 50% the woman’s responsibility, any party can sever the relationship at any time and avoid the full weight of social judgment.  The 50/50 split sounds equal in theory but in reality, the woman gets pregnant and the man does not.  The woman ages faster than the man.  This means that equality actually benefits the man.  Not just a little bit; it benefits him a lot.  It raises up a generation of men like “Christian Grey” who offer equality on the surface but below that, they are really offering women a chance to be their toy until they move on.

Women need the rhetorical and social advantages that being victims of the patriarchy gives them.  Otherwise they have only one choice: be a childless feminist who has slept with lots of men who all moved on to greener pastures.  This is why most women who self-describe as feminists are just that.  It’s also why feminism is facing dissension in its ranks; plenty of women want to have a family.  The best way to get that is by playing the damsel in distress.  That’s just how it is and it’s how it will stay.

Today we’re in the middle, or perhaps the tail end, of a sad state of affairs.  People are expected to justify things like faith and are laughed at for honor but no one is expected to justify their lust.  Lust breaks up families and damages society and no one presumes judgment against the men because they were only 50% responsible for the relationship, so it would be unreasonable to presume their guilt.  Men never should have been freed from responsibility by giving up 1% of their power.  How is that 1% of power the feminists gained working out for women today? Not well it seems.

This is also one of the problems with gay marriage.  If two men or two women marry, they will naturally be 50% responsible each for the state of the relationship.  Neither party can ever reach the 51% threshold because they are of the same gender.  This means that neither party can be presumed responsible for the break-up of a gay marriage.  Calling a gay marriage a marriage makes a mockery of traditional marriage because we presume that “equality” is better than “inequality” and the gay marriage is naturally more equal than the traditional marriage.  The truth though is that “equality” is not a simple thing; sometimes it is better to be in a position of apparent weakness.  If that were not so, we would have no western liberals or progressives today…

In sum, sometimes being “unequal” is actually better than being “equal” if that inequality engenders responsibility and creates a breeding ground for trust.  I’m going to presume here that responsibility and trust have inherent value, though I suspect there are some out there who would challenge those positions, fortunately I have no interest in debating with them.

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Also related, I've spent a fair amount of time trying to figure out what "honor" is.  I think that honor can be found in two things, the first being an observance of rules when they are not individually beneficial to you and the second (related) form of honor is when someone (such as a host) has power over another individual and lives up to the responsibility inherent to that power.

One of the reasons that people are how they are today is because our increasingly legalistic society tries to put everyone into 50/50 relationships.  There's no need for trust, no opportunity for honor, no organic consequences for lacking honor and therefore almost no one has any of it.

This reminds me of the "devine math" thread over on defendingthetruth.  The problem is that some things can't be expressed as numbers, so trying to describe them in percentages only leads to problems.  For example, having the right/power to bite others is worth a lot more if you have long sharp teeth than if you have flat teeth.  Below is a copy of a very old post of mine that deals with the issue of equality.  My main point on this topic now is that one should try to design a system that doesn't offend women but at the same time produces sound patriarchy.  One can do this using the ideas below of having an "equal" system that produces unequal results based on the natural differences between the sexes.  This is why no Mikraite rules are sexist.






I have often been accused of being sexist and of having double standards.  This is absolutely true.  I believe that the sexes are different and should be held to different standards.  The point that I want to make in this post is that there is no need to have different rules applied to men and women to accomplish a double standard since the double standard exists within men and women.  So I will show how each double standard that I support can be implemented with equal rules for men and women.


Double standard:  Women should not vote.

Reason:

The reason that women shouldn't vote has nothing to do with intelligence.  The reason is that men's instincts are designed for tribe formation and women's instincts aren't.  The natural structure of tribes of both humans and chimpanzees is for the tribe to be run by males.  Men have a sense of fairness that comes with this role.  Women have no such sense of fairness.  Men naturally develop a loyalty to the tribe and will act in the tribe's best interest.  The loyalty of women is always primarily based on family, particularly her children.  When women are given the vote, they will always support these things; a strong central government to support them, the right to sexually provoke men without consequences, and the right to cheat on their husbands.  These are women's primary political concerns.  In a democracy that includes women, immoral men and almost all women will vote for these things and ruin society.

Solution:

For equality, one can have separate governments for men and women.  Under this system, men would elect a men's government to govern men and women would elect a women's government to govern women.  This would prevent women from using the government to oppress men.  What would be the result of such a system?  The answer is that women wouldn't bother voting in such a system.  If you look at all the political actions of women, they are all about controlling men.  Women have no interest in controlling or regulating women.  Women want a strong government to force men to hire women, to protect women from men, and to tax men to support women.  Women want divorce laws to force men to pay alimony and child support to women.  And women want to be free to sexually provoke men while having the government prevent any response from men which women call "sexual harassment".  There isn't one single thing that women want from government that involves restricting women in any way.  So under my suggested EQUAL system, women would have no reason to vote at all, which just show the hypocrisy of those who support women's suffrage in the name of equality.


Double standard:  Women should be virgins at marriage.

Reason:

The fundamental difference between men and women is that men have an unlimited reproductive potential while women's reproductive potential is very limited.  When a man has sex, he is giving away nothing of value.  But when a woman has sex, she is potentially giving away a large aspect of her life if she gets pregnant.  Today we have birth control to eliminate the practical side of this, but this doesn't change the feelings in us that were produced by evolution before birth control.  This is why men still greatly value virginity in women, as can be seen in the cases where women auction off their virginity.  But women place no value in the virginity of a man because there is no evolutionary basis for this feeling.

A woman who has sex before marriage is being selfish at the expense of her future husband.  A normal husband (who places his emotions and common sense over feminist propaganda) would prefer that his wife be a virgin.  Women also seem to be changed by premarital sex and are less able to bond with their husband as explained in Why Sluts Make Bad Wives.

The anthropologist Unwin, in his book "Sex and Culture", studied the isolated tribes of his time to determine what best correlated with level of development.  He found one fact that perfectly correlated with level of development.  This was female premarital chastity.  In all the most developed cultures, women were required to be virgins at marriage.  Then he looked at history and he found that in all rising cultures, women were required to be virgins at marriage.  And in all cultures where this requirement was lost, the culture went into terminal decline.

Solution:

People who value marriage should try to offer their prospective partner whatever they value and avoid things that destabilize marriage.  This is a general statement that allows whatever natural differences there are between the genders to be expressed.  It is well known historically that men value virgin brides.  But never in history have women valued virgin husbands.  Instead, women usually value husbands who have established themselves as providers.  This is natural.  To implement my solution, one could ask single men and women to list those things that they desire in a partner in order and then pressure the opposite gender to comply in order to make themselves desirable for marriage.  There is no question that virginity and chastity would be high on the list men but not on the list of women.


Double standard:  Extramarital sex is worse by women than by men.

Reason:

When a woman has extramarital sex, there is a chance that this will result in her husband raising a child that isn't his.  But if a man has extramarital sex, there is no chance that this will result in his wife raising a child that isn't hers.  This is a basic asymmetry.  You could argue that contraception solves the problem.  But our feelings evolved before contraception and the strength of our feelings are a result of the consequences in primitive times.  This is why a cheating wife causes great emotional harm to her husband.  Similarly, rape causes emotional distress to women because they lose control of choosing the father of their child.  Rape with contraception doesn't reduce the emotional distress because this is a result of evolution, not logic.

What women really want from a husband is commitment.  This is what they need to feel comfortable having children with the husband and raising a family.  She wants commitment to be assured that the husband will always be there to support the family, especially when the wife is pregnant or with infants which put her in a weak position.  So why are women so upset by male extramarital sex?  Because modern women have been brainwashed to believe that male extramarital sex is an indication of lack of commitment.  Historically you cannot find any instance of women complaining about casual extramarital sex by husbands before Paul started complaining about this in the New Testament.  Of course women were jealous of mistresses throughout history, and this make sense since this is a real threat to her husband's commitment to her.  It was Paul who introduced this terrible concept of male sexual fidelity to human culture.  And even today, it is the degree of influence of Paul-based Christian culture on a society that determines the level of women's jealousy about male extramarital sex.  Feminism is an extension of this culture and takes it to new extremes.

Solution:

The equal rule is: no one may cause orgasm in anyone other than their spouse.  This rule actually addresses all the underlying issues.  If a husband has a mistress, her orgasm is likely and this is a problem.  But if a husband goes to a prostitute, then orgasm is very unlikely and there is no issue.  In almost all conditions, if a wife has sex with another man, she will cause him to orgasm.  A contrived way out would be for her to hire a gay gigolo to satisfy her with oral sex.  Actually, I don't think most men would find this nearly as bad as the wife having regular sex with another guy.  And I don't think most women would find this satisfying either.  Why?  Because sex is a fundamentally asymmetric act of a woman giving herself to a man.  If a woman doesn't give herself to the man, then it doesn't seem like complete sex.  And this explains on an emotional level why female extramarital sex is so much worse than male extramarital sex.  Because the wife is giving herself to another guy, but the husband isn't giving anything to the other woman.  This emotion reflects the evolutionary argument I gave above.

Interesting observations as usual, you're probably right about women dissolving a female-only government.  I can't imagine them agreeing to such a thing though for basically those same reason.  If we still had things like gender-segregated schooling and a more libertarian government it might start to seem feasible but there's no point in expecting governments to use their educational powers responsibly.  So people may as well focus on homeschooling, but I digress.

My theory here is kind of awkward I guess but I think the best route is to feed into feminist dissenters who are starting to realize that there were upsides for women in more traditional systems.

Thinking about law and government is impractical.  But applying these ideas to religion is practical.  The goal is to have a religion which supports the natural order of patriarchy without offending women.  So you can take anything that you write and try it out on women you know and see how they react.  If they are offended, then you have a problem.

I have seen how this is done practically in Orthodox synagogue.  The rabbis always say positive things about women and about their roles, and never make it sound like women have less of anything.  It works.  Women are very concerned about status and will oppose anything that threatens their status.  So handling this right is about implementing patriarchy is a diplomatic manner.