Part 2: The Origins of Patriarchy
It didn’t have to go this way, but it did. So why?
As we saw in Part 1: Defining Patriarchy, patriarchy is a way of thinking that is taught, learned, and reinforced in everyday interactions in every part of our society. The overwhelming message conveyed is that men dominating others is good and right and natural.
This way of thinking underwrites many of the ugliest and most destructive things human beings do to each other, from rape and sexual violence to wars of aggression and ethnic cleansing.
So, why is society organized through patriarchy?
We start with the assumption that Patriarchy is not natural or inevitable, it’s simply what happened. When we accept that it didn’t have to go this way but it did, we are in a position to ask good questions that help us deconstruct it.
Why Does Patriarchy Favor Men?
Let’s begin with the male body.
When we speak of the male body we have to speak of testosterone.
Some believe that our patriarchal ways can be traced to the effects of testosterone. Testosterone is the hormone that defines the male body. The effects of testosterone on the male body, however, are far more nuanced than needed to show that patriarchy is a natural consequence of testosterone levels. For example, it’s true that an increase in testosterone can cause aggression in insecure, status-hungry men. But at the same time, higher levels of testosterone have little effect on more laid-back, self-confident guys. So, whatever role testosterone plays in male dominance, it doesn’t appear to be the main explanation.
Other people imagine that our patriarchal ways can be traced to our evolutionary past. They look to our closest animal relatives, the great apes. Most species of ape are ‘patrilocal.’ Males tend to be dominant, and spend their lives in the group into which they are born, while females typically leave their groups and travel to join other groups of males. Thus, male dominance is a biological feature of higher primates, and humans are no exception. Right?
Prior to the invention of agriculture, humans appear to have been an exception. Unlike the great apes, early humans were not patrilocal.
We tend to imagine pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer societies as male-dominated. But there’s no evidence that humans functioned patriarchally in hunter-gatherer societies. Indeed, hunter-gatherer societies appear to have been strikingly non-patriarchal. To the limited extent that social roles were assigned by gender, one gender does not appear to have been understood as subordinate to the other. Indeed, men and women may have hunted and gathered together, with limited attention to gender at all.
Why is society organized through patriarchy and why does it favor the male body? Why does the rule of men seem to define society and why does this people-eating system work at all?
Human beings are not destined to be patriarchal. There are examples of matriarchies around the world. Men are not naturally dominant. Women are not naturally domestic or subordinate. And patriarchy is not necessarily good for men, or compatible with their nature.
So, how then did we become patriarchal?
Patriarchy Begins With The Agricultural Revolution
It started with agriculture, about 12,000 years ago.
When agriculture was invented tribes that once migrated with the seasons in search of food and shelter began to settle on discrete areas of land for the sake of agriculture. Out of this new arrangement, social classes, urban areas, and sophisticated notions of property arose.
This is where patriarchy begins.
Agriculture is great for humanity because it creates surplus food and time. This allowed us to stop worrying about our next meal and think of more complex thoughts, like the concept of land ownership. When a person or group decides they have a right to peace of land, sooner or later they will be challenged.
Thus arose the need to be prepared for war at all times.
The male-shaped body seemed better suited for war because of our preponderance of testosterone which makes us taller, stronger, and more driven to die for the ones we love. Tribes quickly learned they could afford to sacrifice men in defense of territory, while women — being necessary for reproduction — were less expendable. So, tasks and social roles came to be divided by gender. To men was given the theater of war, to women that of caretaking and reproduction. In the process of moving from a pre-agricultural to an agricultural society the ability to dominate others and exploit them for personal gain became linked to masculinity.
The result was the subordination of women.
Once women’s bodies came to be valued primarily for their reproductive capacity, women stopped being partners in the production of food and shelter and instead became sources of domestic labor and familial legacy. It wasn’t long before women started to be treated as commodities to be exchanged between patriarchal families.
Arguably, this aspect of patriarchy laid the foundation for all subsequent forms of slavery. At a minimum, it laid the foundation for hierarchical castes within humanity. It wasn’t just that we divided ourselves into “men’’ and “women.” It’s that we made being a man the key to accessing and controlling land.
Being a man meant that you expressed enough dominance to defend your territory and to quell what must have been continual resistance to subordination on the part of women by providing enough labor to produce food. Thus dominance became the trademark of “real men” and domestication became the trademark of “good women.” This set the standards for what kind of behaviors men and women must exhibit to be accepted as men and women in society.
When we settled down and started to demand productivity from land with inadvertently created the original blueprint for oppression: divide humanity into castes, empower one caste at the expense of another, and then coerce people into acting as the caste system demands until it comes to seem natural.
The Death of Patriarchy
Patriarchy has been the norm for virtually every post-agricultural human society. Nonetheless, viewed against the backdrop of two million years of human history, it is a very recent development, the origins of which can be traced to the agricultural revolution some 12000 years ago.
Patriarchy did not exist before then.
And it may not exist much longer.
If the goal of the human species was to colonize the earth and harness its resources then it appears to have ‘worked.’ However, it came at a great cost. The will to dominate created the world we know today; overcrowded, hot, unequal, inefficient, and unloving.
However, If we can look into our far past we find hope.
About 65,000 years ago humans made a cognitive leap. Even though we’ve been anatomically the same for about 200,000 years, what we could call ‘human intellect’ began about that time. Why then? Scientists did a study of the facial features of human skulls and found that for the last 80,000 years the amount of testosterone in human bodies has been steadily decreasing. Their hypothesis is that the reduction in testosterone made us more collaborative. That collaboration opened up the human mind and set the foundation for all the leaps since then.
Human beings will need to shift from dominating to collaborating with each other and the environment if we’re going to survive the consequences of a patriarchal society.
In the coming century, humanity will be tested by its environment in ways that our species hasn’t seen in millennia. We will either remain patriarchal and a few of us will survive or we can be transformed by our collaborative response. The outcome is yet to be decided, but we’re betting on transformation.
We each have a part to play in the intergenerational project of ending patriarchy. Ours begins with this conversation.
In the next parts of this series, we’ll be discussing three main ways patriarchy informs and deforms our lives in the 21st century:
- Sexism and Misogyny
- Homophobia and Transphobia
- Environmental Abuse and Neglect
Next time: How patriarchy creates sexism and misogyny.
Do you want to talk about this?
Creative Masculinity hosts weekly Drop in Groups for conscious people who identify as men. Go here to see this month’s dates and sign up.