Patriarchy and the Age of Information
Rick Knight (rknight@platinum.com)
Thu, 07 Aug 97 17:01:54 CST
A colleague and I were discussing the roots of misogyny and homophobia
today (all this emerged over a discussion of the film "The Crucible").
We segued into a discourse about how the end of the Industrial Age
might signify the cap on the male-dominant well.
It occurs to me that as industrialization wanes in favor of the more
intellectual pursuits of the Information Age, there will be fertile
ground for a matriarchal resurgence.
A matriarchal structure is a more natural social organization simply
because women are the ones who (could ostensibly) control access to
conception. The babies they give birth to are dependent upon them for
life (not considering at this time, the baby formula vs. mother's milk
for sustenance caveat).
When you look at history in Western civilization, males have made it a
priority to keep women disorganized, first by the creation of the
family which they themselves were appointed to lead. Also, setting up
the preoccupation of physical beauty that creates a false sense of
competition amongst women by emphasizing vanity which is both a time
and attention sucking device. They've had to create and perpetrate
this man-creator myth. This has resulted in a social construction of
females being validated by men, acquiescing to what amounts to their
fear-based dominion, a house of cards.
In patriarchy, you have these elaborate myths about the great "sky
father", Yahweh, whoever, "creating life". Of course, what else could
compete with the simple truth that life comes from the womb with a
brief assisting moment from a male? The social constructs that have
been put in place don't hold much water when set against the simple
natural sequence of events that results in the ongoing of the species,
all made possible in the predominant sense by the female. Not that
males aren't necessary, not that it wasn't significant for them to be
a major brute force dominance during the survival eons. But once
civilization set in, they didn't ease off the throttle any...until
this century. It seems that women have more than paid them back for
their necessitated thuggery during the dawn of civilization.
Since survival issues aren't paramount in these much more
technologically advanced times, it seems only logical that women will
reclaim their role as the natural life givers, care givers and that
may likely give way to decision makers and leaders. Yet still, there
are the last fervent attempts, the primitive chest beating if you
will, where men use their trump card, their strength and propensity
for violence, to delay the inevitable. Of course, a great many of us
(males) would be content with equality..conceptually anyway.
So, as we reach a period in human civilization where novelty will
exponentially increase and great change will happen in a cosmological
flicker, what signs are apparent that women are maneuvering into their
ascendant positions to take on a more controlling interest in human
affairs? I've not counted more than a handful of women posting in this
digest. Why is that?
Rick