(While I was writing this, Mississippi’s election results came in. Prop 26, the “personhood” amendment was defeated 57/43. Scary it was that close, really, but sanity won this time.)

Hello, and welcome to Day 2 of Fucking Patriarchy Week. Today’s installment will focus on some of the various ways the fucking patriarchy disenfranchises, trivializes, isolates, manipulates, and even dehumanizes women. My standard disclaimer applies, while this is all as accurate as I could make it, you shouldn’t assume that I know what I’m talking about.

Probably the core idea on which the entire fucking patriarchy is based is that women are inferior to men. This can express itself in variety of ways: Maybe that men are stronger, smarter, and generally more capable then inferior women. Perhaps that women are as capable as men, but God placed men above women in the cosmic hierarchy. Or maybe it’s simply declared without explanation that “bitches ain’t shit”. The general idea is always the same, though: women are inferior at best.

It starts really young, too. Something every little boy learns very early is that you don’t want to be like a girl, you don’t want to have anything to do with girl’s stuff, play girl’s games,or with girly toys or anything like that. That’s not learned from parents or teachers (at least not in my case), it’s learned from other children. This even shows up in the adult world, like those beer ads that were all about mocking one guy’s girliness. (Perhaps “beer ads” and “adult world” shouldn’t really go together like that.)

Have you ever read the comments on YouTube videos? It’s mostly a sea of stupid, I know, but there’s something interesting there. Pick a random selection of video blogs that show the person’s face. Now between the men & women compare the number of comments about their appearance. If you really like data analysis, include whether there was any relevance to the comment at all (wearing a costume, talking about clothes or makeup, asking “how do I look?”, etc). I’ve little doubt the women got a higher proportion of appearance-related comments than the men, and honestly it wouldn’t shock me if this was still true comparing irrelevant comments for women with relevant comment for men. Even when you can’t see their face, it’s not uncommon to see people trying to guess by the voice, or deciding that since they disagree, “you must be ugly”.

It’s a cliche that people tend to judge by appearances, but often for women, especially young women, it’s treated as though appearance is all there is. “Nobody cares that you earned a PhD by age 23 and your doctoral thesis has been nominated for a Nobel Prize, you’re fat & ugly.” “Ok sure, she killed five people, embezzled millions of dollars which she blew on her drug habits, and her favorite hobby is kicking kittens, but still she’s really hot!”

Of course, establishing a woman’s base fuckability only gives her short-term value. When you’re ready to invest in a long-term woman, one you’re not going to trade in soon but keep around permanently, what you’re really looking for is an iron-clad uterus.

The idea of women as sex toys and baby machines is sort of a joke now, it’s easy to think that this doesn’t happen in western civilization these days, only distant, primitive lands where the oil comes from. Maybe a few isolated hardcore religious groups, but nobody with any influence. There are two mistakes in this thinking, the first is that echoes of these ideas have maintained a subtle influence in mainstream society, the second is that isolated hardcore religious groups are starting to gain serious traction in mainstream society. While it’s unlikely you’ll be seeing the 19th Amendment repealed any time soon, there are still people working to erode the rights and freedoms of women, specifically. (I was going to have a third link there, but stumbled onto an unexpected cult while searching for it and decided to let it drop.)

The other side of this coin is that women who choose not to have children are often treated like they aren’t really women. Motherhood is a mysterious, magical thing and women who choose to avoid it, well Timmy, there’s just something wrong with them, by golly!

I barely managed a third of the things I wanted to discuss here, but I’m tired and this stuff is depressing, so I’ll wrap up here for now and pick up with it tomorrow. To the whiskey bottle!