The BBC producer asked me if the UK is a patriarchy. I replied: What do you mean by patriarchy?
After the Barbie film’s portrayal of a world in which men have all the power polarised social media, Radio 4 wanted two people for a more nuanced debate.
Culture worker and elder advocate Stephen Jenkinson has looked at the etymology of the word patriarchy.
He says the first part, pater, is not the word for husband, man, male or masculine. It’s the word for father. It doesn’t refer to an identity. It refers to a function. Fathers are as fathers do.
The second part comes from the Greek and gives us arch, archery, archetype, architecture. It’s that which stands under in a foundational way to sustain every visible thing that’s above the ground.
So something below the ground upholding all the known world and all the ideas contained in it. That’s who elders are and that’s what the elder function is.
Patriarchy means the first fathering. It’s a cultural attribute. It has nothing to do with gender specificity or exclusivity.
The way ‘the patriarchy’ is bandied about implies a freestanding social construct that can be deconstructed or refused. But patriarchy is where we come by our understanding of what it means to be a father.
So, when we deconstruct patriarchy, the consequences for our capacity to father border on the unspeakable.
Having lost my way trying to explain this and other ideas to the producer, I was glad to discover she chose my friend Mike Bell to go on the show. I knew he’d keep things grounded and easy to understand.
Mike is an author and former science teacher who runs the All Party Parliamentary Group on Issues Affecting Men and Boys.
He faced the family law barrister Charlotte Proudman for an hour’s debate on AntiSocial, a BBC Radio 4 show, about whether the patriarchy is real. Charlotte is about to launch a campaign to end the presumption of child contact and remove parental responsibility from parents in family law, which I find terrifying.
It’s worth a listen if you’d like to hear how lazy use of the term ‘the patriarchy’, freighted as it is with assumptions, can be challenged with common sense.
Here are some of the salient points. I transcribed less of what Charlotte said because it’s chaotic and hard to read — so do listen to the show to hear her points in full.
Definition of ‘the patriarchy’
Charlotte: Male dominance. Inequality.
Mike: A society run by and for men.
How do we know it’s there / not there?
Charlotte: Women are unequal in Parliament, law, healthcare, pay, and the media, where they are depicted as objects. Women don’t recognise their own inequality. Often this stems from myths, for example if a woman is sexually assaulted she may blame herself for wearing the wrong thing or saying the wrong thing. This is reflected in the way the media portray cases of sexual assault and violence.
Mike: Patriarchy ‘exists’ in the sense that there is a word which defines something — a society run by and for men — and this exists in some places. However, it’s not a good description of UK society, as there are so many disadvantages for boys and men.
The history of women’s rights
Lucy Delap, University of Cambridge: Legal and political systems were skewed against women in the 19th century. Women couldn’t obtain custody of their children, couldn’t easily leave a violent or unhappy marriage, couldn’t own property in their own right, couldn’t vote, and their husbands had the right to all their earnings. By the 1970s, however, women’s liberation was not about getting women included in existing structures, it was about critiquing those structures.
An evolutionary explanation for male roles
Mike: Yes, those negative things existed, but the question is why were those things set up? If you look at the differences between humans and their nearest ape, chimpanzees, we come from a shared ancestor three million years ago. Humans stand upright, we’re hairless, and the head of the baby is very large. A chimpanzee baby can cling onto its mother’s fur almost immediately after birth, but it’s not possible for a viable human baby to be born and for the mother to look after it independently.
Humans have a long gestation period where women need to be protected, and a long period of childhood. So it was vital that human societies developed a system for the protection of women and children. Therefore men started to develop a role quite different from the other primates which was twofold. Individually they were emotionally linked to their own children and their mother as the provider. Collectively as men we developed this defensive, protective role which we have done both physically and psychologically. It becomes natural for men to take leading roles.
A historical explanation for women’s roles
Mike: Until 1890, because life expectancy was 40 [for a man — 56 for a woman] and women often died in childbirth, and 50% of babies died, and we didn’t have washing machines or pre-prepared food, we did need people to do childcare and cooking jobs. This was the role women took. During the 20th century women gradually took on the roles which men in the past had held.
‘Inequality’ statistics (cited by the BBC)
- 40% of FTSE 100 boards are women
- 30% of FTSE 100 CEOs are women
- 34% of MPs are women
- The Cabinet is 30% female
- 37% of court judges are women
- Pay: average hourly pay for full time employees is 8.3% lower for women (ONS)
- Pay is 14.9% lower for women across all employees because part time work pays a lower rate and women are more likely to work part time
Charlotte: There is a high attrition rate of women in high powered jobs such as in law and Parliament.
Mike: There are more male MPs and CEOs, but why? Are women making life choices and choosing not to go through the highly competitive process of getting to the top of their field? More women choose a more sensible lifestyle.
The male protective role remains essential
Mike: But why not talk about logging? We all use furniture and wood. It’s 95% male and it has the highest fatal injury rate in the world. I have a list of 20 dangerous jobs here and they’re all more than 90% male. Men are also the majority of deaths in combat. Go to Ukraine in February last year and you would see men escorting their wives and children to the Polish frontier and then going back themselves. Society is so used to the idea that men will do this protective role that hardly anyone batted an eyelid. Nobody said, ‘Isn’t it amazing the Ukranian men are going to fight?’ If you get a journalist reporting on the war, they’ll quite often find a woman who is homeless rather than the guy in the foxhole who’s had his leg blown off.
Charlotte: Low pay jobs in the service sector and beyond are often occupied by women. Men have an important role to play in the caring sector. Logging is seen as a male, patriarchal, dominant role, which often comes with a macho culture that excludes women, and women don’t feel welcome. When women enter those sectors, like plumbing, they can be stigmatised and degraded and subject to sexual harassment. Let’s remember that it was men who started all these wars. Under patriarchy women have to conform to a role that’s expected of them by men and that can be to be ‘one of the boys’ to be accepted. The power lies in conforming to ideal versions of femininity such as the way we look, or out-alpha-ing men. Look at Margaret Thatcher.
Mike: There isn’t evidence that female leaders are less aggressive. For instance, the maximum expansion of the Russian empire was under Catherine the Great. I don’t think anyone made her do it. We rarely see women organising to stop wars. If 1,000 Russian women started walking towards the frontier co-ordinating with 1,000 Ukrainian women, demanding an end to the war, they would probably have a large effect. In general women seem happy to go along with the aggressive things that men do on their behalf.
It’s easy to say that women have to conform to stereotypes of the way they look, but is this helpful? Does it lead to anything? Three women a fortnight are killed by a partner or ex-partner, about 85 a year. Do we improve that by going into schools and telling boys that they are born dangerous and they need to be trained not to be? Some of the most supportive people of our work [with the All Party Parliamentary Group] are mothers of sons, because they are terrified of the world in which their sons are growing up in, in which they are effectively being accused of being rapists.
Charlotte: I don’t think boys are born dangerous. It’s the culture under patriarchy that teaches boys to value violence and to conform to toxic masculinity.
Inequality in education and training
Mike: We have had a lot of government encouragement of women to go into STEM. Men no longer dominate in science or medicine. It’s only technology, engineering and maths. We’ve been asking why are there no programs to get more men into primary school, and we can’t get an answer from the minister. All the answers from the civil service are generic and non-gendered. If we live in a society that’s run by men for men, how come we can’t have a program to help men into these roles?
Public opinion statistics (cited by IPSOS)
There’s been a rise in people feeling things have gone far enough with women’s rights. Two in five feel we’ve gone so far promoting women’s rights that we are discriminating against men. Over half of men agree with that view. Males aged 11–26 are most likely to agree.
In 2019, 13% of the British public thought a man who stays at home to care for children is less of a man. Today it’s 20%.
Mike: Women shown pictures of men doing traditional male roles and more domestic roles rated the latter as less attractive. I don’t think I gained status from men or women by spending more time with my small children when my wife was working.
Victim blaming
Mike: If you look at the dominant interpretation for why 75% of suicides are male it’s, ‘Men should talk more’. That’s a victim blaming approach, and that is endemic in society. If you look at the groups who do help men, there’s an excellent organisation called Andy’s Man Club. As a rule, if you provide the services for men, at the places, the times and in the ways men access them, they are very willing to talk and you can’t shut them up. So Andy’s Man Club is expanding at a rapid rate because men do want to talk about their stuff, it’s just they don’t want to make an appointment and go into a room and sit opposite a counsellor.
