Matriarchy
Jun. 11th, 2015 04:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI just finished a book that's by a woman but I kept looking at it sideways thinking 'really?' because it's just... weird and distorted from what I know of humans. There's a matriarchy, but it's all about being all sexy at men and controlling them with feminine wiles because men cannot brain when women are all sex at them. And also it's about castration. Which seems counterproductive? Like, they punish guys for not obeying quickly enough by cutting off the bit they're leading them around by. And then what do they expect to happen? It's all ugly all everywheres and it seems like matriarchy via the distorting mirror of patriarchy, or patriarchy's nightmares.
Maybe it's just someone's idea of a power fantasy, but it don't make much sense to me. Being sexy at people was, along with having babies, and spreading stories, the power even extreme patriarchy left to women after systematic denial of agency in other arenas through millennia of patriarchal oppression. When women have actual access to power then they can wield, for instance, economics. Or really big swords. Or, as in this book, magics. They can be the boss of people in all the ways that men traditionally are around here. And that doesn't tend to include mass being sexy at people. I mean, the active kind of being sexy and trying to use sex to get things done, that gets brought out by the less powerful against the more powerful, mostly. It's tangled up with objectification. If one gender has all the power, legal and economic and violent (and magical), then around here they end up wearing suits and doing sexual harrassment when they assume everyone less powerful wants to jump into bed with them. Showing off their sexual assets doesn't seem to be a major part of most patriarchal power. Even for like actors, relative to actresses. So I don't see why it would be all feminine wiles time if there was actual other power already. Why lead them by the balls when you can just fire them?
In the real world I have observed a small yet functioning matriarchy. Men do what they're told first because Nana says to, then because Grandma says to, then because their mum says, and finally because either their sister or their wife says to. Sisters have the advantage of having been around all the whole time and knowing that of course they're going to inherit, and wives have the advantage of being there all day every day and talking to most the same people and probably buying most everyday purchases and so forth. The power struggle is ongoing and of course never explicitly stated, happening in the clash of assumptions. Males can either keep their heads down and do everything they plausibly can and let women sort it out between them or get out and pretend nobody is telling them nothing and let women sort it out between them. And then whoever has daughters has the best chance of being matriarchy the next generation, at least in the long term, because given long enough they'll be Nana and everyone left standing is used to them.
I'm sure sex has a behind closed doors place in this system, but rather more relevant in a day to day way is knowing who is telling what to who about whom and all the social pressure that can be brought to bear if you're just not keeping up.
Matriarchies can be widely acknowledged (you do not cross Grandma) or a lot more subtle, say when a family finds that upon Grandma's passing they are not in fact a family but instead a number of families ever more tenuously linked. Really successful Grandmas can have people on every continent, without ever raising their voice, though generally with quite a bit of frosty Not Talking on relevant occasions.
Holding economic power can be handy in building a functional matriarchy. If the family pay packet comes home and goes straight into the wife's hands, it is probably not a straight up patriarchy around there. Also a lot of subtle stuff goes on by way of christmas presents, birthday presents, and occasions such as Mother's Day. And the ability to help out here and there with things like childcare and school fees counts greatly towards having ones opinion weigh heavily in future discussions.
Having observed some grandmas I don't rightly think that sex appeal is key to power. Approval, more like. And the ever withering possibility of disapproval. Nobody wants to be The Relative We Do Not Name. Especially if they need furniture moved or some such.
And yes I know these forms evolved within patriarchy where explicit and shouty forms of power tended to be masculine. But they work pretty good.
I just read some of these books from the Mostly Shagging (Some Politics) subgenre and wonder which humans the authors have been observing, that they think they only work like that. It reminds me of them books about wolf pack behaviour that turned out to be written about wolf 'packs' made of a lot of orphaned teenage males. Actual social behaviour in healthy mixed age groups does not greatly resemble the initial assumptions. Maybe human psychology has done the same thing by mostly studying college students? That would be worrying.
It also bothers me in fantasy books and history books that it seems to hone in on all the wars and ignore the bits of history when a whole lot of diplomats and quiet back and forth kept continents more or less stitched together. I mean it can't all have been wars, there was a whole lot of not-war going on, but the stories are wars. And then it's all like solve problems with swords? But swords never solved anything, they just got rid of people and wore the survivors out enough to stop waving swords around and go back to the talking.
Basically I think history probably had a lot more to do with grandmas than is commonly written.
And there's a lot more matriarchy going on around and between that don't look much like these daft books.
Maybe it's just someone's idea of a power fantasy, but it don't make much sense to me. Being sexy at people was, along with having babies, and spreading stories, the power even extreme patriarchy left to women after systematic denial of agency in other arenas through millennia of patriarchal oppression. When women have actual access to power then they can wield, for instance, economics. Or really big swords. Or, as in this book, magics. They can be the boss of people in all the ways that men traditionally are around here. And that doesn't tend to include mass being sexy at people. I mean, the active kind of being sexy and trying to use sex to get things done, that gets brought out by the less powerful against the more powerful, mostly. It's tangled up with objectification. If one gender has all the power, legal and economic and violent (and magical), then around here they end up wearing suits and doing sexual harrassment when they assume everyone less powerful wants to jump into bed with them. Showing off their sexual assets doesn't seem to be a major part of most patriarchal power. Even for like actors, relative to actresses. So I don't see why it would be all feminine wiles time if there was actual other power already. Why lead them by the balls when you can just fire them?
In the real world I have observed a small yet functioning matriarchy. Men do what they're told first because Nana says to, then because Grandma says to, then because their mum says, and finally because either their sister or their wife says to. Sisters have the advantage of having been around all the whole time and knowing that of course they're going to inherit, and wives have the advantage of being there all day every day and talking to most the same people and probably buying most everyday purchases and so forth. The power struggle is ongoing and of course never explicitly stated, happening in the clash of assumptions. Males can either keep their heads down and do everything they plausibly can and let women sort it out between them or get out and pretend nobody is telling them nothing and let women sort it out between them. And then whoever has daughters has the best chance of being matriarchy the next generation, at least in the long term, because given long enough they'll be Nana and everyone left standing is used to them.
I'm sure sex has a behind closed doors place in this system, but rather more relevant in a day to day way is knowing who is telling what to who about whom and all the social pressure that can be brought to bear if you're just not keeping up.
Matriarchies can be widely acknowledged (you do not cross Grandma) or a lot more subtle, say when a family finds that upon Grandma's passing they are not in fact a family but instead a number of families ever more tenuously linked. Really successful Grandmas can have people on every continent, without ever raising their voice, though generally with quite a bit of frosty Not Talking on relevant occasions.
Holding economic power can be handy in building a functional matriarchy. If the family pay packet comes home and goes straight into the wife's hands, it is probably not a straight up patriarchy around there. Also a lot of subtle stuff goes on by way of christmas presents, birthday presents, and occasions such as Mother's Day. And the ability to help out here and there with things like childcare and school fees counts greatly towards having ones opinion weigh heavily in future discussions.
Having observed some grandmas I don't rightly think that sex appeal is key to power. Approval, more like. And the ever withering possibility of disapproval. Nobody wants to be The Relative We Do Not Name. Especially if they need furniture moved or some such.
And yes I know these forms evolved within patriarchy where explicit and shouty forms of power tended to be masculine. But they work pretty good.
I just read some of these books from the Mostly Shagging (Some Politics) subgenre and wonder which humans the authors have been observing, that they think they only work like that. It reminds me of them books about wolf pack behaviour that turned out to be written about wolf 'packs' made of a lot of orphaned teenage males. Actual social behaviour in healthy mixed age groups does not greatly resemble the initial assumptions. Maybe human psychology has done the same thing by mostly studying college students? That would be worrying.
It also bothers me in fantasy books and history books that it seems to hone in on all the wars and ignore the bits of history when a whole lot of diplomats and quiet back and forth kept continents more or less stitched together. I mean it can't all have been wars, there was a whole lot of not-war going on, but the stories are wars. And then it's all like solve problems with swords? But swords never solved anything, they just got rid of people and wore the survivors out enough to stop waving swords around and go back to the talking.
Basically I think history probably had a lot more to do with grandmas than is commonly written.
And there's a lot more matriarchy going on around and between that don't look much like these daft books.