| In the United States women are, I think for the first time in history, gaining real power.
I doubt very seriously that this is the first time that women-as-a-class have achieved "real power." It's just that all the societies where this arose previously have disappeared from the planet for some reason, without leaving a trace. You can find little pockets of matriarchal tribes and so on living in bushes, but all of the "tribes" that flourished at the expense of all others and came to dominate the Earth — basically the Indians, the Chinese, the Western Europeans, and the Arabs — all independently came up with the same idea of lifelong pair-bonding between men and women, and the notion that there is a huge benefit to everyone in arranging things such that men know who their children are, and live in the same house with them. Any tribe or clan that came up with a different idea for how to arrange things has long since been replaced by some group who does do these things. As ships began crossing oceans and "discovering new worlds," why is that we never once found a society of any size where women ran everything, and everyone there thought that was normal? As people around the planet became connected with one other during the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, no one encountered even one successful society where the notion of women running things was considered everyday wisdom. There is an amazing variety of customs on almost every other subject... what to eat, what clothes should look like, what God to believe in. But every single society that was still around to be 'discovered' two or three hundred years ago has the basic notions of lifelong pair-bonding; and men knowing and being responsible for their children. If your society did not invent or copy that system in your little corner of the world, people like you had been overrun, conquered or just faded away by the time the Columbuses and the Magellans arrived on the scene. I seriously doubt that humans are so smart that we can analyze our situation here in the 21st century and decide that we don't need this remarkably successful organizing principle anymore. It's not like humans haven't been trying to create Heaven on Earth for millenia. The problem is that the closest any group of people ever got was in places where they had words for "husband" and "wife" and everyone knew what that meant. I don't know the future. No one does. But everything I see around me in the world tells me that abandoning lifelong pair-bonding has a very high probability of turning out to be a fatal, irreversible, civilization-smashing and "tribe smashing" move of the sort that has led to extinction for so many other nations and tribes. Why lifelong pair-bonding? Because it works. The people who do it flourish and take over the world. The other ones vanish from the planet. It is that serious an issue. We are talking about extinction, as in dinosaurs. We and our Western European fellows are, in a matter of a few generations, squandering a genetic and culturual legacy that was not really ours to "spend." Many people led hard lives to get us — their children's children's children — to where we are now. Who the Hell are we to decide that everything they did was in vain, and that it should all end here? The birth rates in most Western (and Westernized -- like Jopan) countries are so far below the replacement rate that the cultural and genetic legacy known as "Denmark" will be gone from the Earth by the end of this centuray. It will survive only in books. The same with the Swedes, the Germans, the Italians. And if truth be told, among many of those with the same roots who are living here. I don't know what caused it, and I don't know where it leads. But it worries me greatly that in all the years humans have been on this Earth, not one society where women gained "real power" has lived to tell about it.
I agree with the people here who say that Islam is at root a matriarchy. It is the culmination of the process Fred describes in this article, where a handful of the Biggest and Baddest males are seemingly "in charge," while the rest of the society stays frozen in the seventh century, unable to organize or accomplish Big Things. To the extent that men over there jump up and down and wave rocks at us to show us how tough they are, it's because that's the best they can do. They live in a place where everything is run by women. Their society never changes; it's boring; it's oppressive. In the usual inimitable way, there are never any female suspects or witnesses as to how this oppressive force called "Islam" stays in place. There's always a holy book to blame, or a front man wearing a beard. I don't buy it. Just look at it... Islam is Woman. It fights like a woman. It organizes its societies according to Monkey Rules, with a tiny cadre of alpha males pretending to be in charge, while virtually all the resources that do not go this handful of "powerful" men go to women. Monkey rules are at root a system for beggaring males... or at least, all but a relative handful of them. I see I'll probably get flamed for that. I don't care. |
I have trouble believing that. It wasn't so long ago that most people lived their entire lives without ever meeting anyone from more than 200 miles away. In such a world, every imaginable kind of social structure must have been tried somewhere.