It’s a system that favours privilige, power, and freedom (where freedom can be loosely defined as “access to choice”) for rich, older, white men more than for anyone else, and restricts privilige, power, and freedom for everyone else, to a greater or lesser degree.

This is brilliantly put; and I totally resonate because these are ideas I have for a long time held self evident (as you all obviously have too) except I was using a different vocabulary – I can only say I was ignorant of the true definition of patriarchy, and confused it for an anti-male slogan -which I even agreed with up to a point – except I could only be my own enemy up to a point. Nevertheless – thanks again Jennie.

Pretty much, yeah.

Sorry. But the patriarchy’s been around in one form or another for millenia, so it’s had time to get its tentacles into pretty much everything.

The patriarchy is not MEN. It’s a system that favours privilige, power, and freedom (where freedom can be loosely defined as “access to choice”) for rich, older, white men more than for anyone else, and restricts privilige, power, and freedom for everyone else, to a greater or lesser degree. To paraphrase Twisty, it’s a system of power that has rich honky men at the top and poor women of colour at the bottom. It’s not a conspiracy so much as a bunch of ways of doing things based on some fundamental assumptions about The Way Things Are. We can’t just change the fundamental assumptions and keep the systems based on them, we have to look at every system, and either tear it down or alter it to fit the Way Things Are Now.

There’s not a lot of room for misandry in there, in my view. I’m fighting a bunch of systems, not men.

The all-pervasiveness of patriarchal systems doesn’t mean anyone has to fight the damn’ thing. People can keep on upholding the patriarchy—I can’t stop ‘em. Doesn’t mean that a feminist need to spend every moment of every day asking “Is this a patriarchy-supporting behaviour?” First off, the answer is probably “yes,” and second, she’d never get anything done at all.

So let’s look at beauty standards:

In western culture at the moment, there is a pronounced bias towards thin, young, and “feminine” in our icons of female beauty.

We may argue that older women are beautiful, we may argue that women of all sizes are beautiful, we may admire women present as more “mannish,” but overwhelmingly, the women who are presented to us as beautiful are young, thin, and clearly female. Why do you think this might be? Could it possibly be that young women are seen as more fertile, more impressionable, easier to control, and more “ripe for the picking”? Could it possibly be that thinness is difficult to attain (in today’s western culture), indicates that a woman has leisure to exercise, attend yoga classes, and care for her body? Could it be that we need to mark women as “feminine” in order to point to a number of other “feminine” qualities: meekness, docility, motherliness, etc., etc.,—qualities that men find unthreatening?

How often, in movies or on TV, do you see an older leading lady and a younger leading man, depicted as an appropriate match for each other? How often do you see an older leading man and a hot young leading lady? How long was Sean Connery considered sexy and cast as an action hero? Do you think Angelina Jolie is going to have nearly as long a shelf life?

If we tell women that it’s really important for them to be beautiful, that beauty is one of the most defining qualities for them, and their most valuable commodity, then we make beauty something very difficult for most women to attain, we’re going to make a lot of women really insecure. They’re going to spend time and money and energy trying to be beautiful, young, and thin. This is going to divert a lot of time they could spend on their careers, their artistic endeavours, whatever. This is going to make them more poor. This is going to make them believe that they have less to offer when they’re no longer young, and they’ll be less demanding and less threatening in consequence.

And that is a very simplistic view of why it’s a patriarchy-supporting action when I colour my hair. (I’m not even going to go into how the money spent on hair colouring went to support an industry that survives because women are insecure about their looks.)

Forgive me, because I am interested and wish to learn about this topic which I can’t say I really know anything about – so I don’t mean offense – but at the moment it feels as if there is evidence to support patriarchy in places – but without breaking it down into more clear definitions its just an umbrella for misandry – as you Jennie talk about your female dominated industry I feel encouraged because surely it is the role of feminism to make women feel they are independant and free to do anything they choose – and if something stops them – they’ll fight it – but by referring to ‘patriarchal standard of beauty’ I feel as if you are talking about something quite unsubstantiated and almost mystical – I’m probably way off the mark and need a simple explanation – but I’m learning and it can’t hurt to convert me.

I can’t speak for R. Mildred, but I don’t think she meant that anyone was a sellout to the feminist cause.

Contrast your question:
If a woman shaves her legs, wears high heels and gives blowjobs does it make her a sellout of the feminist cause?

With her statement (above):

That’s what’s meant by labelling something “patriarchal”: Look At It Closer! … it’s the most fundamental part of being a feminist – you’re always ready to blame, and after you blame, you figure out how to react to the knowledge that something is patriarchal, do you continue to do it anyway? Do you s[h]un it completely? Do you take the hard assed route and decide that even if you do like it, and you can work it without it being a form of oppression, it still adds to the patriarchal culture and needs to be shunned.

What I got from R. Mildred’s post is that 1) identifying something as patriarchal refers to the behaviour, not to the person. So if someone points out to me that colouring my hair is an act of submission to the cult of feminine beauty and diverts my income from sensible things like food and books to things that support an industry that exists in order to perpetuate patriarchal standards of beauty and keep women spending money on appeasing the male gaze, they’re referring to my actions, not to my devotion to the cause of feminism.

And they’re correct about my actions, more or less. I’ve absorbed patriarchal notions about beauty and colour my hair because I prefer the way it looks when it’s coloured and that’s patriarchal yep youbetcha.

If I were a better, harder-assed feminist, I’d let my hair go grey and cut it short, probably. As it is, I accept that in this, I am a flawed, weak, and (as Twisty would probably have it) hypocritical feminist.

Does that negate the value of my contributions to sexual health education, my work to raise the salaries and freelance rates in my female-dominated industry, or my writings on feminism in my own blog? I really hope not.

What I don’t do is respond to a post about hair-dyeing being a manifestation of the pervasiveness of the patriarchal beauty myth by saying “But I’m a feminist and I dye my hair, it’s my choice, it makes me feel pretty and empowered, and better able to use my feminine feminist wiles to get my way, and so hair-dyeing cannot be patriarchal, ’cause then I wouldn’t be able to do it, you big meanie!”

Moving into the bedroom, what a feminist conscious demands of us (women and men, I think) is that we examine our relationship and sexual dynamics for the expectations engendered by privilige and the “traditional” roles between the sexes. Do we find ourselves feeling like we’re “expected” to put out? Like sex is the coin we pay for affection? Like our beauty or appearance are key contributions we make to the relationship? Do we find ourselves thinking that we are “owed” sexual favours? Do we understand that “no” is always an acceptable answer? Can we honestly say that we’re giving as much as we’re demanding?

That’s not all of it, but IME it’s a decent place to start.

Every woman negotiates her way through the patriarchy. Far be it from me to tell her how to do so.

I remember my sister getting irate when we were watching a Marilyn Monroe film as she felt that MM was the beginning of these sensational pin ups which have led to this image obsessed culture that we currently reside in. I think it is maybe the typical male drawback of ‘knowing’ but not ‘understanding’ the problem. I knew ‘women were being oppressed by this patriarchal society etc’: you only have to turn on the news to see the elder more authoratative man (who’s sexuality is neutralised) and his co-host, the sexy, leggy and sophisticated Natasha Kaplinsky (in England) who would be despite her intellect nowehere without her appearance. This infact is a good thing to say to people who deny patriarchy because it is so visual and blatant (and not as crude or fallible as 1/4 of college girls are raped).

I agree with BlL’s article that women have to overcome and topple male supremacy – I mistakenly thought that this change was being brought about with more women becoming CEO’s and more men becoming anorexic and reading lifestyle magazines – sounds like a joke when I write it now. When women become these aggressive CEO’s, corperate bosses, Prime Ministers(Thatcher) – are they standing up for feminisim? Do they try and crusade for the rights of other women? Or do they by functioning as men do effectively transit from their gender?

The question of semantics. How are we to define what it is to be a ‘woman’ of for that matter a ‘man’. Asides from the obvious equal opps which need to be addressed – this notion of something deeper inside reminds me of something I read about Ganesh (Hindu elephant god) – he is in the world but not of the world – if a woman shaves her legs, wears high heels and gives blowjobs does it make her a sellout of the feminist cause? There are expectations of everybody – and those who do not fill expectations are discriminated against – this is in all spheres of life but in sex for instance men are also under pressure to perform and satisfy – these are the nuances of interpersonal relationships and maybe a trend but are certainly not the work of a grand conspiratorial design by men to oppress women in the bedroom.

Also, in my case, the Hollywood media played no role- the only female figures I saw in my youth were 16 bit figures in video games that were not clearly defined in their body shapes

So I started exercising more and eating less in order to lose the weight and success! I managed to lose it all. Except for the last ten pounds. Which is typical of most dieters but in my case it is rather deliberate.

I have noticed a change in the way people, OK men, treat me when I am thinner. I get more attention and it makes me feel self-conscious. When some asshole is gawking at my tits or my legs I am filled with rage. When I am fat, nobody looks. When I am skinny, they do. I am reminded that being an attractive woman can be a terrible thing. Like all women I have been heckled on the street for having tits or had them grabbed when I had no desire for it. When I stepped on the scale and realized that I weigh the same as I did in high school I was not happy or proud of myself. I panicked! I really want to be thinner because I have more energy and I like the way I look. But I don’t want to be treated differently by men.

So I have a case of anorexia in reverse. And reading your post made me realize it. Maybe I will stop over-eating in an attempt to keep that last ten pounds. At least I am painfully aware that I have a problem at all. All I can say is that reading this post is the first time I gave it any thought.

Look, think of it like sexual preference, people preffer to fuck (or not) people of a specific gender, in a specific way yes? But some people, due to social pressures, choose to fuck people of the (as far as their actual personal preference goes) incorrect gender, in non-preffered ways, due to huge social expectations that emerge as part of several oppressive systems, yes?

Extend that concept to other behaviors. What choices are you making as a result of oppressive systems? What due to the person you actually are? then start subtracting what is neccesary to survive from what is preferable and then working like hell so that everything balances out in such a way that no body gets screwed over, and that survival is not, I repeat not, entirely dependent on fucking ourselves over until we end up like Maureen Dowd, Dawn Eden or Condileeza Rice, while at the same time leaving every other women bleeding from the crotch in the gutter.

Take leg shaving, shaving your legs is not an inherently oppressive act, but the question must be asked, because patriarchy is everywhere blah-di-blah, “why am I shaving my legs?” and if you decide that you’re shaving your legs merely as a result of society urging you to shave you legs rather than because you want to shave your legs (or some other bad reason) the Next question you must ask yourself is “How do I react to that?”

I wouldn’t tell you off, I would point out that I think it’s utterly ridiculous for anyone to actually claim she does something *for* herself as if her self is somehow detachable from the world in which she lives, as if she carries around a special knapsack where all her true desires are and if she’d could just get past all the patriarchal garbage hiding that little knapsakc of special snowflake desires — vloila — she could pull a preference out of a knapsack and say, “mine all mine.”