Dismantle the Patriarchy

Oh dear. Not this again.

Well, sorry to beat this drum again, but I saw this “Dismantle the Patriarchy” bumper sticker on a car in front of me the other day (inward sigh) and was reminded that a significant portion of the population is angrily driving around harboring resentment for men. So, I continue to beat the man drum (as I have here and here and here.)

This same message—that men are evil tyrants who must be deposed—ripples through virtually every event I attend at the Commission on the Status of Women at the UN (read more here.) But the thing is, I don’t believe men by and large are evil tyrants who should be relegated to the closet while women go around and heroically fix everything men have done wrong. Men have done a great deal of good, though of course there are individual exceptions to this.

Does the person driving this car realize that the car they’re driving would never have been invented and be at their command at this moment without the work of men?

Men have done formidable things that we all benefit from. Why is it so difficult to acknowledge that?

I heard Jordan Peterson say once: “Do you know what happened never? 20 women got together and built a boat and traveled to a distant land.”

He’s right.

Women have done absolutely amazing things—things men cannot or would not do—but building boats and sailing off to nowhere isn’t one of them.

While there have always been adventurous women, women as a whole have organized, led, and executed far fewer expeditions into wild, uncharted territory than men (like, almost none). Ernest Shackleton—ambitious explorer of Antarctica (read this amazing book about him)—was a man, and only men could have withstood the insanely severe conditions that Shackleton’s crew found themselves in. That isn’t saying anything derogatory about women; it is simply acknowledging the strengths and inclinations of men.

Beating Our Breasts

The modern radical feminist hears this and beats her breast, lamenting that women have not explored or invented or physically built as much as men only because men didn’t let women go off gallivanting into the wilderness. Modern feminists also make the point that women have had their needy children to tend to, and that’s why women haven’t been able to explore or conquer in the same way men have.

Two points: 1) Nobody let men go off galivanting or do anything else they have done; they just did it, and 2) If women were tending to their children (which they often were) they were already doing something arguably more important than sailing the seven seas and equally as harrowing in its own right.

And I’ll add a third point: 3) The vast majority of women I’ve seen advocating for “dismantling the patriarchy” at the global level in order to “give women a fair chance” want to do so by sucking billions of dollars from economies that already exist. They want leaders from all walks of life to take existing wealth and give it to women so they can prove they can do what has already been done.

This is in no way a feminist victory. This is refusing to acknowledge the shoulders (of men) on which we stand.

I say, “Embrace the patriarchy.”

Maybe I should sell bumper stickers.

With love,

Kimberly

P.S. On the flip side, for a full treatment of how the contributions of women support entire economies, see Chapter 8 of my book The Invincible Family.

Me out adventuring in the wild…with my husband nearby.