I think most of us immediately realized the OP was exaggerating for effect.
The OP does make a point though, right?
Two of the classic theory books, Elizabeth Janeway’s Powers of the Weak and Marilyn French’s Beyond Power, dismantle and examine* our generally-unquestioned beliefs about what power itself actually is.
To have power over other people in the classical they’ve-got-no-choice, coercive-oppressive sense, thoroughly disempowers the folks you have power over, but generally ties up vast portions of your own resources too.
In the raw simple sense, in order to get you out of the bar when you don’t want to leave, the bouncer has to wrestle you around, whop you a couple times, and throw you out, and while doing so, isn’t free to do much of anything else.
We tend to think of power as “just existing”. It doesn’t. To be sure, in most situations of such power, the oppressed participate, playing their roles (although at any given point they could require you to actually apply the coercive force before cooperating, or refuse all cooperation altogether), and there’s a constant negotiation going on in which, even in such a coercive power relationship, you’re convincing them that matters are sufficiently tolerable that they should continue to participate, while they’re trying to extract whatever concessions and considerations they can. There is also generally going to exist the possibility of a revolution that will supplant you as the boss-in-charge, whether it be the oppressed rising up and taking over or a third party swiping your slaves, and in neither case is there any inherent reason that the folks you’ve got under your thumb would help keep you in charge.
So the answer to “what’s in it for you, the oppressor, to give this up?” is the possibility of obtaining the other kind of power — the kind obtained through voluntary cooperation. Same outcome at a cheaper price, if what you wan’t isn’t inimical to the best interests of the party or parties you’re seeking cooperation from.
- I didn’t use the term “deconstruct” because I wanted to avoid implying a connection to poststructuralism and semiotics and all that shit. These authors aren’t of that school.
Riiiiiight. That’s why the countries with the highest birth rates are the most prosperous.
Look, the simple reason why men gave up power is that men may control a greater percentage of capital, jobs and property, but women control 100% of the vagina.
It’s not enough to have kids, you have to have a birth rate above replacement level, which the Muslims are currently doing in spades but the West is not.
Who said anything about being prosperous? The peoples that will be around 100 years from now are those with large birth rates, not those with minimal birth rates but more SUVs and big screen TVs.
But if men ever truly controlled women, then they indirectly controlled 100% of the vagina, and if they truly cared about the vagina that much, why would they surrender that control?
A whole lot of patriarchy was about controlling the vagina, whether directly or as part of the process of controlling the uterus.
One reason “men surrendered that control” is that, for many individual males, letting individual females control their own uterus and vagina let them in for less manipulation than when men-in-general, which tended to mean the power interests of the men running the society, were in control of them.
Consider the 1960s in the USA. Imagine yourself a 19-year old unmarried male, shadowed by the threat of the VietNam draft, unhappy with the “plastic dead corporate culture” your Dad and others of his generation want you to sign up for. The TV ads say you can impress the girls if you buy this shiny car and wear this fancy suit, and the Ann Landers column warns the girls that no one is going to buy the cow if they can already get the milk for free, but by gosh and by golly the girls have contraceptives and aren’t cooperating, to the dismay of the older generation, and you can drop out of college and hang out at the coffeehouse reading anti-war poetry and marching in antiwar protests…and even though you’re poor and don’t have social-status success symbols to flaunt, you can get laid, downright often, even.
So what’s your motivation for locking down access to contraception and access to abortion and arresting sexually active unmarried females for lewd behavior and etc, if you’re the young fellow? Nope, you’re better off with the old guys not being able to keep your access to sex bound up with doing the upward-mobility thing in their companies, aren’t you?
True, but the lives of male slaves was nothing like the lives of Ptolmey and Augustus either.
Well, first of all, this argument rests upon the assumption (which, admittedly, seems to be considered axiomatic in our society) that all men are interested in is “getting laid”, that the overwhleming desire for us that is going to drive all our decisions is to have short-term sexual encounters for the purpose of immediate gratification. I would quarrell with this (it’s certainly not true of me), but that’s a subject for a different thread.
Even assuming this, however, in your hypothetical scenario, it seems that the patriarchy has already been broken; otherwise, presumably, our 19 year old male wouldn’t have the option of hanging out at the coffeehouse reading antiwar poetry and getting laid. Of course he’s going to have no motivation for locking down access to contraception, arresting sexually active unmarried women, etc. But move the question back a generation or two: why did the men at the top, the true movers and shakers, who allegedly once tightly controlled the entire society, ever allow this situation to come to pass? Why did they loosen their iron grip and allow society to reach a point where our 19-year-old had any options other than joining the “plastic dead corporate culture?”
Couple of things:
Most men’s drives for success in some form is ultimately motivated for the unconscious urge for procreation. Short-term sexual encounters are one way of temporarily addressing that urge. But many other things men strive for, wealth, power, accomplishment, attractiveness, etc., are also means to that end, whether the individual is aware of it or not. Sometimes the man seeks power, or the appearance of power, through the arts, through acquisition of material possessions, or through looking cooler than his peers in the poetry-slinging coffee house.
The 19-year old has always had other options. Bohemian poets and wandering mistrels have always had a certain appeal for the ladies, don’t you know.
In some societies, moreover, the ones in control have not changed. Times may be a’changin’, but not that far in many places. Do you think that the Saudi ruling class would think so, for example?
If you look at the US, of course, one cause may lie in the nature of the way the founders and their contemporaries looked at the ideal society, where any man might be the equal of any other man regardless of the station in life to which he was born. Three hundred or so years ago, some Europeans visiting the colonies were appalled at the uppitiness (is that a word?) of the common men. Obviously, it was not an overnight change, and it is not, if it ever will be, complete.