In comments over at FeministCritics, where I’ve been trying to explain why I think skepticism about feminism is way, way, way less important that skepticism about mainstream anti-feminism ought to be, typhonblue said

My problem with feminism is where it doesn’t challenge ‘patriarchial’ notions of male disposability, responsibility and moral inferiority. Additionally, it’s very obvious to me that ‘patriarchal’ notions of male disposability lead to a situations in which a woman is valued far, far, far more for her femaleness then her personhood; which I find profoundly offensive.

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I also find the notion of ‘patriarchy’ incoherent.

Maybe it’s just me but I think the notion of patriarchy is actually pretty straightforward. Here’s what I think it means (or at least where it came from) and how I think both the ideas of women’s value as property and men’s disposability come from values handed down from that system.

Formal political capital-p Patriarchy was and in some places still is the organization of society into extended multi-generational families, “houses,” or clans. Inside that system the extended family is held to be more important than any member in it. Except, maybe, whoever was the titular head. (Though even then it’s presumed their privilege comes from the decisions they make on behalf of the family.) That the heads of those houses were almost always men isn’t as important as the fact that they were the most senior relative in their particular branch of their family. They were more likely to be grandfathers or, occasionally, grandmothers of extended families than fathers or mothers of contemporary nuclear families.

Under political/economic patriarchy alliances are made through marriage — the idea being that if your children are married and, more important, their children are both descendants of the respective household heads, then betrayal would be literally an abandonment of one’s own flesh and blood.

Technically under patriarchy children of both sexes are “given” in marriage to form alliances with other houses. In theory (and often in practice) subordinate family members were given no more real say in who they were to marry than a suitcase full of money or a deed to piece of property would be.

In practice, though, women family members were often given in marriage to particularly “worthy” male outsiders — soldiers, say, or wealthy individuals. The stereotypical example of the latter would be when a king announced his daughter’s hand in marriage to whoever won a major tournament. (Or, in mythology, slew a dragon.) In other words it was possible for an ambitious or particularly infatuated man to “earn” a desired woman (or at least an alliance to her family) by pleasing her father and family interest.

And if the striving man dies in battle? Well, that’s male disposability for you — the king gives his daughter to the guy (possibly even the enemy who killed the first guy) and even though the first guy is dead and the daughter has to put out for and have offspring by some guy she has no interest in (and in the case of war might not even speak the same language as) the family, and its leader, come out ahead.

While that sort of formal organization isn’t as major as it once was you can still see it in operation of it in, say, the polygamy of the FLDS where wives are used as a way to accumulate property and/or influence and where marriage is denied to “excommunicated” men and boys. You can also hear about it from time to time in Afghanistan when “clan leaders” a.k.a. family heads settle violent disputes by “giving” female family members to rival families.

So that’s patriarchy: a hierarchical system in which both individual men’s and women’s interests… and even their physical bodies… may be sacrificed for the “good” of the family or community. It makes (nearly all) men disposable, reduces women to the desirability and utility of their bodies, uses access to sex as a way to reward men for earning or to punish men by withholding all while treating women’s desire and preferences as a really annoying interference. Oh, and it makes marriage a financial transaction where, generally, the man brings in wealth or at least productivity and the woman brings sex and, for extra credit, childcare and domestic labor.

You can see how under that system

• it’s a really, really bad idea for women to have, say, financial independence or equal earning power.
• it would be really bad for men to ever get the idea that they didn’t have to a job, or a car, or money, or a fancy place, or else maybe lies, or pure grain alcohol in the punch, or a dark alley for women to be willing or even champing at the bit to love them or make love with them.
• it would be a really bad idea for anyone to get the idea that woman who admitted or demonstrated that she just really enjoyed sex with men because it felt really, really good wasn’t a “bimbo” or a “slut” or a “whore” or “crazy” or “wild” or “childlike and naive” or otherwise unusual and maybe broken but was instead a normal, healthy human being.
• it would be really, really bad for men to get the idea that 90-95% of women with full economic, political, social and especially biological independence and self-determination would still want and like men.
• it would be really, really bad for men to get the idea they don’t have to die for love either in feats of derring do to “get the girls” or in the slow, Willie Loman sense of grinding one’s self into an early grave to keep them.
• it would be really, really bad if men ever got the idea that wives, sweethearts, mothers, sisters, and daughters — feminist or otherwise — really don’t want their husbands, sweethearts, sons, brothers, and fathers “disposably” dying young, or even early on their behalf

You can also see how under a system like that

1. any woman with a brain would take one look and think “woah, that’s fucked up, I don’t want any part of this.”
2. any woman with a brain would get pretty exasperated that men kept falling for the sucker role the system assigns them

With minor variations items #1 and #2 encompass almost all of “mainstream” feminism. Substitute “any woman or man or any age, race, class, or body” any time you see the words “woman” or “man” in clauses #1 and #2 and you’re got an emerging consensus in feminism. Of which I’m very comfortable considering myself a part: I have a brain and I think the system’s fucked up and I don’t want any part of it and I get pretty exasperated whenever men, and women, keep falling into the sucker roles the system wants to assign them.