Part II:
What Does A Matriarchy Look Like and Do?(click
here to read Part I)
The Matriarchy that exists today in the West rode in on a feminist Gramscian Marxist horse, and as a result has much of the same look and feel. Yet the Matriarchy is not simply a Marxist phenomenon, where women (as represented by feminists) are jockeying with other groups for political power. No, the Matriarchy seeks to supplant the previous patriarchal hegemony on not only an economic level (as Marxists would be satisfied with doing) but on a social level as well. As sociologist Stephen Baskerville
writes, matriarchal feminism
extends the socialist logic and may actually exceed its intrusive potential. “Women’s liberation, if not the most extreme then certainly the most influential neo-Marxist movement in America, has done to the American home what communism did to the Russian economy, and most of the ruin is irreversible,” writes Ruth Wisse of Harvard. “By defining relations between men and women in terms of power and competition instead of reciprocity and cooperation, the movement tore apart the most basic and fragile contract in human society, the unit from which all other social institutions draw their strength.” Politicizing sex takes the logic of class conflict a great leap forward. The charge of “oppression” is leveled not at broad, impersonal social classes but at the most intimate personal relationships. The oppressor is not the entrepreneurial class or entrepreneur but the husband (or “intimate partner”), the father, even the son. To relieve the oppressed, the all-powerful state nationalizes not only the private firm but the private family...
Matriarchal feminism is thus the third in a sequence of collectivist twentieth-century philosophies. Preceded by fascism--which nationalized the culture yet was content with directing economic activity and the use of private property--and socialism, which nationalizes the both the economy and private property and is content to merely direct the culture, matriarchal feminism does both, nationalizing the whole of society, right down to the individual family member level, for the benefit of women and women alone.
As its Gramscian Marxist heritage suggests, the Matriarchy despises the traditional nuclear--patriarchal--family. For it to achieve its "takes a village" utopian vision, where women care for each other's children in a shiny happy plastic society, the authority of the family--and ultimately the patriarch, the father--must be usurped. The first of these usurpers was compulsory schooling, which established the precedent of the State assuming responsibility for the upbringing of children. Closely following compulsory schooling was the advent of the welfare state, the second usurper which annexed responsibility for the care and feeding of full grown adults away from human families and from the spiritual patriarchal family--the Church. While both of these usurpers temporally preceded matriarchal feminism, they nonetheless enabled it by legitimizing the intrusion of the state into the family, first with one's children, and then into the private affairs of full-grown adults.
The next usurper was the seminal--if the reader will forgive the pun--one: divorce. Divorce is the atom bomb of the Matriarchy, the alpha and the omega, simultaneously a rite of passage for its members and the source of much of its power. Baskerville again:
Divorce injects state power — including the penal apparatus with its police and prisons — directly into private households and private lives. “The personal is political” is no longer a theoretical slogan but a codified reality institutionally enforced by new and correspondingly feminist tribunals: the “family” courts. These bureaucratic pseudo-courts permit politicized wives to subject their husbands to criminal penalties...without having to charge the men with any actionable offense for which they can be tried in a criminal court.
...feminists long ago recognized [divorce's] political power. As early as the American Revolution, divorce has represented female rebellion: “The association of divorce with women’s freedom and prerogatives, established in those early days, remained an enduring and important feature of American divorce,” writes Whitehead. Into the nineteenth century, “divorce became an increasingly important measure of women’s political freedom as well as an expression of feminine initiative and independence.” But it was in the twentieth century that feminists teamed up with trial lawyers and other legal entrepreneurs to institutionalize “no-fault” divorce — a measure that subtly but decisively amounted, no less, to “the abolition of marriage” as a legally enforceable contract...
From here the subsequent usurpations followed in a deluge. The welfare state expanded exponentially to cover not only children who were poor as a matter of happenstance but those kids deliberately impoverished by self-serving, "freedom"-seeking actions of their mothers--the feminization of poverty. Feminists imposed no-fault--in reality unilateral--divorce on a gullible public, which served to fan the flames of divorce further. The Welfare State expanded further under the guise of Welfare Reform in the mid 1990s, only this time, the State harnessed those men who were evicted from their children's lives to underwrite the filching of their own children and subsidize a vast patronage machine for the benefit of those who have a vested financial interest in keeping the gears of the divorce machine cranking along. And those women, now "liberated" from the home and family
entered the workforce at functions that extended the domestic roles with which they were comfortable. Thus rather than caring for their own children within the family, women began working in new professions where they care for other people’s children as part of the public economy: daycare, early education, and “social services.” This transformed child-rearing from a private familial into a public communal and taxable activity, expanding the tax base and with it the size and power of the state, while also driving down male wages. Soon, a political class paid from those taxes began to take command position in control of vastly expanded public education and social services bureaucracies, where they supervise other women who look after other people’s children, further expanding the size and scope of the state into what had been private life
Let's review what we have seen thus far. We have seen a social system in which women are dominant at the most basic level of society; that dominance bubbles up all the way to the top. If a man fails to make his wife happy, he is summarily cashiered for the bulk of the property held in common with his wife, possibly with the aid of a domestic violence action that locks him out of his own home. Unmarried men face a similar threat--fail to make your girlfriend happy, you face arrest and incarceration from nebulous accusations of domestic violence or rape, both of which also marshal the guns of the state against you. Furthermore, both married and unmarried men face the constant threat of having their children confiscated, access cut off or severely curtailed under the threat (again) of state enforcement action, and a not insignificant portion of his future earnings are awarded to the woman he used to trust. All men labor under the constant threat of a nebulous accusation of sexual harassment--a crime defined as a male perpetrator and a female victim--in the workplace, all men date under the constant threat of a nebulous accusation of sexual assault, another crime defined as a male perp and a female victim. It is not difficult to imagine the tyranny that occurs in a society when one sex lives, works, and plays under a constant threat of compliance with the other sex's wishes or face forcible, eviction, enslavement, arrest, and/or incarceration.
We have also seen a social system that labors to advance the interests of women before those of children and men; in fact, entire governmental agencies are peopled chiefly by women who work for the benefit of, and to eliminate any constraints on, women. And as Baskerville notes, not only does the system serve to facilitate women ridding themselves of any responsibility to a man, it seeks to do the same vis-a-vis women's children too:
We have created a panoply of mechanisms and institutions allowing divorcing mothers to rid themselves, temporarily or permanently, of inconvenient children: “safe havens” have legalized child abandonment by mothers; daycare is tailored to the needs of mothers, not children; foster care relieves single mothers who cannot provide basic care and protection; “CHINS” petitions allow single mothers to turn over unruly adolescents to the care and custody of social workers; “SIDS” and in some countries infanticide laws have even made the murder of children semi-legal. And then of course there is abortion. When one adds the extension and proliferation of institutions not normally associated with divorce but whose purpose is to relieve parents in general and mothers in particular of childrearing duties — public schools, organized after-school activities, convenience and fast food, psychotropic drugs to control unruly boys — we can begin to see how massively our society and economy have been gearing up for decades to cater to divorce, facilitate single motherhood, marginalize fathers, and generally render parents and families redundant
No such agency exists for children, and certainly no such agency exists to advance the interests of men in a similar fashion. Even those men who populate governmental agencies, all the way up to legislators in Congress or agents in the Executive, join women in being more moved by the problems of women than those of men--an artifact of a traditional cultural imperative that privileges women over men as compensation for women's social and physical vulnerabilities.
Furthermore, we have seen a social system where women have been empowered at all levels of society, and most importantly at all levels of government, while men have been symmetrically disempowered by that same government. Through routine violations of the anti-peonage act and the 4th and 14th Amendments to the Constitution, routine ex parte TROs, through judicial pro-mother bias, through the female sentencing discount, and through rape shield laws that prevent the identification of an accuser in the media (though the accused's good name is fair game), the legal position of men is far weaker than women, even in the darkest days of a feminist's fevered imagination of what patriarchy used to be.
Yes, we live under a matriarchy. Unfortunately, or thankfully, depending on one's perspective, it cannot last. We'll either collapse from within because a modern complex society cannot long survive the ghetto form of the family, or (less likely) fall to an external invader who is encouraged by the weakness he perceives in our once-great culture. I'll close this post with my final citation of Baskerville:
Decades before the family crisis became obvious, sociologist Carle Zimmerman demonstrated that family atomization preceded civilizational collapse. Zimmerman showed how Greek and Roman decline was preceded by a renunciation of family life, first by educated elites and then others, and argued that our own civilization is on a similar trajectory. Zimmerman was writing during the post-war baby boom — before “second wave” feminism, no-fault divorce, same-sex marriage, and “demographic winter” — when the family was generally assumed to be stable. Yet he predicted these developments based on long-range trends — mostly elite intellectual fashions — whose significance few others grasped. Indeed, Zimmerman emphasized how difficult the decline is to perceive while it is taking place: “These changes came about slowly, over centuries, and almost imperceptibly.”[90] Today, even as the family crisis becomes undeniable, there is still little awareness of its full ramifications and how close we are to the point of no return."
