I was a student in Gerda Lerners patriarchy class at Madison and she always said off hand there’d be a time where the narrative construct of patriarchy (our male unideity myths, our law, our state, our history in cause effect simplifications- all illusions btw) would run aground when women gained equality and the hidden legacy that gave lesser able men places at the societal table would vanish. These men who are castaways were included earlier as the effluvia of dominance. Now they’re not included.
That’s evolution, especially as patriarchy is dismantled far too slowly. When do we demote these male gods? The dinosaur skeleton of patriarchy?
Keep in mind, patriarchy is just a narrative that masculinity can never resurrect.
And the question becomes how do we ensure parity or partnership, otherwise women can possibly implement the pendulum swing matriarchal dominance? The patriarchy (male mono mythic gods, inheritance favorability, dominance, you name it) is slowly coming to an end. And those that sneaked by in the past on the coattails of dominance are not getting into college nor can this plurality compete in an open market.
Retrieving masculinity isn’t bringing back the dominance or self image of it.
What did men do to deserve this? We accepted evolution and the switchover happens.
> the hidden legacy that gave lesser able men places at the societal table would vanish. These men who are castaways were included earlier as the effluvia of dominance. Now they’re not included.
Lovely pro-female sentiment, but be aware: every time this has happened in history, these “redundant” men have conducted violent revolution because they had had nothing left to lose. It was no different during the dawn of agriculture, where less than one man had offspring for every 17 women who did… those that could not secure wives to produce children ended up burning their societies to the ground just to feel a little warmth.
This is why many religions - led invariably by men - created monogamy and the nuclear family and draconian prohibitions against infidelity: because they knew that men without options were men who had no skin in the game, and so had no compunction against destroying it all in order to gain even a little.
Ancient men were not idiots. They just had to work with what was available to them, which was limiting AF.
We have the benefit of knowing deep history and psychology and sociology and the evolutionary drive behind mate choices to help us change those mating/gender choices that still demand “the patriarchy” from young men, yet force them to do so in a social and economic climate that has almost completely eliminated the opportunities they might have to reach those benchmarks.
Change is needed on both sides of the fence. Issues don’t just leap out of holes in the ground, fully formed; as the old saying goes it takes two to tango.
This has never happened in history, Kurgan partnership old Europe was probably seamless with hunter gatherer preceding, and the mass transition is only beginning of the overthrow of patriarchy, and is teamed with instant planet wide communication and the rhetoric in the peak male dominators of the West: Trump, Hegseth, Kirk, Thiel, Yarvin, Galloway, Peterson in eg is not brain science level, it’s amateur hour.
Partnership males are ready to negotiate, the negotiations are social and online.
> Partnership males are ready to negotiate, the negotiations are social and online.
Are Gaza, Ukraine, Somalia and ISS in Syria examples of partnership males having social and online negotiations? I ask only because they are examples of the person you are responding to: a group of males deciding the risk of the death and destruction of everything they hold precious is preferable to what they have now.
To me it looks more like two groups of males fighting to near death for the privilege of running some godforsaken plot of land. The policy is scorched earth. Society, farms, food, schools are disposable pawns in the game. The women and their needs and wants are irrelevant, except as a source of children to feed the armies.
Recently we've seen the USA start down the same road, electing a narcissist who openly bragged about how he demeaned women while on the campaign trail. Maybe they like his attitude to women (and many of the other pillars of modern society), but I suspect it was more a case of just wanting change, and those things matter less than the change they were after.
I'd love if it males really did start solving their problems with social and online negotiations. But history, even recent history is not kind to that view. "The Goodness Paradox" proposes a very different theory to how we got to where we are now. It posits that males solved their problems over the millennia by murdering each other. The paradox is that created evolutionary forces leading to males who were kinder and gentler to others in their village. But to males outside that group, it was always scorched earth, winner takes all.
Historians and social scientists widely agree that a significant surplus of unmarried, low-status young males can cause substantial social and political unrest, a pattern observed in ancient societies and documented throughout history.
The core issue stems from an imbalance in the "marriage market" (often referred to as a "marriage squeeze"), where these "surplus men" have little or no prospect of finding a spouse, establishing a family, or gaining a respected place in society. This lack of integration often leads to frustration and alienation, making these individuals more likely to engage in risk-taking behavior, crime, and violence.
Societies have historically dealt with this "bachelor problem" in several ways, and the failure to do so often resulted in conflict:
• Formation of "Bare Branches": In Imperial China, unmarried men were termed guang gun-er ("bare branches" or "bare sticks"). The Ming Code specifically labeled these marginalized individuals as a potential source of illegal activities and unrest. The Nien Rebellion in the mid-19th century has been linked by some scholars to the presence of large numbers of these disaffected, mobile, and unmarried men.
• Redirected Aggression (War and Exploration): Many land-owning societies historically managed excess male populations by sending them away to fight in wars, join the priesthood, or colonize new territories. Examples often cited include:
• Viking raids: Speculated to be partly driven by a system where not all men could inherit land and marry.
• Mongol warbands: United by leaders like Genghis Khan, potentially channeling the energy of unmarried young men into conquest.
• Janissaries: The Ottoman Empire created a military class of forced Christian converts who were kept as unmarried, loyal soldiers, effectively absorbing a potentially destabilizing group.
• Polygyny and Social Inequality: In some polygynous societies, a small number of elite men monopolized most women, leaving many lower-status men without spouses. This extreme inequality has been associated with higher rates of violent crime and internal conflict, as the frustrated, unattached men had little stake in maintaining the existing social order.
• Modern Analogy: In modern times, the pattern repeats in fragile states or cities where extremist groups and gangs heavily recruit from large pools of frustrated young men who lack family ties, jobs, or a clear future.
The existence of a large group of unattached men with little to lose is a recognized warning sign for social instability, leading to domestic and international violence.
That’s evolution, especially as patriarchy is dismantled far too slowly. When do we demote these male gods? The dinosaur skeleton of patriarchy?
Keep in mind, patriarchy is just a narrative that masculinity can never resurrect.
And the question becomes how do we ensure parity or partnership, otherwise women can possibly implement the pendulum swing matriarchal dominance? The patriarchy (male mono mythic gods, inheritance favorability, dominance, you name it) is slowly coming to an end. And those that sneaked by in the past on the coattails of dominance are not getting into college nor can this plurality compete in an open market.
Retrieving masculinity isn’t bringing back the dominance or self image of it.
What did men do to deserve this? We accepted evolution and the switchover happens.