A post on Deb’s Facebook page
Hi Deb,
Agree that where patriarchy exists in and of itself it needs to be demolished and replaced with more open systems.
And not everything (or even most things) are the result of patriarchy (though it certainly is strong in some contexts).
We have a number of major issues.
I agree that individuals need to be valued in and of themselves.
I have a long standing commitment to individual life and individual liberty, and both of those expressed via responsible actions in social and ecological contexts.
One thing that not too many people appreciate, is that liberty applied in practice results in diversity. In some cases that diversity is beyond the bounds of what some people consider acceptable; but unless a clear link can be established to something actually being a reasonable threat to the life or liberty of someone else, it must be accepted and tolerated. Those on the more conservative end of the spectrum will have difficulties with that.
And beyond that, many other factors are important.
Competency hierarchies are essential for optimal functioning; and to some people any sort of hierarchy is seen as patriarchy.
Small difference in the center of a distribution can result in large differences at the tail of the distribution. So men and women can differ very little in the center of the distribution, and still have a significant difference at the extremes of competency – that is just a fact of statistics and normal distributions – not necessarily an indication of patriarchal bias (and to be clear, I am not denying patriarchal bias exists, I am just being clear that not all deviations from even distributions are due to it).
Sorting out the different contributions of all the different factors is not a simple thing.
Assuming that people are or should be the same in all aspects is a very bad idea.
We are different, that is part of what makes us interesting to each other.
So long as everyone has enough by their own reasonable standards, then those differences ought to be celebrated.
Interesting times.
