Matriachal or Patriarchal?

What sort of society are we living in?

Most tend to think that the men control everything however are we ignoring the contributions of women in our society.

I've recently spoke to someone who is sure that we are in a matriachal society and I've struggled to argue against this point.

Men make more money but in a household generally it is the woman paying the bills and looking after the money.

Marriage can be looked at as the man owning the woman however these days marriage is more for the woman. (How many men get an engagement ring?)

I'm just curious to hear peoples thoughts on this, is it possible that it's not a mans world? After all behind every great man is a great woman.

Good point, and probably one reason why things are so screwed up in this society. Women are economically and socially disadvantaged for the most part but they have lots of fallbacks like alimony that men don't. Ask any man who has had trouble getting child support from a woman or assistance for domestic abuse and they will tell you how skewed things are against men as well. I'm spending a lot of time with working poor right now and it seems like the men are not able to get government assistance if they are single parents anywhere as easily as women get it.

reply to post by Krahzeef


It's both.

A dysfunctional patriarchal society is manifest in overt aggression, wars for territory and resources, and force instead of diplomacy used to resolve conflict.

So the masculine principle of the human race is out of balance.

People notice this and go too far, and end up blaming everything on men. If you look closely, however, there is a lot of dysfunctional matriarchy going on too:

Symbolically, the feminine principle would rule nutrition, healing, communication and protection. We are living in a world with under-nourished, starving people, suppressed healing methods, greedy pharamceutical cartels, a deeply dishonest media and widespread indifference to the suffering of the weak.

All of the above are manifestations of an out of balance feminine principle.

It's important that we let go of binary thinking as a race. There's no point in arguing back and forth: It's patriarchal, oh no it isn't it's matriarchal, oh no it isn't. An honest analysis has to be balanced.

Lastly, man has been weakened through repeated application of the divide and conquer tactic: Arab vs Jew, Black vs White, U.S. vs PRC, Man vs Women. Feminism is a good thing but taken too far it's another manifestation of the divide and conquer tactic successfully applied, to distract us from our true enemies.

Conclusion; we are living in a society where both masculine and feminine principles are out of balance with themselves, and in turn out of balance with each other.