Patriarchy

I don’t know anything and never been to Europe but American feminism is different, I think. It went puritanical like everything in America. Leftism generally went puritanical and utopian, strident and judgmental, and it cost the hell out of them. 

Who wants that, constantly feeling watched over, unwhole and inadequate? So, the patriarchy, which I’m convinced is compensatory. Men are compensated by society for their weakness and vulnerability. They were given power to console them, to invest them in something other than death, and to keep them from acting out. 

Patriarchy is a function of a deeper problem, I believe, the absurdity of being alive. Women are fundamentally more grounded, including in a chthonic kind of way, and fundamentally stronger by being more able to achieve a harmonious existence within nature whereas men too often want to fight against nature and mortality. 

Which never fucking works. So civilization is about constraining and channeling men’s dominating and destructive impulses. Borrowed (power, petro) energy made this harder because men wanted to own it. Ownership is fundamentally wrong and illusory. The sicker the culture the more focused it will be on property rights.

In healthier and more harmonious cultures, though they may offer significant protections for property, it will be still be understood, as a cultural matter, as a kind of stewardship. The guy at the gym wanted to own y’all. Kicking him in the nuts would have been one way to negate it but it’s risky and inflammatory. 

The reaction of the other women is another way of disempowering him and contributing to disempowering the whole mass of this shit but the striving for power and security-through-domination instead of security-through-cooperation is a perennial problem. American white women voted for Trump three times.

That’s support for an especially addicted, abusive, arbitrary form of patriarchy. I got on board with feminism early though it troubled me that it seemed insulting to the American midwestern women I grew up with who were mostly one generation off of farms but in any case generally tough, productive and nobody’s patsies. 

I got on board with feminism because of nukes and industrialized slaughter as represented by the Holocaust. But Israel is now another example of the perennial problem of everyone getting compromised by patriarchal impulses relating to historical cycles of tribal wrongs and not being able to break those cycles.

I agree with you about accountability. I think it must be at the societal and cultural levels. If that works then these interpersonal instances and transgressions get instantly processed as sad and desperate attempts of losers to assert themselves. Which, if it’s socially reinforced, gets us to the sociopathy of Trumpism.