Wikipedia, Patriarchy, Proof and Pudding

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Wednesday, November 29, 2006

KISS

If you are a friend of Bill , you probably have heard, "Keep It Simple, Stupid". Y don't support name-calling, especially a name like that. Y do support keeping it simple. Just look at what is in front of you. Also, behind you. It's not that hard to figure out.

Do an experiment. Watch tv - any regular channel - and write in two columns in your records (that's scientific - or use logs, which are also scientific) how many men and how many women are in the picture every time the camera shot changes. For groups or crowds do a realistic estimate. For example, a drive-in movie parking lot would be a wash, since a good estimate would be half men and half women. A scene of the us congress in session - what estimate would you give it? What about the governmental bodies of any country on Earth? Say, Liberia, Argentina, and Poland...

Tuesday, November 28, 2006

Self Evident


Monday, November 27, 2006

A Band Of Brothers

From the Merrriam-Webster online dictionary
Cohort
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English, from Latin cohort-, cohors -- more at court
1 a : one of 10 divisions of an ancient Roman legion
b : a group of warriors or soldiers
c : band, group
d : a group of individuals having a statistical factor (as age or class membership) in common in a demographic study
2 : COMPANION, COLLEAGUE

Rintrah, in his second comment to The Sorry Mr. Happy, seems disturbed that Y referred to him as a cohort of SecondSight. Y would not like to talk to or be associated with SecondSite, either, after reading his user page on wikipedia. Read it for yourself, if you want, but it looks to me like he spends a great deal of time and energy studying the psychology of personality in order to improve his skills as a "pick-up artist" in the "seduction community".

As far as Y can tell, SecondSight is responsible for deleting my contributions. Here is another aspect typical of patriachal organizations: only those in the know are able to effectively work the system. Navigating wikipedia is like trying to work your way around an underground community of moles. On the surface, anyone can see the evidence of their labors. But it's so hard to tell where it all comes from - it's time consuming, too.

Look at this beauty, that Y was able to dig up:

The origins of bias
The average Wikipedian on English Wikipedia (1) is male, (2) is technically-inclined, (3) is formally educated, (4) speaks English to an extent, (5) is White, (6) is aged 15-49, (7) is from a predominantly Christian country, (8) is from an industrialized nation, (9) is from the Northern Hemisphere, and (10) is more likely to be employed in intellectual pursuits than in practical skills or physical labor.
You can read this whole page, including the self-references, at Wikipedia:WikiProject Countering systemic bias.

Oh, by the way, number (10) is a euphemism for "belongs to one of the upper echelons in the class hierarchy". Euphemism: yet another weapon used by the soldiers of patriarchy.

Saturday, November 25, 2006

The Sorry Mr. Happy

Mr. Happy finds this "page really, really sad" and offers me some advice: "If you bothered to start enjoying life instead of fighting some terrible phantom, you might find your views would turn out a little different." (Comment on Scholarship).

Thanks for your concern, Mr. Happy, but Y am afraid that the more Y bother to start enjoying life, the more life bothers me. For example, Y thought Y would enjoy seeing the Patriarchy entry improved, but the patriarchal structure of wikipedia prevented me from experiencing more than a few moments of enjoyment. For, after placing my contribution on Nov. 14 at 5:14 am, about an hour and a half later Y found this:

Please revise your essay on the patriarchy in Gender Studies. There are no sources; patriarchy in your essay is poorly defined; much of it is blatantly spurious—e.g., [patriarchy] is predicated on the idealization of the sperm—; and the hyperbole is quite offensive. If you want to find a way to constructively contribute, please contribute verifiable, well set-out ideas. I will leave your contributions for a while, so you or someone else can rewrite it as necessary, but if it is essentially unchanged, I will remove it. Rintrah 06:39, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

As a habitually offensive hyperbolist, Y wasn't surprised. Well, the speed with which Rintrah found my change and published this vitriol was impressive. Especially since by looking at the Statistics page, and doing some math, Y estimated that there are 60,000 edits to wikipedia Every Day! (Sources: Wikipedia and math- but not that good at math, so check my figures). How did he do it? He does seem to be a busy boy. Although he claims he has no special interest in the subject of patriarchy

It might surprise you to know I don't really have strong feelings about this. If I did, I probably would have taken this page off my watchlist. I was trying to agitate people to improve this page.

he does say that it's on his watch list. Here we have an example of one of the consistantly effective tools of patriarchy- equivocation.
  • the patriarchy page is on his watch list
  • if he cared about it, he would take it off of his watch list
  • he tries to agitate people to improve the page
  • improvements to the page are deleted
  • he wants the page improved
  • if someone tries to improve the page, he threatens to remove any hard work they might contribute if it doesn't meet his standards
  • according to him and his cohort SecondSight, my contributions do not meet the high standards set forth by wikipedia
  • my contrbutions were reverted to entries which also do not meet these standards, and are actually rediculous, erroneous, inadequate or downright idiotic

So, thanks, Mr. Happy for giving me the stimulus for this entry. Please continue to join us on our journey of exposing the patriarchal basis/bias of wikipedia and the world it purports to describe.

Wednesday, November 22, 2006

Scholarship

If you have read the patriarchy page in question ( scroll down to In The Beginning and skim over it if you haven't) you will see what a disgrace it is. More about that later. Today Y want to look at men and their scholarship.

Y attended Wayne State in the 70's. Y took a class called "The Sociology Of Sex". The teacher - using that term loosely - was a real piece of work. He was actually getting money (they call them grants) to go to all the massage parlors in Detroit to "study" how many and what kind of "services" he was able to obtain. Disgraceful
.

One day he drew on the chalkboard simple representations of the vulva and the penis/testicles combo. He explained that the clitoris is essentially a tiny penis. When he reluctantly called on me (of course my hand FLEW up) Y pointed out that his comparason was faulty. Every embryo is female, until and unless it gets a hormone bath to turn it into a boy. Therefore, if a comparason is to be made, the penis must be a grossly exaggerated clitoris. But it is not, since the clitoris is the only known organ in the whole phyla of life forms which has as its sole purpose to pleasure its body. If you have the opportunity and the interest, you can see the vestiges of any man's original labia between his testes and anus. Anyway, teacher's response was, "I will not debate theories with you."

Another gem from this reliable, published source on the sociology of sex: "The reason some women don't achieve orgasm during sexual intercourse (the 'with a man' goes without saying- my comment) is because their clitoris is too far away from their vaginal opening."
Y was delighted to point out that the reason women don't have orgasms when having sex with men is likely to be the ineptitude of the man. Of course, this was another theory of mine.

The disgrace of common scholarship depends on using the word 'theory' to disallow facts, common sense, or inconvenient truths in any academic melieu.

Tuesday, November 21, 2006

Sources, Sauces, Souses, Senses

If you were to undertake to edit a page on wikipedia, you would see this notice:

Encyclopedic content must be verifiable .
They (whoever they are, but Y know they include Rintrah and SecondSight who have the integrity to identify themselves in some way, at least) consider anything verifiable if it is supported by a source which is approved by every editor who notices it. If any editor does not approve a source, then the illicit material will be deleted.
Problems with "sources":

For me the best sources are my experience, current events, common sense and reality.

Monday, November 20, 2006

In The Beginning....

Here is what we find today at Wikipedia. This is also what was found there when Y decided to edit the Patriachy page.

Patriarchy
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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The neutrality of this article is disputed.Please see the discussion on the talk page.
For other senses, see Patriarch (disambiguation).

Patriarchy (from Greek: pater (genitive form patris, showing the root patr-), meaning father and arché meaning rule) is the anthropological term used to define the sociological condition where fathers have supreme authority within families and male members of a society tend to predominate in positions of power; with the more powerful the position, the more likely it is that a male will hold that position. The term patriarchy is also used in systems of ranking male leadership in certain hierarchical churches or religious bodies (see patriarch and Patriarchate). Examples include the Greek Orthodox and Russian Orthodox churches. Finally, the term patriarchy is used pejoratively to describe a seemingly immobile and sclerotic political order.
The term "patriarchy' is distinct from patrilineality and patrilocality. "Patrilineal" defines societies where the derivation of inheritance (financial or otherwise) originates from the father's line; a society with matrilineal traits such as Judaism, for example, provides that in order to be considered a Jew, a person must be born of a Jewish mother. However, Judaism is still considered a patriarchal society. "Patrilocal" defines a locus of control coming from the father's geographic/cultural community. In a matrilineal/matrilocal society, a woman will live with her mother and her sisters and brothers, even after marriage. She doesn't leave her maternal home. Her brothers act as 'social fathers' and will hold a higher influence on the women's offspring to the detriment of the children's biological father. Most societies are predominantly patrilineal and patrilocal, but this is not a universal (see: matriarchy).

In gender studies
In gender studies, the word patriarchy often refers to a social organization marked by the supremacy of a male figure, group of male figures, or men in general. It is depicted as subordinating women, children, and those whose genders or bodies defy traditional man/woman categorization.

Feminist view
The neutrality of this section is disputed.Please see the discussion on the talk page.
Many feminist writers consider patriarchy to be the basis on which most modern societies have been formed. They argue that it is necessary and desirable to get away from this model to achieve gender equality.
Feminist writer Marilyn French, in her polemic Beyond Power, defines patriarchy as a system that values power over life, control over pleasure, and dominance over happiness. She argues that:
It is therefore extremely ironic that patriarchy has upheld power as a good that is permanent and dependable, opposing it to the fluid, transitory goods of matricentry. Power has been exalted as the bulwark against pain, against the ephemerality of pleasure, but it is no bulwark, and is as ephemeral as any other part of life...Yet so strong is the mythology of power that we continue to believe, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, that it is substantial, that if we possessed enough of it we could be happy, that if some "great man" possessed enough of it, he could make the world come right. According to French:
It is not enough either to devise a morality that will allow the human race simply to survive. Survival is an evil when it entails existing in a state of wretchedness. Intrinsic to survival and continuation is felicity, pleasure [...] But pleasure does not exclude serious pursuits or intentions, indeed, it is found in them, and it is the only real reason for staying alive" —Beyond Power: On Women, Men and Morals The latter philosophy is what French offers as a replacement to the current structure where, she says, power has the highest value.

Non-feminist View
Gender-issues writer Cathy Young, by contrast, dismisses reference to "patriarchy" as a semantic device intended to shield the speaker from accountability when making misandrist slurs, since "patriarchy" means all of Western society.[1] She cites Andrea Dworkin's criticism, "Under patriarchy, every woman's son is her potential betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman."

Pro-feminism and patriarchy
The neutrality of this section is disputed.Please see the discussion on the talk page.
Pro-feminism refers to a school of thought developed by men that supports the feminist analysis of patriarchy as a system that privileges men over women, and also men over other men. A pro-feminist analysis of patriarchy asserts that gender interacts with factors such as ethnicity, power and social class. Patriarchy is seen as a hegemonic gender order imposed through individual, collective and institutional behaviours.

In psychology
Psychology researchers have used the SDO and RWA measures to predict patriarchal attitudes.
Terrence Real, best-selling author of I Don't Want to Talk about it: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression, believes there are two types of patriarchy: 1. Political patriarchy (the sexist oppression of women by men, the target of most feminist writers) 2. Psychological patriarchy ("the dynamic between those qualities deemed masculine and feminine... a dance of contempt, a perverse form of connection that replaces true intimacy with complex covert layers of dominance and submission, collusion and manipulation... it is the unacknowledged paradigm of relationship that has suffused western civilization generation after generation, deforming both sexes and the passionate bond between them.")

See also
Look up Patriarchy inWiktionary, the free dictionary.
Anthropology
Antifeminism
Biblical Patriarchy
Chinese patriarchy
Classical definition of effeminacy
Father
Heteropatriarchy
Matriarchs (Bible)
Matriarchy
Men's movement
Misandry
Paideia
Patriarch
Patriarch magazines
Patriarchs (Bible)
Paternalism
Traditional authority

External links
Cattle ownership makes it a man's world New Scientist (1. October 2003): Early matrilineal societies became patrilineal when they started herding cattle, a new study demonstrates
Debate Between Mark Ridley and Stephen Goldberg on the Inevitability of Patriarchy
The Return of Patriarchy by By Phillip Longman

Literature
Pierre Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, Polity Press 2001
Robert Brown, Human Universals. Philadelphia: Temple University Press 1991
Margaret Mead, . (1950). Male and Female, Penguin, London.
Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour, Palgrave MacMillan 1999
Forms and Styles of Leadership: see also Form of government
Anarchy Democracy Geniocracy Gerontocracy Meritocracy Matriarchy Ochlocracy Panarchism Patriarchy Plutocracy Theocracy Technocracy
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriarchy"
Categories: NPOV disputes Forms of government Cultural anthropology Feminism Sociology Men