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Notes -
There is a certain beauty to some definitions of Rectangle. The one I am singling out is
Why? this was the definition listed in my high school Geometry textbook. I remember it because the wording was a little peculiar. But, later I came to enjoy it. This is the kind of subtlety only a math nerd could appreciate.
I began to appreciate it once I learned how feminist theory defined patriarchy. The wording (doubtless there are many) I recall is, "a system of gender roles which is harmful to men and women" or some such. Some might say that this definition smuggles in a claim: that gender roles are harmful. That's not quite correct. You see, a non-harmful system of gender roles would simply not be Patriarchy as a matter of definition.
The reason I wrote this post was because of the earlier discussion that "Rape is about power, not sex." I was reminded of many past times I've heard rape defined this way. You might say that this definition smuggles in a claim: that men are motivated by power (or some such). But that is not quite correct. You see, a man who is motivated by sex is simply not committing rape as a matter of definition.
My textbook used the phrase, "at least one right angle," like Wikipedia uses a right angle. This is critical to leave the reader mentally itching, to leave him thinking that maybe a rectangle contains a mix of angles -- some right, and some not.
Behold! The full force of a theorem (not a definition)! So there is no doubt in the mind that there could ever be a parallelogram with mixed angles. This relation between the angles cannot be expressed with mere definitions.
Much later, I learned a name for this: The virtue of precision. Definitions should be as small as necessary.
What other imprecise definitions smuggle unproven claims?
Isn’t the “imprecision” of that rectangle definition meant to generalize to other geometries? My theory is pretty rusty, but I’d think you could have a space where two sets of parallel lines don’t have symmetrical angles. Maybe one pair right angles, one pair not?
I’m quite confident that it can. Geometry has a lot of mere definitions, and stringing a few of them gets you from any of the other rectangles definitions to the four-angles one. In the case of the single-right-angle version, adding Euclid’s fifth axiom confirms that the opposite angles must be identical, and either the 360° definition of a quadrilateral or the rules of supplementary angles should give us the final proof.
This is really important because theoretical math is all about reducing definitions.
What do you mean by "a space"? I'm in an ambivalent state where I can't tell if you're missing an obvious point, or talking theory at a level I'm entirely missing. Leaning towards the latter.
A space in the mathematical sense: a set of locations plus some rules which describe their relations. Our vanilla geometry is defined over Euclidean spaces, but by screwing around with one or more of the relation rules, we get other ones. The classic example is swapping out the parallel postulate to get "elliptic" and "hyperbolic" geometries. The former includes geometry on the surface of a sphere, which gives us triangles with two right angles and other shenanigans. I looked to [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_(mathematics)) for a better definition but only left more confused.
This was on my mind from trying to grasp quaternion basics for work. They're 4-dimensional, which I'm pretty sure is still handled by a Euclidean space, but also have some nice properties regarding spatial rotations.
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In a space that has more than two dimensions, skew lines never meet but also are not parallel.
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Actually you might be right the "at least" is basically there to apply to hyperbolic space or something like that. Of course, high schooler me had no idea about that stuff.
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The "small" definition isn't that it's a parallelogram with one right angle. For instance, the definition "a polygon with five or fewer sides, parallel sides, and one right angle" seems to be smaller in the sense of having fewer explicit constraints (but of course if it defines the same thing it always has the exact same implicit constraints).
Actually, I am not convinced that "smaller description" is a well defined term at all, unless you're just counting words.
There’s always Kolmogorov complexity. I don’t think it’s terribly helpful for deciding between geometric options—most of the program is going to be the geometric axioms, and then a little will handle drawing lines under those axioms.
Kolomogorov complexity varies with your programming language. If your programming language is "English", the phrase for "rectangle" with the smallest Kolmogorov complexity is "rectangle". If you're not allowed to use the word, the phrase would be something like "equiangular quadrilateral".
If we avoid geometry, consider that the "small" definition for a unicorn is arguably "member of the empty set". I don't need to mention that it has one horn, for the same reason that your definition of "rectangle" doesn't need to mention the other three angles--in fact, I don't need to mention any traits at all.
Of course, you get into the issues in Naming and Necessity, where just because two definitions point to the same set of things doesn't make them interchangeable. "He learned that the morning star is the evening star" is not equivalent to "he learned that the morning star is the morning star", even though the morning star is the same object as the evening. (And no, I'm not namedropping a famous book to look clever; it's one of the few philosophy books I've actually read.)
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This is not very representative of the feminist definition, at least of the academic kind which forms the basis of patriarchy theory. I'm sure you can find a street feminist to offer such a definition though.
The most robust concise definition of patriarchy I've seen offered by a feminist, which I believe essentialises the concept for feminism as a whole quite well is the one offered by Sylvia Walby in Theorising Patriarchy (1989): "a series of social structures, and practices in which men dominate, oppress and exploit women." This really does encapsulate what feminism, all feminism, means by patriarchy at least at a basic level. Often bits and pieces are tacked onto it later, often to band-aid or cover-up over issues with their theory (e.g. "patriarchy hurts men too"). Walby's work on patriarchy is pretty foundational to feminist academia today, even though in some sense she was just formalising a lot of threads that existed previously.
The radical feminists make no distinction. They see the male sexuality as inherently linked to violence and oppression against women, and therefore basically all sex between a man and a woman is men raping women. Catharine McKinnon's Sexuality, Pornography, and Method: "Pleasure under Patriarchy" (1989):
The later, more contemporary intersectional feminists tempered or moderate this perspective, but ultimately they are cut from the same cloth and you can see the same principles underlying it, even if they're supposedly 'sex-positive' (that is, male sexuality, or male sexuality under patriarchy is linked to the need to dominate, and therefore oppress women). For example, bell hooks' Feminism is for Everybody (2000, but still extremely popular in contemporary feminist circles):
The impression I have gotten is that sex-negative feminism won the ideological battle, but sex-positive feminism won the branding battle. "Sex-negative" probably sounds too much like "anti-fun" to make headway with the public, so I suppose that all but the very most extreme can consider themselves (more) sex-positive (than somebody.)
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I think you are misremembering. According to the Women's UN Report Network, "Patriarchal (adj.) describes a general structure in which men have power over women. Society (n.) is the entirety of relations of a community. A patriarchal society consists of a male-dominated power structure throughout organized society and in individual relationships." Similarly, Geek Feminism Wiki says, "Patriarchy is a term used in feminism to describe the system of gender-based hierarchy in society which assigns most power to men, and assigns higher value to men, maleness, and 'masculine traits'."
Hence, feminism does not include harm as part of the definition. It defines patriarchy as a particular system of social relations, but describes it as harmful to men and women.
This is a trick.
You can similarly say that Marx merely describes capitalism as a particular organization of relationships of labor and capital and then describes it as harmful.
But then it says nothing of how he has contructed this descriptive worldview, not in isolation, but to serve a preordained normative framework. Hence the peculiar specifics around the value of labor that don't make sense in isolation to a reasonable observer, but necessarily imply the moral judgements down the line. This is what OP describes as smuggling. And it is fallacious.
I don't want to single out Marxism and Feminism (which is directly inspired by Marxism in this particular way) as all ideologies do this to some degree. But the idea that there is any non normative full theory of society and the humanities is one of the most annoying and persistent lies there is.
It is not impossible to extract descriptive theories in the humanities, but feminism is not one of those endeavors and never has been.
But capitalism IS a particular organization of relationships of labor and capital. Marx did not invent the concept of capitalism; his contribution, for better or worse, was a particular critique of capitalism, as well as claims re its historical relationship to other forms of economic organization.
Similarly, feminism did not create the concept of patriarchal societies. There are plenty of societies which "assign[] most power to men, and assign[] higher value to men, maleness, and 'masculine traits'." And it is transparently obvious that norms about what roles in society are proper for men and women have changed in the US over the decades -- how many female doctors and male nurses were there in the US in 1950 -- so that one does not have to be a feminist to believe that the US was more patriarchal in 1950 than today. So, clearly, the concept of patriarchy is not unique to feminism.
I always feel like an broken record saying this, but this entirely depends on what one means by 'patriarchy'. It's a word that's been used, misused and abused to death. Based on what else you said, I understand what you said to mean that 'patriarchy' as the feminists describe has always existed, feminists merely created the descriptive theory (that is, merely described what already existed). Although this is undercut by 'the concept of patriarchy is not unique to feminism', which is true in the strict sense, but the feminist theory of patriarchy, which is what you are describing, is unique to feminism.
The term 'patriarchy' to describe social structures was first used by Max Weber in his posthumously published The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (1947), in which he provides an extremely narrow definition of patriarchy, basically describing a system of household organisation and inheritance - almost a synonym for 'patrilineal'. This was purely descriptive, and contains none of the connotations and normative judgements implicit in the feminist definition. The term 'patriarchy' specifically was introduced into the feminist lexicon by Kate Millet in Sexual Politics in 1970, though the general idea if not in name existed in feminism before then.
I disagree with you when you say "feminism did not create the concept of patriarchal societies", because the feminist conception of patriarchy does not and did not exist, and is purely a product of feminist historical revisionism (that is, a myth) constructed to support their political project. To be specific, I am referring to the feminist understanding of the relationship of the sexes as being one of where men oppress women. In other words, that "the history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpation on the part of man toward woman." I have written extensively about this in the past on the old subreddit and elsewhere, but just to highlight two really quite prominent examples of this myth-making:
We have known for quite a long time that there is gender parity in domestic violence (and rape too for that matter) but this has been suppressed in large part by feminist activism and feminist theory. Many historical claims about domestic violence similarly turn out to myths, for example the oft repeated claim that men used to be able to beat their wives with impunity is a myth, and appears to originate William Blackstone's 18th Century Commentaries on the Laws of England in which he claims (via a unspecified colleague as a source) that men used to be able to do just that - before adding that this had changed under the enlightened reign of Charles II, obviously having a political motivation to describe the pre-Restoration era (and thus Cromwell's rule) as savage and barbarous compared to the present. Decrying how your outgroup treats women poorly to make them look bad and yourself good is a tactic as old as time.
The issue of women's suffrage is far more complicated than as present by feminists or 'common knowledge' generally. It was never an issue of men against women, or men oppressing women. In fact, for much of the history of the suffragette movement, men were actually more progressive on the issue than women themselves were, and the anti-suffragette movement was led by women and was far more popular than the suffragette movement until well into the 20th century. The early suffragettes hilariously often stated that they didn't want women to vote on the issue of their own suffrage for this very reason. The anti-suffragettes had some interesting arguments, and far stronger than the strawmen arguments they are often presented as having. To summarise their arguments extremely briefly (the link provides more detail), they saw their role (as women) in society as unique, distinct and different to that of men, but their role was no less important, influential or yes, powerful as that of men.
The issue of women's suffrage in some sense encapsulates the issue with historical judgements about the relationship between men and women history. The playbook is something like: identify something that we highly value in our present society and ideology (the right to vote), compare the historical society to our present society in this regard (women didn't have the right to vote), then condemn the historical society for failing to live up to our modern morals and sensibilities (women couldn't vote because men were oppressing women - evil). There is very little attempt to address the past on its own terms, that there might be practical and understandable, if not good, reasons for the way the things operated in the past. This is particularly true of the sexes. Women have never been oppressed en masse as described in feminist patriarchy theory. Men and women simply valued different things in the past and had different roles - maleness was highly valued in male roles, and femaleness was highly valued in female roles, one was not necessarily better than the other. The history of the sexes has always been primarily one of cooperation and yes, affection. This obviously comes with the caveat that yes, you can find specific instances of where both women and men have suffered injustices, but this not part of a universal and timeless 'patriarchy'.
Well, again, I see that as descriptive, rather than definitional. The basic argument of feminism is that the cultures and structures which have been traditionally been seen as normal are actually oppressive.
But, again, these are normative arguments, not definitional. You and feminists seem to agree on what gender norms and structures existed in the past, but you disagree re whether they were oppressive
The feminist definition of patriarchy includes oppression as a core part of it. Patriarchy isn't just 'more men in political office', it's a society of, for and by men that oppresses women (for the record, the feminist view is that 'more men in political office' necessarily results in the oppression of women).
I disagree with the feminists quite a lot with what gender norms and structures exist in the past. The feminist says that the female role was one of submission that had no power. I say no, the female role actually did have wield significant power and influence, and their own form of status.
Again, I believe that the claim is that patriarchal structures are inherently oppressive, not that oppression is part of the definition. That was the core contribution of feminism: "Hey, you know this structure you social scientists have been talking about forever. Here is something you have not realized before: It is terribly flawed."
As I said in another thread, the most robust concise definition I've seen is from Sylvia Walby in Theorising Patriarchy (1989): "a series of social structures, and practices in which men dominate, oppress and exploit women."
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It is not. Not unless you're a Marxian. I would argue capitalism has more to do with fractional reserve banking than it does labor.
Marx's particular conceptualization of capitalism is pretty explicitly novel and cooked for his normative bias.
Nobody would dispute that the Dutch invented a novel and influential organization in the joint stock corporation that would define the organization of society during the industrial revolution, but that's not what Marx says capitalism is.
He says it's a mode of production based on private ownership of the means of production and the exploitation of the labor force. That's the definition. And that places a certain value to labor and already casts the roles in our moral play. If you accept this definition it's impossible to not end up with the capitalists as evil or at least in need of elimination.
Similarly, patriarchy is not this wishy washy idea that masculinity is valued more of that men hold most of the power. No, what you find in the scholarship is a system of social structures and practices, in which men govern, oppress and exploit women. And exploit and oppress are the operating words here.
I suppose you could rescue patriarchy as a concept by using the anthropological definition. But that's like using Mises' definition of capitalism. It's not what we're talking about here.
There's already been talk further up in the thread about all the things that feminists are misguided about regarding the traditional societies they would call patriarchal. On that topic I would say that I too happen to disagree with the idea that masculinity was "valued more" in the past, rather masculinity and femininity were both respected in their own distinct way, and men and women had their own corresponding and complementary forms of power and influence.
However, another very big part of the reason why feminists can come to the conclusion that societies were "oppressive" towards women is because of some very extreme selectivity on their part. They hyper-focus on any perceived male privileges and ignore the very real female privileges and male responsibilities that existed, obscuring the tradeoffs inherent in traditional gender roles. In the societies that feminists claim fit their ideas of "patriarchy", there's plenty of commonly found social norms and structures that contradict the "gendered oppression of women" hypothesis, but are conveniently left out from the definition of patriarchy.
These elements of traditional societies that feminists ignore (e.g. their protectiveness towards women and tendency to assign men responsibility for ensuring female wellbeing) are massively important parts of their social organisation, and I strongly suspect that the exclusion of these inconvenient elements from their definition of "patriarchy" is deliberately done so that the definition fits the preordained framework that feminists already have in mind. When confronted about it, they might occasionally acknowledge the existence of these female privileges and male responsibilities, but then will subsequently attempt to rationalise it away with baroque, unintuitive and unfalsifiable "benevolent sexism"-type word games which paint attitudes and norms that favour women as merely being side effects of patriarchy so as to maintain the idea that the foundational elements of patriarchy are that of male power and privilege. Again, their ideology and beliefs inform their definitions.
As you have already noted, the feminist definition of patriarchy isn't separable from their moral judgements surrounding it - all these moral judgements are baked straight into the DNA of feminist theory. Oppression of women is fundamental to the feminist conceptualisation of gender relations, and all of their definitions and theory bend to accommodate this idea as much as possible through misconceptions, half-truths and some very skewed and selective framing.
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Please don't treat feminist definitions with the same seriousness as math theorems.
A rectangle is a parallelogram containing a right angle, because if it has one, it has four. This isn't a made up arbitrary distinction. You could spend the rest of your life trying to come up with a parallelogram with only a single right angle, and you couldn't.
Claims like "rape is about power" are easily disprovable. I mean, sometimes, sure. But not always, with abundant examples. You don't get to take a thing that has existed more or less since before our ancestors were sapient and notions of consent even existed, and redefine it. Then use clever word games to say "Well if it's nonconsensual sex and it's not about power, then it's not rape". Like you've discovered some immutable truth in the same vein as a parallelogram with one right angle must have four right angles.
Feminist definitions are just clever word games and political slogans. They carry little to no truth value what so ever, neither predictive or descriptive. Unlike your definition of a parallelogram.
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In addition, this is also not how feminist theory truly defines patriarchy. Feminists will use "patriarchy" in their writings and also often in discussions to refer to a system built by men to privilege men and oppress women (and they will very gratuitously throw around that term to describe societies past and present). However, when people call them out on these statements as being inaccurate many feminists will run to the motte and firmly assert that "patriarchy" only means that men predominate in positions of political power, or that there are gender roles that harm both sexes, or some other relatively innocuous claim that they’ll portray as being devoid of any extra implications. When their interlocutor can't rebut them due to the motte definition of "patriarchy" which they have claimed is the feminist definition they can claim victory, and when the inconvenient interlocutor leaves they can return to the bailey and continue using the word to strongly imply that the system is inherently based on male oppression of women.
Given that I see this behaviour all the time, I can't help but regard this definition of "patriarchy" as being a cute little Planck length-sized motte perched in front of a monstrous bailey the size of North America.
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Guy Steele's "Growing a Language" is similar: https://youtube.com/embed/_ahvzDzKdB0
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I think the issue with that definition is that it is too weasely. There's too much room to maneuver and keep claiming a patriarchy.
Harmful to which men? Harmful to which women?
Does it matter if a society made rational trade-offs of one kind of harm against some benefit that outweighs the harm?
I think before the Industrial Age, having a division of labor made sense. With all of the developments after the Industrial Age we shrank the scope of the woman's societal role until it was almost nothing (cleaning clothes for a family of five took 20 hours before washing machines!), forcing them to adopt "men's" societal role.
Now there's effectively only one role in the larger society. Stay at home mothers frequently get involved in MLMs, because there's nothing to do for most of the day - laundry takes two hours, watching one kid isn't that stimulating and a person can only take so much TV.
I'm reminded of complaints I've seen from the manosphere talking about the "feminization" of our culture.
I think many people are basically agreed that the life the average person lives in our society is fundamentally unsatisfying. But I don't think "patriarchy" or "feminized culture" get to the core of the issue. We're social animals staring at screens of various sizes throughout the day. We're so prosperous that we don't depend on each other for our individual survival, so it becomes much harder to cultivate deep friendships. We have a service economy that forces a lot of people to do jobs that humans in the ancestral environment we evolved for would have hated too.
Humans weren't built for this, and it has nothing to do with whether our society is benefitting men or women more. Ideally, society would settle on a set of norms that benefit everyone so far as possible, but we're so rich and prosperous that we get whatever we want to satiate our petty impulses and desires and rarely get what we need for a deep and fulfilling life.
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"Rape is about power, not sex" is not an attempt at a definition of rape, it's just a statement about rape.
Yeah, to steelman it: why do men who can have access to sex - they may have girlfriends, they can visit prostitutes, etc. - commit rape? Why do men rape prostitutes, for example, when this is literally buying sex? The explanation must involve that this is not just about sex, or overwhelming lust; we expect people to be able to control overwhelming lust in public, we wouldn't accept it if John in the office got so worked up about an attractive new woman employee that he had an erection and started masturbating in front of everyone. If Billy and Sue are boyfriend and girlfriend, and Billy is horny but Sue is not in the mood, we generally expect Billy will respect that and not keep pushing for sex, especially not get violent and force Sue to have sex against her will. (Sometimes Billy will keep pushing for sex, and Sue will go along just to get him to stop nagging her even if she won't enjoy it, but that's not rape as such).
Rape also doesn't happen with strangers alone, rape happens between intimate partners or family or someone known to the victim.
So rape involves coercion and violence, which involves an exercise of power. It is the rapist saying "I can do this to you, and you can't stop me. I can have this, and your refusal doesn't matter. Because I can force you to do what I want." That ties in with classical definitions of Patriarchy because where men are in a dominant social role and women are expected to be socially submissive, where men have authority over female family members, where women have few to no legal recourse against men, and there is an expectation that men have a right to sexual access to women, then rape - be it by force, by coercion, or sexual activity without the consent of the woman - is also an element of social control, and is linked to the power of men in society. The idea that "you can't rape your wife" was tied to the presumption of permanent consent to sex (by both parties) within marriage, but some men did indeed violently and forcefully have sex with their wives which was not normal consensual marital sex, but could not be prosecuted as rape, though the same act by a stranger would have been.
There have been shifting definitions of rape over the centuries, and shifts in social attitudes. There are many studies on the psychology of rapists. I don't think there is one easy template to apply, and the definition has certainly been broadened to include cases where it is an absurd accusation ("I had sex with him but I didn't enjoy it so it was rape" and so on). But we all recognise that there is indeed an act, and a crime, called "rape" and that it's not just about "oh, Annie was so beautiful I just couldn't help myself, I had to have her". There are animal species where mating and reproduction does involve rape (ducks seem to be the infamous example) but humans are expected to be more able to control themselves.
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