i visited turkey after some time. at the airport, i saw several touristic ads about çatalhöyük. saini also writes about this place in the book. also about the ancient greece, soviets, and contemporary iran together with many other times and places.
“Division is part of what gives patriarchy its power. The damage wrought by gendered oppression isn’t just economic or physical; it’s emotional and psychological. The effect of alienating daughters from parents, emotionally distancing wives from husbands, and demonizing those who don’t conform to narrow gender norms has been to foster fear and hatred of the very people in whom we might otherwise find comfort. We know that it’s possible to love and trust other human beings—our survival as a social species has depended on it—but one effect of this form of divide and rule has been to make us believe that we can’t.
It subverts our closest relationships.
Patriarchal power is, in one sense, no different from any other system of control. What sets it apart is that it operates even at the level of the family. Its Machiavellian force lies in the fact that it can turn the people nearest to us into the enemy. The evolution of this strategy can be traced through the practices of patriliny and patrilocality, which separated women from their childhood kin, and in the dehumanizing brutality of captive taking. We can draw threads between that history of detachment and control all the way to some of our more recent laws and beliefs. But we can’t assume that this has been the same all over the world. None of it was automatic. In some regions, patriarchal systems are thousands of years old. In others, they’ve become established only in the last few centuries.
Patriarchy as a single phenomenon doesn’t really exist, then. There are instead, more accurately, many patriarchies formed by threads subtly woven through different cultures in their own way, working with local power structures and existing systems of inequality. States institutionalized human categorization and gendered laws; slavery influenced patrilocal marriage; empires exported gendered oppression to nearly every corner of the globe; capitalism exacerbated gender disparities; and religions and traditions are still being manipulated to give psychological force to the notion of male domination. Fresh threads are being woven into our social fabrics even now. If we are ever going to build a truly fair world, everything will need to be unpicked.
Faced with a task this monumental, the fight for our equality can feel like a war of attrition. I myself have spoken at law firms and banks to women who want to know how they can move up the corporate ladder in sexist work environments, all the while oblivious to those cleaning up their offices after them for subsistence wages.
We’re yet to invent political systems that nurture the needs of the individual over the demands of the state, that cushion every one of us from the blows of this world. Even when all our laws are as fair as we can make them, when we’ve moved beyond our gender stereotypes to accept all people as they are, after our languages and cultures reflect values of equality, this doesn’t mean there won’t still be those out there trying to assert power over others in some new way.
As interminable as this struggle might seem, though, there’s a beauty to be found in it nonetheless. When we fight for equality, we don’t just fight for ourselves. We fight for others. And much of the time, that fight does get us somewhere. Without it, our lives could be so much worse. As a science writer who spends most of her time thinking about human nature, I find this to be the most extraordinary part of us. While researching this book, I’ve met and read the work of people who have laid down their lives and careers for the idea of human dignity and freedom. As much as we can’t bear to be treated unfairly, most of us can’t bear for others to be treated unfairly either—including strangers we’ve never met. We share in their pain. We want to help.”