Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
It's interesting to note that patriarchy is usually conceived of all wrong by westerners for whom patriarchy was not even in living memory when their grandparents were born- it's patriarchy, not andrarchy. Rule by the fathers, who often harshly suppress younger men as much as women. Patriarchal societies are of necessity clannish because ruling over adult sons is the sine qua non. These societies have age gated authority rather than gender gated; yes, men rule over women at the same level, but that's as close to a universal rule as even exists. Intensely clannish societies give older women quite a bit of power and influence because they do the social work to maintain this intense clannishness; the networks of controlling arranged marriages and intense reciprocity structures which maintain the clan as a social unit are done by women even if men theoretically have the final say.
I remember speaking to a woman who fled a particularly strict family in Saudi Arabia in adulthood- she was married off at fifteen but her husband wasn't permitted to see or speak to her beforehand. Instead his mother picked which of the sisters in her family he was to marry. She doesn't know how 'this guy marries a woman from family X' was arrived at. This example is a bit trite, but it illustrates key facts about ultra-patriarchal social structures- unmarried men are tightly policed to bind them into the clan structure, no less than women(albeit in different ways), and authority is exercised by elders over the young. Our resident Indians can probably confirm that their arranged marriages are made by women as well.
This is, despite the name, not a particularly male-oriented macho man environment like, say, VDV barracks or a frat. In fact intensely patriarchal societies mostly lack these kinds of institutions because they separate young men from the controlling power of clan elders.
A deep, yet topical pull.
I appreciate the important addition of age as more than an additional variable, but a whole new (and indispensable) axis in the very rough model my first post attempted to sketch out.
It leads, I think, to some uncomfortable confrontations with reality in today's world. We just had an election where the sitting president knocked himself out of it by being himself at the first debate. One of the internet's most famous Guys Who Says Stuff asserts "many of the problems of Western society are caused by ... privileging the old over the young.".
The classic RETVRN concept of a patriarchy fails to reconcile the fact that, for most of human society, men reached their wise and philosophic years starting at 40 or so. Then, they were expected to move their talents to the afterlife in their 60s - and this for the luckiest!
Most of us reading this forum will probably live to see extreme scale issues of care for elderly folks in their 80s and 90s with tragic yet real cognitive decline. Obviously, we should not be deferring to their collective "wisdom" in any domain.
I don't have good answers. As much as I have emotional sympathies and inclinations towards a kind of traditionalist social redoubt, the world only moves forward and you have to live in it (but not of it) the way it is.
In practice, the Saudi royal family(which runs on this kind of patriarchy) does a better job of avoiding 'all power to the senile' than the US gerontocracy. I'll wager it'll do a better job than the British monarchy does, as well. We really don't know much about the influence of aged, high status female Sauds(and Saudi Arabia is a personal possession of the Saud clan), but it's a good bet that it exists, given how clan dynamics work. The Saud clan also has super-opaque internal dynamics we only get glimpses of when people are purged, exiled, or murdered, which seems more like a female dynamic to western sensibilities.
I'd point to the privileging of the old over the young which afflicts the west- as in the specific gerontocratic model we see in the anglosphere- as the sort of explicit thing that can only happen when patriarchy is broken; the patriarchal answer to social security is for children to have legal obligations to take care of their aged parents, China had this sort of patriarchal society before Mao and is experiencing issues of relations between the generations running on dynamics which seem inscrutable to westerners. A patriarchal society prefers to keep major social functions within the clan so they can remain under the control of elders rather than the state. This of course means that when natural faculties start to fade the next generation(still quite old, of course) rises in influence because there's no one to stop them.
De Maistre wrote about this- 'the counter revolution is not the revolution opposite, but the opposite of the revolution'. In the modern west we see some parallel society movement among social conservatives who nevertheless participate in society- think the Knights of Columbus benefits for their members, or the LDS... everything, or generically Christian health sharing initiatives, or the homeschooling movement. These things are exactly what he's talking about; the establishment of folkways/institutions which accomplish the things needed by a healthy society in a time of chaos is the traditionalist social redoubt, in a form which grows because it is healthy, crowding out the dysfunctional revolutionary folkways until it reaches a position of dominance at which it can calcify into tradition. And the decline in Christianity has halted, per the latest pew poll. Parallel institutions steadily grow. It's the opposite of the revolution, it proceeds agonizingly slowly but steadily, almost unnoticed until the tortoise overtakes the hare's fits and starts and from the perspective of the normie becomes just the way it is.
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