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Notes -
Samuel Johnson provides a pithy (as you’d expect from him) expression of this, even in a time far more patriarchical than our own:
Additionally, going back even further, into the medieval era, there is the famous story of Aristotle and Phyllis, intended to show that no matter how noble one’s standing or intelligent one’s philosophy, he can still be brought to his knees by a woman.
(And of course, even further back than that, in the Iliad, we see Helen’s face launching a thousand ships.)
Stories like this are useful, because they dispel the pop-feminist myth that men under patriarchy oppressed women simply because they wanted to maximize their own benefits and minimize those of women. Rather, if anything, it was often viewed as lessening the power differential between men and women, a sort of affirmative action, if you will. Of course, the extent to which these stories were merely post-hoc rationalizations for pre-existing social structures can be debated. But they do serve as acknowledgement of what everyone intuitively knows: that women possess immense social power, just as men possess immense physical power. Moreover, they demonstrate that participants in patriarchy were conscious of this.
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