The Woke, social justice warriors, postmodern progressives, call them what you will, spend much of their time mainstreaming stupid memes: intersectionality, institutional racism, toxic masculinity, gender fluid, etc. These memes are mostly pure abstractions whose connection to the world of real people and solid objects is doubtful at best. But that’s the Woke for you: They have a way of embracing dubious ideas, then defending them as if they’re facts. And since they’re not facts, that defense necessarily takes the form of name-calling, shout-downs and plain old bullying—in two words, cancel culture. In the age of social media some prize piece of stupidity can be launched into the world with a mouse click. And before the critics even have a chance to clear their throats, it’s established as a fact and has acquired a large, menacing body of defenders.
The great current example of this phenomenon is gender ideology: a subject well worth examination. But now I want to put another stupid Woke meme under the spotlight of rational analysis: the Patriarchy.
That Western society is irredeemably patriarchal, i.e. organized to the detriment of women for the convenience of men, is an article of faith among the Woke. Let it be stipulated at the outset that when the Patriarchy is invoked, the compound adjective White Male is implied—males of color being members in good standing of the victim class. And the Patriarchy protects its own: That explains why Brett Kavanaugh is sitting on the Supreme Court instead of living in disgraced obscurity. So goes the narrative. But as usual with the dogmas of the Woke, the concept of the Patriarchy crumbles upon close examination.
Take, for example, the question of suicide. You might think that if women languish under the tyranny of the Patriarchy, their suicide rate would be higher than that of men. But no. In 2017 the suicide rate for all American males was more than three times the rate for women. And in that year, almost 70% of all suicides were by white males—the rate for middle-aged white males being particularly high. So suicide appears to be one area where the Patriarchy is providing lousy customer service.
Then there’s the question of accidental and violence-related death. Despite the best efforts of the Patriarchy, men are more likely to die of injuries arising from accidents at work and elsewhere, or from violence. From 1981 to 2007, nearly three million men but slightly over one million women died of injuries. The same is true of illness. Men are significantly more likely than women to die of just about every illness, and to die earlier.
In some ways, indeed, the Patriarchy has been exceptionally considerate of women. Of the nearly 60,000 Americans who were killed in the Vietnam War, 67 were female: eight military members and 59 civilians. Somehow Patriarchy Central never hit upon the idea of drafting women. And come to think of it, I don’t recall that male-bashing fourth-wave radical feminists have ever complained about that discriminatory oversight.
Moving on to the area of education, we see that the Patriarchy is doing a poor job in that area as well. In grade school and high school, girls are doing significantly better than boys and for some years now more women than men have been earning college degrees. The overall college graduation rate is 63% for females but only 57% for males. Once more we’re left to wonder why it is that the supposedly omnipotent Patriarchy is allowing so many of its members to slip through the cracks.
Of course it would be no more true to say that we’re living under the thumb of the Matriarchy. Both men and women have their problems, grapple with various challenges and have legitimate grievances. But the notion that women in America and other Western countries constitute some downtrodden underclass is simply ludicrous. True, examples of real patriarchy do exist, for instance in certain immigrant communities. In his must-read book, Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass, the British writer Theodore Dalrymple describes how the culture imported into the UK by immigrants of Pakistani Muslim origin leads to the mistreatment of young girls who are forced into arranged marriages and, not infrequently, killed by family members if they refuse to comply. Such atrocities have also happened in the US and Amnesty International estimates that each year some 5,000 honor killings are perpetrated around the world. (I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the actual number is much higher.)
It may be argued that these terrible crimes are not unique to certain countries and immigrant groups. After all, young girls are abused and even killed by their American parents and this is true—sadly so—as far as it goes. The difference is that such killings are not culturally sanctioned. In America no one would argue, and the law would never recognize, that a family was justified in taking the life of a daughter who refused to conform to the rules. Relativism may be creeping upon us, but we’re not quite that far gone.
So much for the dreaded Patriarchy, then. It’s true enough that historically, Western society and culture were patriarchal. But the history of that Patriarchy from the eighteenth century to the present day is the chronicle of its decline and fall. By the turn of the century at the latest, it was no more. And the effort to animate its corpse is just one more facet of Wokedom’s perpetual campaign to spoil just about everything.