... because there is misogyny and there are misogynists. ah well. Sorry about that.

Indeed, since it's now vacation time and all exams have been graded, my daughter is now appreciating the seaside for 3-4 weeks with her grandparents, and my research proposal hasn't been approved so I won't be going to the field, there's not much to do except sit home, cook meals, wash the dishes, and read blogs. I can't even go to conferences because everybody else is going to the field, nobody would plan a conference for July-August. (My wife, who is a philosopher, does get to go to conferences, since philosophers don't do fieldwork. So on some days I even get to be alone at home with nothing to do except read and post.) Of course, this will change in mid-August, when courses start again.

If 'patriarchy' is defined as a power structure, I would ask if it is a law-sactioned one (the law says men have more power) or as a custom-sanctioned one. The latter looks more like social ideology of some kind... The reason I ask is the word 'patriarchy' itself, which looks like some for of government (like monarchy, oligarchy, etc.); and because these forms of government would allow legal oppression of citizens (in the sense of not giving them a say in how the government works), it sounds as if the word 'patriarchy' were overkill. As if it had been chosen to make the idea more hateful. (Note, for instance, that in discussing racial relations one uses words like racism -- the -ism already suggesting some sort of belief system -- rather than, say, 'leucocracy' = government by whites.) It tends to bring to mind a conspiracy image, in which men got together and decided to build a new, revolutionary social structure + belief system just for the purpose of oppressing women. (As if men could ever, as a group, agree to all do anything, no matter how beneficial it would be for them as a group... We're too divided in thousands of factions, cultures, and belief systems to be able to accomplish that.)

My opinion of themes like misogyny and 'patriarchy' (which is a layman's opinion; I've studied anthropology, but not gender studies) is that social structures start developing at some point, for all kinds of reasons (mostly Darwinian: it works better for some reason and gives an advatage to those who adopt it) and then some sort of belief system or ideology is invented to justify the structure as a fait accompli. So, patrilinearity, patrilocality, etc. start because they confer some sort of Darwinian advantage: more efficient food production, better defense system against attacks, better way of taking care of children, more efficient administration of conflicts within the group, whatever. At first it's a minority trait (at this point this minority may even be seen as 'strange' or 'weird' by the others), but since it has some sort of advantage, this minority increases in number, till it becomes a majority. At this point, some sort of 'explanation' becomes popular (it might have been invented before, or at that time) which makes this new trait look natural ('we're patrilineal because men are better than women'), pretty much like myths are invented to explain the regularities of life like birth and death, sunset and sunrise, etc. When the new feature becomes universal, new generations will drink this explanation with their mother's milk and believe in it. A historical example of this kind of pattern would be the spread of Christianity during the Roman Empire, which grew from a small religious group to one of the main factors in Western history.

So I prefer to think in terms of social structures and belief systems (including stereotypes), and I feel the word 'patriarchy' is a misnomer for the actual phenomenon. I wished another word had been created. But I do admit it's already there, and it's in use. And there are plenty of concepts in science and philosophy that got infelicitous names (saying that an electron has 'spin' has always struck me as a very poor vocabulary choice; it suggests a vivid image of an electron spinning, which looks like an explanation for its intrinsic magnetic momentum, but is not the real explanation, and just makes a student's life harder).