Interesting. I’ve read Lerner’s book and found it really fascinating but I’ll have to check out Pateman’s next, as I found the former interesting for a historical understanding but not super relevant to more modern forms of society.
Gerda Lerner doesn't say matriarchy came before patriarchy. Her book disproves that. It's Bachofen in the XIXth century who said it (and modern anthropology shows he was wrong), and Engels used the idea to (wrongly) argue private property is the sole reason for the oppression of women. I'm reading Pateman's book at the moment and it seems to me Lerner and her add to one another, rather than being opposed.
Yes, with that quote from Pateman about "matriarchy", I might have inadvertently made it look like the critique of Lerner was something about that. No, you're right, that was definitely not Lerner's thesis. At this stage, I can't quite get on board with the suggestion the two authors are complementary, but I'll go back and read Lerner again, and maybe this time I'll see your good perspective!
No, the differnce to labor as I would define it and the contracting of owning somones body, is that the worker reamins an agent who is contracting to do taks for others as free men, meaning freewillingly choosing the contract for something and able to end it as well as reataining his two inalinable rights at all times. The differnce is the free-will (to enter the contract, to recive something) and the rights retained
The argument that prostitution is a result of the male 'sexual contract' is nonsensical. If it were the case then it wouldn't make sense that a male dominated state would continually outlaw prostitution. Also if men were seeking to "enslave" women thousands of years ago then prostitution wouldn't be the result, because the men wouldn't bother paying for it. Think about it, who on earth bothers paying a group they've enslaved for their services. Also, the notion that modern patriarchy helps enforce a male sex right to women doesn't stand up to scrutiny. A higher percentage of women than men ultimately find mates and produce offspring. This objective fact in itself contradicts the idea that the system is enforcing a sexual right to women, otherwise you'd see those numbers skewed in the opposite direction. Prostitution and porn primarily exist because women in general have always held more sexual bargaining power in the 'sexual marketplace'. If men had the same power to leverage you'd see homeless men on the street corner offering up themselves to be "exploited" by women along side their female counterparts; but you don't see that because they don't even have that sexual power to leverage in the first place. That's just a few of the many errors I see in the theories proposed here.
Actually when something is outlawed its good for business. The Mexican cartels(for ex) are powerful because drugs and prostitution are outlawed not in spite of that outlaw.
@@stephaniemoore8013 sure, people in the black market thrive from it; but are you suggesting that the puritanical leaders in the past outlawed prostitution out of a secret desire for pimps to prosper?? I don't see how your point addresses what I said. A good example would be prohibition: Many prominent suffragists were also campaigners for prohibition, but probation created a black market. Are you suggesting that these 1st wave feminists were championing a cause to increase patriarchal power?
@@swg303nunya7 if prostitution was legal, it would be harder to keep the use of its services secret. No public control means more facility in obtaining sexual services in the shadow of one’s puritan claims, allowing for easier control of women’s capacity to gain from sex work (no laws can be made to protect them like there exists for other professions) and general autonomy, which is what religion seek to do : control reproduction.
@@Retromantique I don't think it necessarily follows that legal prostitution would jeopardize a customer's identity anymore than usual. But that aside; I'd say that patriarchal religion sought reproductive control through the institution of marriage. If anything, the church would see prostitution as a threat to that institution (which I think explains my earlier point about why the most patriarchal societies typically had the harshest penalties against prostitution). Also if prostitution was a result of patriarchy there wouldn't be so many examples of it in more egalitarian pre-abrahamic cultures. I'm certainly not arguing that it's a positive thing (far from it), but just because women have been exploited through prostitution doesn't automatically make it 'patriarchy' by default (nor is it evidence of an 'enforced sex right' for men; per my original comment)
