Gender Wars & Organisation

“a society is a conglomeration of people joined together for certain aims; while you, who write in your own person with your own hand are single. You the individual are a man whom we have reason to respect; a man of the brotherhood, to which, as biography proves, many brothers have belonged. Thus Anne Clough, describing her brother, says: ‘Arthur is my best friend and adviser... Arthur is the comfort and joy of my life; it is for him, and from him, that I am incited to seek after all that is lovely and of good report.’ To which William Wordsworth, speaking of his sister but answering the other as if one nightingale called to another in the forests of the past, replies:

The Blessing of my later years
Was with me when a Boy:
She gave me eyes, she gave me ears;
And humble cares, and delicate fears;
A heart, the fountain of sweet tears;
And love, and thought, and joy.

...Inevitably we look upon societies as conspiracies that sink the private brother, whom many of us have reason to respect, and inflate in his stead a monstrous male, loud of voice, hard of fist, childishly intent upon scoring the floor of the earth with chalk marks, within whose mystic boundaries human beings are penned, rigidly, separately, artificially; where, daubed red and gold, decorated like a savage with feathers he goes through mystic rites and enjoys the dubious pleasures of power and dominion while we, ‘his’ women, are locked in the private house without share in the many societies of which his society is composed.”

– Virginia Woolf, 1938, Three Guineas

Consider a very different set of customs, a matrilocal society without institutionalised (or indelicately bound) marriage, where the male creates a sisterhood (the female, a brotherhood) by way of family connections, it's almost like a gift (and no, except by retrospective chance, protection racket), not only among siblings but nonconsanguines as well: aunts for every child and new prospective interests for each adolescent looking for a date. If here, there is a sense of marriage, it has long been suggested as occurring between groups (thought in terms of "corporate mergers" between organisations) but is more correctly (in our hypothetical case) only a jam between or unlocked door able to swing both ways. Another excuse for a community celebration – the exposure to novelty, piqued interest, peak experience, potential crew-mates of all persuasions, and all with letters of introduction.

encounter group, n.
a group of people who meet, encouraging personal growth, self-awareness, and social skills by means of emotional expression and interaction. (see 'crew')

– the dictionary

We're not just speaking of the Hibi Jibi's or those who weren't exposed to civil dictionaries. The Russian spaceship, Mir (from miru: 'peace' or 'Mary' (or see maru, 'far eastern ship that sails the sea'); lit., 'a peasant commune', on a par with urban soviets before the bullshiviccars came), may have been named for such groups , the entendre being a home away from home, but still in orbit and whose residents can come and go. When the raskolniki ('those who split': ie., 'old believer' heretics) made their final break with the Russian church starting in the mid-17th century, a progressive divorce was finalized by the time of the peasant rebellions at the turn of the 20th, the first sacrament to be abandoned was marriage, a theo-secular law the world over to the extent it is now considered a "fact" of nature, no more a topic for interrogation. I've always thought the peasant the real brains behind the species. Criminalized and tortured for two and a half centuries (only to become more and more an outsider society), the tsar in 1905 legalised the movement just to keep from being totally enflamed by the out-of-control peasant rebellions. The nihilists from town were bad enough, and everyone was getting twitchy. And then they joined the war out west like changing channels to see what's playing on Emp-tv, but that's another story. It's always been repeated so we can come back to it later.

From the boy-child's perspective, if the "father" moves with the mother's group, the social (socializing) father, which is to say the one with first hand experience with this rather than that set of salient experiences, the "encounter-group", may be the mother's brother, who may be moving with yet another group. The biological father is free to split without concern for the child's non-material "welfare", as that is already taken care of (of course, material concerns are taken care of by the entire community – it may in fact be difficult to distinguish the two). Besides, he's likely someone else's uncle or a brother. The constitution (membership) of the group itself would be seen as continually shifting – the "home" group is a psycho-geographical hub or reference, even a place-holder, not necessarily a central office, base of deployment or box to plant your booty. The correlation of growing up human with achieving property status (as nothing but a piece of it) is possible, but only as a macabre nightmare.

One's sense of direction in adult life is very often based on the topographic orientations witnessed in childhood, persisting like a metaphoric universal translator, useful almost anywhere but within the metropolis (those born to it – the Metropolians – have an obvious advantage, but that is one of those sorts of "truth" most often answered "Duh!", only obscurely related to the Russian "Dah"). The group is "in name only" plus one, and that "one" is the territory (not a nation, but still the country: it does not imply property). Territorialised, we call it a band or even tribe – or dialect tribe, to be more precise – those on speaking terms – a territory may be utilised by more than one band, not to mention species. Nominalised, we call it a clan, where the criterion of membership is defined by consanguine or other connection to a mythical progenitor (which may or may not be "human", nor represent a single person). And not to intentionally complicate matters, a tribe or band may be composed of many clans.

Matriliny only suggests the maternal is the salient line along which relations are rendered (they went both ways in Russia^[1]). In this sense only (and not in the genetic) we are speaking of material relations and their development is generative, not productive (except from a certain point of view). In either case, there are neither orphans nor wall flowers and once the blossom appears, seeds are not constrained from breaking umbilical chords (assuming there has been sufficient experimentation to ensure competency) to spread more than just rumors. Remembering stories, one can snap back like a bent branch on a forest path hitting you in the face without a moment's notice or hesitation.

Patriarchy takes the nominalised title itself and redefines gender roles. Biological male (and everything in that direction) becomes a social category with form-fitting expectations which, in importance, supersedes biological condition. There can in fact be a matriarch, as long as she is "manly" (fits social expectations in the "male" gender category) or delegates subject-males to be and do so. Imperial China institutionalised the position in the dowager, although in symbol only. In lieu of a "strong" male emperor, China was an oligarchy. Even then, any monarchy must consider the bureaucrats else reign in fear of assassination. Dynastic change (when antagonism is at its highest or a priori agreed upon as "term limits", naturalised by accompanying cyclic astrologic (for example) events) becomes incorporated as just another part of the job description to preserve monarchy itself: the expectation of civil war and revolution are all part of the script.

The imperial body guard was never concerned with protecting a monarch or oligarchy from the people as disgruntled "subjects" but from each other as "competitors", hence, there are always at least two sets of (legal) books. There is no sense of exception or hypocrisy as the two civil bodies (aristocracy and populace) are considered unrelated. Patriarchy is the good old boys club, and whose enemy is everyone else, especially useful girls and unuseful (that is, "all") children outside pragmatic means to carry on his fame. It is built into every avant guard group except those that oppose the patriarchy itself (the status quo). Even so again, having only one model to mimic or even critically modify, the counter group often retains the same structural relationships. Only from this point can a "true" matriarchy emerge, and the show's spectators will hardly notice a difference. Outside of specific battles on specific fields of combat, there has never been a sustained war of the sexes. Gender war is the conflict of categorised social expectations, concerned only with the role and it's performance. Again, unfortunately, the manly critics draw blood as both punishment and recompense.

"it seems both wrong for us rationally and impossible for us emotionally to fill up your form and join your society. For by so doing we should merge our identity in yours; follow and repeat and score still deeper the old worn ruts in which society, like a gramophone whose needle has stuck, is grinding out with intolerable unanimity... We should not give effect to a view which our own experience of ‘society’ should have helped us to envisage. Thus, ...we believe that we can help you most effectively by refusing to join your society; by working for our common ends — justice and equality and liberty for all men and women — outside your society, not within.

...In the first place, this new society, you will be relieved to learn, would have no honorary treasurer, for it would need no funds. It would have no office, no committee, no secretary; it would call no meetings; it would hold no conferences. If name it must have, it could be called the Outsiders Society. That is not a resonant name, but it has the advantage that it squares with facts — the facts of history, of law, of biography; even, it may be, with the still hidden facts of our still unknown psychology." ( – ibid)