But this is what I meant to discuss, dominance relations, the intended continuation from paragraph three in the previous post.
No doubt many of the assumptions are implanted into children at a very young age (even inadvertently passed on) by primary school teachers or parent-graduates. Should the engrams fail to stick, the television (and easy-to-access "mainstream" webcasts) incorporate intellectual theses into entertaining themes (ancient Greeks saw the importance of the process by incorporating and deifying 'bronze-age' personifications of culturally processual categories or patterns – renamed "goddesses" in the guise of Thetis and Themis, patronettes of social organisation). Cinematised graphic novels & comics are still saturated with the ancient good vs. evil dialectic. The narrative must go on.
The institution of state-sanctioned (or religiously 'sacramental') marriage allowed the supersession of female as an adverbial category by nominally "real" male gods concerned with property management. Prior to permanent or regulated ('authorised', meaning 'established by a higher authority') marriage, there never was, it appears, a matriarchy. There may neither have been a goddess outside a poetic, theatrical or iconographic sense. What we call matriarchal families today are very often run by chicks with (metaphoric) dicks. It may be more clear if I used the term "balls" and Marguerite Thatcher, Condoleza Rice and Hillary Clinton come right to mind: manly girls (the behavioural entendre overides the physiological for the metaphor to work). It may just be that in nature, referring to other mammals (and even vertebrates like chickens) and so-called primitives, there were few if any metaphoric balls despite the prevalence of warrior spirit irrespective of gender. We are immediately referred for correction to the "pecking order of chickens", "rutting elk violently competing over property rights to the does", the "alpha gorilla" and human "headman/strongman" as "facts" derived from our own myth-time and proven by academic science.
Well, I've spent 40 years as a nomad-peasant only recently retired to a town-like existence (the only justification for cities and towns is retiring or resorting, in my opinion), and can say I've never personally witnessed any of these outside of colloquial imagination, mainstream media and scientific treatise funded by Rockefeller, the Geographic Society or Disney (sibling corporations who share parentage with the History and Discovery channels and cousinage to the BBC) or religious organizations like the catholic as well as lutheran church.
First off, there is no pecking order of chickens outside of artificial environments or, among free-ranging varieties, raised in conditions mimicking the human, conditions of scarcity and overcrowding replacing the food rationing among the confined. Grounds for the dismissal of that idea of pecking order is easily witnessed when there is no imposed scarcity in the interest of increased profits for chicken farmers, as well as direct observation (outside of manipulated lab conditions) of wild fowl.
Most humans seem to prefer the "authority" of tradition over brute force, at least until custom becomes a shackle, when innovation is actually encouraged. That would be before the application of valium (or today, ativan) and the institution of democratic sacrifice, aka "political correctness" and in scientific, religious and geopolitical circles, the grand unification theory. It's a ring of power. Hegemony. And to think we were worried about the dumbing down connection between matrimony and maternally inherited money or munitions to protect the patriarchal municipality made possible with contained marriage units insuring the preservation of future workers and their bosses close to home!
But what of more easily gendered mammals? Elk and deer in the wild or sheep and goats on the range? First off, rough and tumble play is easily confused with violent display. Like judo, which is more properly a dance than a martial art (but useful should one be attacked by a thuggishly warted hog), players are very often equivalently matched, which is to say, adolescent age-mates. Should the play turn into antagonistic competition and the alpha male is nearby (we label them Alpha because of a perceived ferocity or largeness of appearance, and most often, the animals involved would agree with our assessment) like a Sensei, bull elk or a gorilla 'headman' will put a stop to it (assuming both don't become mutually exhausted), often with a mere "eye", a look that inspires fear in one and all. Such a master at simple gesture has only mastered the reduction of his own effort. Should a victor appear in the "contest" unimpeded by onlooking elders, he will attempt to look for someone more adept to play with rather than pursue the exhausted former opponent. If a sort of thuggish attitude persists, it is soon given the important lesson of humility (even sheep understand the notion of bigger fish in the ocean).
Meanwhile in all this fracas, the animal least assessed by Herbert Spencer or Sir Thomas Huxley as "fit" is off having sex with all the estrus females. I knew a free-ranging goat named Gimpy (he was three legged) who couldn't keep up with any of the boys yet fathered most of several generations of kids and eventually died of ripe old-age. No one fucked with him or they'd have caught hell from grandma. The moral of this story, of course, is that it's hard enough to know our own "real" motives for much of our behaviour to proceed to assume a motivation in others, particularly when the eyes never move from the mirror held to our face. My answer to both the food-pyramid and the food-chain is "Have you forgotten the worms, beetles and necrophilic microbes who crawl in and crawl out once the formaldehyde wears off?" And to the dominating hierarchy, "have you ever considered that the alpha position in every other case but yours might just be a force-field of preventive anti-dominance?"
This seems to me to be another source of empirical data to support the hypothesis (or reject the affirmative null-hypothesis) that civil ideology has it, not just backwards (a mere dialectic assessment) but wrong-side out and twisted like a mobius strip. The safest stand is, of course, to deny final truth altogether and allow suggestion to supersede demand and personal experience (your own or someone who's been there) to supersede dogma, and provisional contingency to supersede the permanent institution, be it marriage or academia.
– see The Painful Truth
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