Beic culture

[Salmoneus]

I'm a bit surprised that Brandrinn chose to leap in to savage me for my chauvinist pig-dog ways when I was agreeing with him - and more surprised that he chose to disprove his point in his own point.

Economics (which is, after all, what we ultimately mean by culture and politics and society and whatnot) is not changed simply by closing our eyes and wishing really hard. Beggars don't suddenly become the most powerful people in society just because society one morning says 'you know what, beggars are the most powerful people, honestly'. They remain impotent because they have no resources and can't aquire what they want - no matter how many encomiums on poverty are written by the well-to-do.

Likewise women. It's not just a coincidence that female-dominated societies don't exist - it's a simple result of economics. If wishing really hard ('challenging the patriarchal woman-raping assumptions of our bourgeois patriarchal capitalist patriarchy') made things change, things would have changed.

You give an example that shows that women can have power and prestige within their family. Of course they can - and they have, in many societies. But that power is power over family members - not power over society.

Why is it more powerful to control an army than to control a womb? It's not just a contingent fact of how we think about it. It's the fact that an army is inherently bound together by a commanding will - the commander of an army controls many men. A matriarch controls only her own family, as other families don't care how many children she has. Armies and trading alliances span and unite in an inextricable web of participants; each mother bears her own children. Childbearing will never lead to political control until mothers have become fully unionised - and as their rule is concentrated in their own family they have fewer means to form such unions, compared to the external and interacting roles of men, which in the main compel cooperation across family lines. Without unions, "women" have no monopoly, as they do not act cohesively. Moreover, in a war between the sexes it is better to have the army than the womb. The army can go and get women from outside the society, or can steal children, and can put mortal compulsion onto difficult women. It only takes one man to kill one woman; it takes every woman in the world to deny that man a child.
[Of course, women can kill as well - but then they're straying away from reproduction to get their power]

Nobody denies that women can be powerful and respected and valued because of their reproductive role - indeed, that's exactly what I said when I was agreeing with you. But that power cannot easily be parleyed into political control - not so easily as can the power of men. Or, more generally, the reproductive market is limited in scope, with each family a different market. The productive market constitutes the public sphere.

Now, if you want to say 'oh, but even if we leave control of the public sphere exactly as it is, the reproductive sphere can still be more important if we just say so [and click our ruby shoes together]', then that's fine, but that's poetry, or perhaps some form of religion, and irrelevent to the actual facts of the world of the lives of people.
[Your false assumption is that importance is some characteristic of the world that we can change by wishing it so. Importance is not anything. Importance is a predicate in the ethical system of the speaker, not a characteristic of the society which he describes, or of componants of it]



Vec: but your point about the sagas just illustrates what I've said. Again and again, a woman influences a man to do her bidding through some form of personal persuasion or compulsion. The same as we see in many real societies. But this sort of personal influence is a different sort of power from political/economic/military power, the power of the public sphere.

Let's put it a different way: reproduction is not fungible; production is fungible. The fungibility of production allows the creation of institutions of exchange. Trade is the ultimate example - if we trade one hour of labour for one bushel of corn, it doesn't matter whose labour or corn it is, so long as the skill is adequate and the corn is unblemished. So we can create 'contracts', 'jobs' and 'wages'. Or in the army - if you are my captain today, I obey you, but if he is my captain tomorrow, I obey him.
Institutions allow a greater degree of organisation of power/money (it's the same thing on the larger scale, money is a symbol of power) relations. Organisation of power amplifies power - because if I'm, for instance, CEO of a bank I have a lot more power over more people than I would do if I was just a guy with a lot of cash. I can influence society more fully by my position in an institution.
But my wife's baby is not interchangeable with some stranger's baby. Reproduction-based exchanges therefore can't develop beyond the particular into the institutional, and so the higher degrees of social influence are not open to those basing their power on reproduction.

Thus, the women of the sagas influence a man to do their bidding; they do not command armies (and if they do it's not because of baby-having). They can of course command armies indirectly, as they have done in history - but that's a matter of negotiation. No amount of wishful thinking can do away with the fact that the commander of the armies has, even if sometimes latent, power in that relation. He possesses a great deal of fungible social capital.

[zompist]

Well, Zompist, you certainly don't have to convince me in order to be happy with your conworld. If you like it the way it is, feel free to ignore anything I might have to say. But if you do want some constructive criticism, some hand-waving about how tedious childrearing is doesn't accomplish that. You should read some Simone Weil to find out why you've been made to think of it as "tedious;" in fact, Marxist Feminism in general would be a wonderful first step to figure out how a matriarchal society would likely differ from ours. Certainly women have always had help raising children. But the idea that a mother would rather focus on production rather than reproduction (I'm using Weil's terminology here) seems like it was imported straight from 21st century America.

I'll call your Weil and raise you a Woolf. Have you read A Room of One's Own? Though it's most directly an explanation of why most great artists have been men, it's also an argument that women's liberation requires economic power.

Whoever controls the armies and controls economic resources will largely control the country. And that determines much of the form of Beic society: for it to work, women can't be spending all their time in child care (however 'valued' they consider it).

I see that Salmoneus has just pointed this out, so I won't repeat. I do think he goes just a bit too far on the ineffectiveness of "wishing it so"-- that is, ideology. I think there's a complicated dance between a society's economics and its ideology; they can certainly get out of sync, but they affect each other. Ideas can be awfully powerful. Medieval Europeans devoted their grandest buildings to an institution that contributed little economically. But I agree with him that actual power roles won't (greatly) change merely by thinking about them differently.

[brandrinn]

I'm a bit surprised that Brandrinn chose to leap in to savage me...

Sal, I love your sense of humor

I agree with your basic argument: economic power is essential for political power. What I question is merely your assumption that useful economic activity can only come from occupations traditionally dominated by men in Western society. To be clearer:

I don't think there's anything wrong with you for believing what you do. I only suggest that you take more time to analyze your assumptions. Let's look more closely together, hand-in-hand, like the best of friends (which we are!).

You say that wishing something so doesn't change anything, or at least it doesn't affect the balance of power. I would say that this is half-true at best. Consider all that our society has accomplished by merely "wishing it so." Sex is, as always, my favorite example. Who controls sex in the dating scene? Probably women, right? Why? A vagina is no more rare than a penis, but our culture has made the decision, wished it so, if you will, to decide that women choose whether or not sex will happen. If All the men got together and said "we're not having sex with any woman unless she begs us," pretty soon all the heterosexual women would be in a pickle. Prestige is another quality that is totally arbitrary, but incredibly important at all levels of society. If every high school senior decided Kansas State was the best university and applied there, Kansas State would overnight become the most sought-after college for employers. Harvard would have no bargaining position whatsoever if each generation of high school seniors didn't fall over themselves trying to get in.

I think sexuality and prestige are two areas where changing ideology can, in fact, change the balance of power very effectively. Even most economic activities not directly related to them are done for the sake of greater prestige, or even greater mating opportunities. Bill Gates will never spend all that money, after all; after a couple million it lost all utility to him except as a perverted sort of "Life Points." The top executives in the business world of our own culture are not doing what they do for the material goods they can buy with their billions (a $20,000 necktie is no softer than a $100 necktie). They work for money because it makes them important and respected, something that ideology can quickly change.

Now because I like you and you're smart, I'll try to see the situation from your point of view. You're saying that the bedrock material needs of society minus reproduction (staple crops, textiles, carpentry, construction, defense, etc) are what matter the most, perhaps the only things that really matter, and that they are immune to ideology. You say (correct me if I'm misrepresenting you) that whoever does these tasks will have a lion's share of the power, and it cannot be any other way, at least not probably. I respectfully call shenanigans on this. History is full of cases where the underclasses did all the meaningful work, while those on top did nothing. Our own upper class is littered with millionaires who receive dividends on other people's labo(u)r. No doubt a conlanger would reject this situation as totally unrealistic. The American South and Ancient Greece delegated many of the activities mentioned above to slaves, leaving the freemen to perform other essential tasks, but also some stupendously worthless things (from an economic point of view) like war, philosophy, and just plain-old telling people what to do.

So those who do the things that need doing are not necessarily the ones with all the power. But the more glaring omission, I think, is that you don't consider female-dominated work to be part of this "core" of essential economic activities. That is the assumption that I wish I could convince you to take a second look at. In any society where women have total control over mating opportunities, this can be translated into tremendous societal/political/economic power. Why isn't that up there with food? I must say, there are plenty of days when I'd go hungry for a mating opportunity. Somehow the "oldest profession in the world" doesn't give women as much power in our society as carpentry gives to carpenters.

This, I believe, is something that could be changed merely by ideology.


Zomp: Surprisingly, I have read snippets of A Room of One's Own, in college, though on a second glance I must admit I missed much of the detail the first time through. I wasn't trying to start a pissing contest of authors before (I know you're very well read), I just honestly felt that Simone Weil is good for challenging the kinds of assumptions I thought you might be making. You've made it clear that you, like the good Sal above, think that women can't have more power than men unless they do exactly what men do. I disagree, but I certainly don't expect you to change your mind so easily. There are good arguments for both positions.

[Salmoneus]

I'm a bit surprised that Brandrinn chose to leap in to savage me...

Sal, I love your sense of humor

I agree with your basic argument: economic power is essential for political power. What I question is merely your assumption that useful economic activity can only come from occupations traditionally dominated by men in Western society.

Not my assumption at all. I have explicitly referred, time and again, to the price of reproduction, and to the possibility that that price might be high. Unless you've got some other criterion for 'useful' in an economic sense other than 'expensive' (but such a criterion would be unjustified insertion of your own ideology). But power is not power if there is no capacity to exercise it - resource capital must be accompanied by human capital and social capital. In particular, an individual has power within a certain theatre, the theatre of those the individual has actual contact with for a start. This theatre cannot encapsulate the whole of society. So, no one person can control society directly (more generally, individuals have no direct influence over society). In order to control society, the individual needs to resort to institutions, which connect the theatres of the various individuals in society. Institutions are like convex lenses - a small number of actors prod the institution at one end, and a large number of indviduals get prodded by the institution at the other end. Without such institutions, the individual can have no influence over society as a whole without going and prodding everybody one by one.

How is this relevent? Because economic roles (by which I mean here types of holders of resources) are of two kinds: fungible and non-fungible. [Yes, obviously in practice the distinction is not binary, but rather a continuum. I don't think this simplification alters my point]. Fungible roles create economic relations that can be institutionalised, because the actors are interchangeable. Non-fungible roles cannot be institutionalised, because the economic relations attached to them cannot be divorced from the individual holding that role. An institution is a structure of relations with the individuals bracketed - that's why it can be applied to many different individuals, because the individual does not matter.
Reproduction is one economic activity that does not lend itself to institutionalisation - because men tend not to just want babies, they want particular babies, and likewise women tend not to be willing to give up their babies. Even if they were, each baby is different. Babies are not a freely-tradeable and interchangeable commodity. Motherhood and fatherhood are not freely-tradeable and interchangeable roles. Reproduction is not necessarily the only such activity. Artistic production may be another example. And of course most activities are not fully fungible. That has been one feature of capitalism - the reduction of increasingly many economic relations to increasingly denuded and depersonalised (ie fungible) status; accordingly, it was this increasing institutionalisation of wage relations (ie the growing realisation that workers were interchangeable, bosses were interchangeable, contracts were interchangeable) that allowed the increase in institutionalisation of Labour in the form of unions - the elimination of 'special relationships' allows direct comparison of conditions and collective consciousness and collective pressure for improvement.

Reproduction does not lend itself to the creation of institutions of power. Those institutions that can be built on it (families) are small and particular. In order to exert control over society, individuals will either have to gain power from activities other than reproduction or they will have to act through institutions controlled by others. This may give them a measure of social influence, but not dominance, as those controlling the institutions will still have veto powers.

Who controls sex in the dating scene? Probably women, right? Why? A vagina is no more rare than a penis, but our culture has made the decision, wished it so, if you will, to decide that women choose whether or not sex will happen. If All the men got together and said "we're not having sex with any woman unless she begs us," pretty soon all the heterosexual women would be in a pickle.

But this cannot happen, and so it is irrelevent - and it cannot happen because men are not institutionalised qua men. There is no 'man-union' to impose such an embargo. If such an embargo occured, it would not be a result of reimaginating existing relations - it would be a result of the use of institutions to produce concerted action. And if existing institutions were used parasitically to engineer such a change, they would be productive institutions.
[Yes, it can happen, and has happened, at least in reverse, iirc - but only in small theatres where the women have been able to know each other directly, or at least at very few and close degrees.]

Prestige is another quality that is totally arbitrary, but incredibly important at all levels of society. If every high school senior decided Kansas State was the best university and applied there, Kansas State would overnight become the most sought-after college for employers. Harvard would have no bargaining position whatsoever if each generation of high school seniors didn't fall over themselves trying to get in.

But this cannot happen, and so is irrelevent. It cannot happen because students are not institutionalised qua students, and so they cannot simply all decide to do something - because there is no 'they'.

I think sexuality and prestige are two areas where changing ideology can, in fact, change the balance of power very effectively.

But changing ideology does not occur randomly - nor at the behest of feminist manifestos. Ideas are not adopted unless they outcompete the alternatives. Part of this competition is coherency both with themselves and with existing ideas. A large part, however, is fitness for the environment. Ideologies that run contrary to the prevailing economic topography will not prosper, because their adherents will not prosper [except, of course, those ideologies that manage to change economic reality in some way in their struggle for survival - through new technological or organisational advances, for instance].

Even most economic activities not directly related to them are done for the sake of greater prestige, or even greater mating opportunities. Bill Gates will never spend all that money, after all; after a couple million it lost all utility to him except as a perverted sort of "Life Points." The top executives in the business world of our own culture are not doing what they do for the material goods they can buy with their billions (a $20,000 necktie is no softer than a $100 necktie). They work for money because it makes them important and respected, something that ideology can quickly change.

Here we differ. I view it as no coincidence at all that 'successful businessman' became a prestigious position when capitalism became dominant and has remained so ever since. Capitalism as an ideology idolises successful capitalists. The ideology of capitalism is wedded to the economic environment of capitalism - those who adopt capitalist ideology are more likely to flourish, not because capitalism insists on it but because capitalist ideology is the ideology that is most suited (pragmatically) to the capitalist environment. [Aristocrats who held to old ideologies and valued honour and dignity and whatever above making money quickly lost power and influence to the new ruling class of those who prioritised making money. Indeed, only the very richest of those families have survived, and they all have been forced to embrace capitalism to a degree their forefathers would have balked at. The aristocrats had every advantage - they had money, connections, education or the ability to acquire it, political influence. They lost because they did not have the most pragmatic ideology for the environment. Consequently, their own ideology is all but extinct].

Now because I like you and you're smart, I'll try to see the situation from your point of view. You're saying that the bedrock material needs of society minus reproduction (staple crops, textiles, carpentry, construction, defense, etc) are what matter the most, perhaps the only things that really matter, and that they are immune to ideology.

No, I'm not. First, I don't deny that there are other activities in the same class as reproduction - just that they don't mirror reproduction because either they are not male-only or they cannot involve so many workers as reproduction (or both). Second, I explicitly eschewed talk of 'what matters most' and 'importance'. I merely said that they were different. Accordingly, the effects of labour in the different activities is different. One set of activities is very able, perhaps more able, to give power within small and particular theatres. The other set of activities is required to give power over wider society.
I have made no statement until this post (not intentionally, at least) about how ideology affects these - my point was that the ideology of the analyst does not affect the real economic conditions being analysed. So it's not as you suggested merely a matter of looking at things differently.

You say (correct me if I'm misrepresenting you) that whoever does these tasks will have a lion's share of the power, and it cannot be any other way, at least not probably. I respectfully call shenanigans on this. History is full of cases where the underclasses did all the meaningful work, while those on top did nothing. Our own upper class is littered with millionaires who receive dividends on other people's labo(u)r. No doubt a conlanger would reject this situation as totally unrealistic. The American South and Ancient Greece delegated many of the activities mentioned above to slaves, leaving the freemen to perform other essential tasks, but also some stupendously worthless things (from an economic point of view) like war, philosophy, and just plain-old telling people what to do.

You're misrepresenting me. Perhaps that's my fault. It's not the people doing those tasks - it's the relations involving those tasks, and the institutions responsible for those tasks. Those in privileged positions in those institutions will have social power. In your example, power resided in the institution of slavery. That institution was itself controlled by the slave-owners. This gave the slave-owners power. The slave owner is not labouring in the fields, but they are involved in productive labour - the management and trade of slaves.
War, philosophy and telling people what to do are vital economic activities. War has a thousand uses. Philosophy reinforces ideologies, and hence organisation. Telling people what to do is what economic activity is - the exercise of power.

So those who do the things that need doing are not necessarily the ones with all the power. But the more glaring omission, I think, is that you don't consider female-dominated work to be part of this "core" of essential economic activities.

It's nothing to do with being essential. Its to do with being institutionalisable.

That is the assumption that I wish I could convince you to take a second look at. In any society where women have total control over mating opportunities, this can be translated into tremendous societal/political/economic power. Why isn't that up there with food? I must say, there are plenty of days when I'd go hungry for a mating opportunity.

There are two reasons. First, the desire for food is more fungible. You want food - lots of people can provide it. Even if you want pasta and not rice, there's lots of people can provide pasta of approximately equal utility to you. But most men, most of the time, do not just want sex - they want sex with particular people. If your wife is giving you sex, it's a poor consolation that there's a prostitute around the corner you can go to. It may be a consolation you take - but it's still only a consolation. [For most people, most of the time. Of course, probably less true for young men than for older ones, I suspect]. Now, this gives your wife a lot more power over you than the pasta-seller has. But it's a power that SHE has, not that WOMEN have. Contrariwise, the pasta-seller qua he himself has hardly any power - but pasta-sellers as a group may have power, and food-producers as a group certainly do have power. And even more importantly, it's a power that she has over YOU. The pasta-sellers have a power over many, many people. Your wife doesn't (unless she's as busy a woman as your mom*).
The key difference, as I've said before, is that pasta-sellers qua pasta-sellers have power as a group because they can be bound up in institutions, both formal (guilds, corporations) and informal (cartels). Your wife is not in a wife's guild, or a wife's company. [Whereas, of course, your prostitute may well be - because her labour is more fungible, and hence more amenable to institutionalisation]

Secondly, while she has that power over you, you also have that power over her. She also wants sex, and it's a poor consolation that there's a prostitute around the corner she can go to (indeed, it's probably true that its less of a consolation for her than it is for you - men do seem predisposed to promiscuity to a greater degree than women. But that's beside the point). You have as much power over her as she does over you in this respect, so really I don't see why you're bringing sex up. Sex is very different from reproduction.
But even in reproduction, she has her own interests in it.

Somehow the "oldest profession in the world" doesn't give women as much power in our society as carpentry gives to carpenters.

Well, that's prostitution, which isn't really relevent to women's power or status. Prostitutes can of course be economically as powerful as carpenters, but that requires very particular economic circumstances - there has to be more male demand for sex than there is supply from non-prostitutes. [I.e. the price of alienated sex must be high]
In reality, of course, prostitutes have usually had more power from unalienated sex - heterai and courtesans. But that, again, is an uninstitutional power]

This, I believe, is something that could be changed merely by ideology.

And which economic relations will change that ideology?

Zomp: Surprisingly, I have read snippets of A Room of One's Own, in college, though on a second glance I must admit I missed much of the detail the first time through. I wasn't trying to start a pissing contest of authors before (I know you're very well read), I just honestly felt that Simone Weil is good for challenging the kinds of assumptions I thought you might be making. You've made it clear that you, like the good Sal above, think that women can't have more power than men unless they do exactly what men do.

I go further. Women can't have more (broad social) power than men, at least not notably more so. Because they have no advantage in those economic activities. They can of course have more narrow, particular power - but the two types of power are not comparable. If you think that one is 'better' or 'more' than the other, that's your prejudgement, not mine.

I disagree, but I certainly don't expect you to change your mind so easily. There are good arguments for both positions.

*Sorry.

[brandrinn]

*Sorry.

I laughed.

Why is this so fascinating to me? I just can't stop thinking about it. I spent the whole walk to the gyro stand trying to think of a way to make maternity profitable...

So let me see if I understand you. You've restated your opinions enough times that I think I have a handle on them. You say that societal power comes mostly (entirely?) from institutions. If an economic activity isn't part of an institution, it can at best raise the position of one individual at a time, not half the society.

For example, folks need cotton. Now that cotton isn't going to pick itself, is it boy? No sir. An institution is in place to get that cotton picked. Some people do the picking, and some others do the "work" of fanning themselves and sipping mint juleps. I'm having a bit of fun here, obviously, but it's not at your expense, mind you. The question of how the people doing the real work have so little power is not solved by saying it's the nature of the institution, because obviously our next question is: how did such a lopsided institution develop in the first place? If it has room at the top for people doing very little work for tremendous compensation, while the people on the bottom do much work for little compensation, then we at least can be certain of this:

Even if an economic activity is easily institutionalizable, we have no guarantee that the people doing that activity will have power or compensation proportionate to their work. A parasitic class can be inserted on top. This class can easily justify itself with ideology. If it needs brute force, it can pit one group of subservients against the other. A little clever propaganda will keep the proles from even realizing they're being played for chumps, or that life can be any other way but the way it is. Now just replace Boss Hog* with Bea Arthur** and you've got yourself a matriarchy. Hell, Bea doesn't even have to go to the plantation. She can just collect dividends and spend her time playing checkers. You might respond by saying "But she's only powerful, not because she's a woman, but because she's part of this important institution!" To which I say "Yes, but in this scenario she only got to that position because she's a woman. And beside, it's meaningless to say she's part of the institution; all she does is play checkers, for God's sake."

A second point: I'm not so sure fungibility is so essential to institutionalization. I mean, there are plenty of groups like the Screen Actors' guild, and some of the oldest institutions on Earth are monarchies and churches, which provide very unique, unfungible services. Maybe a Council of Matrons could exercise power. You could argue that the institution, not its constituent mothers, has the power, but that's a distinction without a difference, at least in this case, because all we want is powerful women.

Most importantly of all: I am skeptical about the importance of institutionalization in empowering women. Even if having a vagina and a uterus gives only local power, we must multiply that by half the people in a community. They certain will be closely knit, if we're still talking about pre-industrial society, and can coordinate their efforts (though I'm sure it will all be done subconsciously without anyone willfully seeking power).

To support this, I would argue that patriarchy often perpetuates itself without institutions. There is no male-controlled institution in charge of maintaining the cult of virginity. Purity in young women is mostly reinforced by other women, often without any institutional support (sometimes the church plays this part, but sometimes it doesn't, and it seems to have far less influence than a woman's peers). Indeed, if male-dominated institutions were in charge of dictating sexual norms in patriarchal society, every woman would have a sex quota, adjusted for age and beauty, and failure to meet it would result in a spanking. The idea of purity seems to be enforced without much institutional help. Ideas of female inferiority in math, or male orgasm as the sole purpose of sex, and countless other sexist ideas, are spread and maintained outside of institutions.

As usual, you are really on to something! But I think you are a wee bit off the mark to focus so completely on institutions. And even within that model, matriarchy is not a lost cause. We may be straying from Almea, though... Let's see how our positions pertain to Mark's wonderful creation. I have issue with the idea that industry and defense must have majority female participation for women to have the lion's share of power in society. Do you have any issue with it, or do you think Beic culture is spot-on as a thought experiment in matriarchal culture?

*American TV reference: fat white guy with money.
**American TV reference: feminist who played Maude.

[Salmoneus]

It's not my place to say whether slave-owners undertake VALUABLE activities. Value is not really important in these matters - value is the opinion of the observer, and those opinions have a place, but we shouldn't let them interfere with the observations themselves.

Slave-owning is a form of labour. It takes time and effort - slaves have to managed, disciplined, bought and sold. Of course, slave owners may choose to use their power to compel others to do their labour for them, but the labour is still being done.

Why do the slave-owners have power? Well, the power over the slave comes from the institution of slavery - but ultimately in a capitalist system the power comes from trade and capitalism. Through the investment of resource capital, either to transport goods across price gradients or to create price gradients by lowering the costs of production, the investor creates social capital (in the form of the institutions of factories and trade routes and contracts and so on), which allows him to accrue more resource capital. This capital advantage is power. In particular, it gives the power to buy in to the institution of slavery at the comfy end.
[And of course in, say, a feudal system the power may instead come from, ultimately, military power]

The institution of slavery is an economic one; it doesn't come about purely as the result of one big con by the elites, it comes about through a series of economic imbalances. You might say 'but the slaves could just have spontaneously organised themselves and overthrown their masters' - but nothing happens spontaneously. Slave-owners have (in general) been able to control their slaves because of economic imbalances - the slavers have a great deal more social capital, in that they can quickly summon up organised and obedient military forces, while the slaves are disunited and capital-poor. That's not a matter of 'playing people for chumps' or 'clever propaganda'.

Of course women can be slave-owners. But when a woman a) builds up her capital reserves through her business interests, b) uses those reserves to invest in labour institutions, c) conducts trade in slaves to maintain and improve her stake in those institutions, and d) uses her stake to acquire a share in the profits of production -
- she is acting exactly the same as any other good capitalist employed in institutions of production, and she is not dedicated to reproductive labour. She's acting the same way as a man, and she gets her power from the same sources as the men around her do.

Now, a) that means that it's not power deriving from reproduction, b) it's only likely on a large scale when the value of reproduction is low, and c) she's not doing anything that men can't do. As men can do exactly the same thing as her, and have no reason to absent themselves from the productive sphere (because they have no analogue to reproduction), you won't have a scenario where only the women have such roles and the men do not have such roles. You don't have to just replace Hog with Bea - you have to replace every Hog with a Bea. And as Bea will only be interested in production if has a high price, Hog will have the same incentives to be involved in production.

------

Monarchies and churches are hardly counterexamples. Take a monarchy. Obeying the orders of the king gains you favour with the king. Does it matter who the king is? No, not really - such favours can usually even be transferred between kings, except in cases of major dynastic break. Does it matter who carries out the order? No, not really, most of the things kings want can be carried out by any of their courtiers, nobles or generals. Does it matter which order you obey? Not really, except that orders have a certain weight that gives greater or lesser rewards. And this favour that you get - it in turn enables you to give commands/requests to others in exchange for your favour. So giving a command is a fairly bland thing (albeit not as bland as giving money), and allows the receiver to give commands in turn.

Babies are not like this. A woman gives a man a baby. Does it matter who the woman is? Well, yes. A wife giving you a baby is different from a stranger giving you a baby. Now, which wife doesn't matter much. So the institutional bit is the marriage - but it's an institution that is one-to-one, or at most one-to-a-roomfull, so its multiplicative power is weak. King/subject, Pope/christian, or even baron/subject and priest/christian have a lot more ability to amplify power because they are one-to-many. And does it matter who the baby is given to? Well yes, women put a different value on giving babies to their husbands. Indeed, even the marriage isn't entirely institutional, as women may prefer to have one man as a husband rather than another - whereas kings don't care too much about who their subjects are, except in rare cases, and priests care even less.
And does it matter which baby is given? Well, yes, it's usually better if its their baby, or at least not a baby claimed by someone else. So, "a wife provides her husband with a baby" is a relation that, for any given wife, applies generally to one husband and one baby at most. "a king gives his subject a command" applies to thousands of subjects and hundreds of commands.
And the same relation can be extended - the king gives an order to his baron who gives and order to his peasant. The pope blesses the bishop who blesses the priest who blesses the peasant. Because the baron carries out the king's orders, he gets to give orders to others. So the relation isn't 'king gives orders', it's 'feudal superior gives commands to feudal inferior' - a nice thin fungible relation that can occur again and again to build up a giant institution. But the wife/baby/husband triangle is wedded to that trio - the husband doesn't get to be a wife providing his husband with a baby even if his wife has provided him with a baby. So the first wife's power cannot extend outside her immediate theatre of contacts on the basis of this relation alone - whereas even if the Pope had no power over peasants directly thanks to the interchangeability of the recipient end of his relations, he would still have indirect power over them through those relations because those he has power over thanks to those relations have the same sort of power over the peasants.

So if there is no chain linking one woman to the peasants through the baby relation, she can only have power over them if the one she has power over has a different sort of power over the peasants - eg her husband is the king.

But that makes her power parasitic on his power. And, yes, the same is true of the king and his barons. But there are many barons and one king, which means that the power of the barons is less than that of the king. When there are more of you, you need more social capital to be able to produce concerted action. So the king exploits his unity to play the barons against each other and maintain his power. But there is one king and there is one queen, so in that respect they are equal. They both have power in the reproductive relation (as the queen wants babies too), but the king has the auxiliary power of controlling the armies. In general, then, kings will have more power than queens. Moreover, he retains monopoly over the army power, but the queen has no monopoly over the baby power, as the wives of Henry VIII found out - other queens can be acquired, more easily than the queen can acquire a new king. And once there are babies, the baby power is diminished dramatically. So in general the kings will have more power than the queens over society, even if they acquiesce on private matters (the king can negotiate with his private and public resources - the queen has no public resources of her own, so she is likely to lose the negotiations).

Of course, Queens can rule in their own right. But that's nothing to do with babymaking. That's production, not reproduction - because controlling the armies controls the flow of capital which controls production. And women have no inherent advantages in the productive sphere (let's assume - if they have any, they're probably small, and as yet undemonstrated).

Yes, women in villages can co-ordinate their efforts. But a) so can the men, so that's still equal and b) women across the kingdom will find it far harder to organise themselves. So any digruntled husbands can just bring in a pliable outsider.

----

You talk about patriarchy supporting itself. Patriarchy is not an agent, it's a system. The way an agent gains power in a system is entirely different from the way a system sustains itself. Economic systems and ideologies are in symbiosis - when there are no changes in the base economic topography, that leads to stasis; when there are changes, the systems and the ideologies interact through an iterative evolution, where ideologies grow to fit the system and then systems grow to fit the ideology until the system and the ideology is in balance again.

Female virginity is reinforced by women because it is in their economic interests. They may do it for reasons of ideology, but that ideology has evolved to fit their economic interests. Women whose value comes chiefly from reproduction will be dependent for their value on finding and holding husbands. It is in the interests of husbands to have faithful wives, and in particular ones that aren't pregnant by someone else when they marry. So, in competing for husbands it is in the interests of wives to compete in this regard - and being able to offer total chasteness and virginity helps them compete. So mothers encourage their daughters to do this. Likewise, it is in the interests of wives to have their husbands be faithful (as it gives them a monopoly on sex, and hence power), so unchaste women are the enemies of wives, and women pressure their peers to be chaste.
[Of course, if reproduction is even more valuable, husbands stop being able to have such high demands of their wives because they're desperate for more babies]

So no, there's is no male-controlled institution that maintains virginity - there doesn't have to be, as it's already in the economic interests of women (in certain societies) as a result of the prices of various commodities. Likewise, stressing male orgasm is a way women can compete through pliability; an aversion to mathematics keeps daughters away from unprofitable pursuits like trade and in the profitable pursuit of marriage.

Going back to your original point - yes, if people value reproduction more, things will change. But how much value is given to various activities and products is the essence of economics, and will have economic motivations.

------

On the question of matriarchy, I have two objections:
- women will not have social dominance unless they dominate relations of production
- women will not dominate relations of production

As I suggested before, the only way I can see it happening is if there's a massive male-only profession. In fantasy, this could be done by magic - if men can engage in non-productive but valuable magic and women can't (eg men are very good at magical entertaining), AND the value of reproduction is low, you could end up with female dominance of production.
Outside that, the only thing I can imagine is war. If there's perpetual warfare and men have to be soldiers all the time, women could take over production - except that if there were perpetual war, one would think that reproduction would be very valuable. So perhaps perpetual war that had low casualties and that involved stealing babies?

That aside, I think it's possible for women to dominate production in certain sub-cultures of a wider society, including powerful subcultures - for instance, it wouldn't take much war to take males out of production in the aristocracy if it's an army structure closely associated with nobility. That could result in women having social power in the upper echelons, and by extension throughout society - but I don't see it feasible to have that imbalance perpetuated down through all levels of society, except perhaps in small societies. Otherwise the mass mobilisation of men into non-productive careers (war, entertainment, hermitry etc) just wouldn't be feasible.

[hwhatting]

On Sal's argumentation on the power of institutions:
One thing you have to keep in mind is that, in premodern and non-Western societies, the power of institutions to make relations fungible was often undermined by the intrusion of family relationships - i.e., what we call nepotism. Relationships - between master and servant, lords and their vassals, captains of warrior bands and their warriorrs, bureaucrats and their subordinates, were at the same time institutional and personal, and often based on family or clan relationships. It is the peculiarity of our modern capitalist system that most intitutional relationships do not involve some kind of family ties and are to a high degree depersonalised. That makes them effective, but also a historical exception.
This is also the mechanism through which family based power can be turned into institution-based power, so that, if we have a scenario where families are female-dominated, this can be turned into a female-dominated society. And when the institutions have been created or taken over, they can keep the society female-dominated long after the original conditions which caused the female domination have gone. So all we need is a specific set of circumstances that creates female-dominated clans and communities, and an ideology that keeps men from taking control when the conditions are gone.

I also want to underline that childbearing, while probably making it disadvantageous for (premodern) societies if women undertake certain risky tasks like war on a large scale (if half of a clan's women get killed in battle, the clan has only half the potential for offspring; if half of the men gets killed, the other half can take up the slack), it doesn't remove women as much from production as some seem to assume - as has been said, in non-Western and premodern soceties relatives and the community as a whole do much of the childcare. My wife comes from Kazakhstan, and my nieces and nephews there spend more time with grandparents, aunts, and uncles, than with their own parents. In premodern societies, most production is organised in the household anyway, with children gradually becoming involved in work while they grow up. And even pregnancy is no work-stopper; I've read of cases where women have had childbirth in the fields where they'd been working at advanced stages of the pregnancy.

[Mornche Geddick]

One other thing should be considered: 'caring more' won't massively up your infant survival. Eighteenth-century Europeans didn't have such appalling rates of infant mortality just because they didn't invest in their children - there simply wasn't the medical knowledge to keep babies alive.

For a dissenting view, read Mother of All Myths by Amanitta Forna. The chapter about motherhood in the 18th century is an eye-opener highly relevant to your post. In France, for example, it became the custom for middle-class and noble women to send their babies away to a wet nurse. Because these women were only doing it for the money (which they badly needed), they had an incentive to take on more children than they could feed, or look after properly, and also to force them onto solids before their digestive systems were ready. The result, not unnaturally, was widespread, appalling neglect and a huge infant mortality rate (reaching 90% in some areas). One of the historians Forna cites had this to say:

Now by the 18th century people knew, in an abstract sort of way, that letting infants stew in their own excrement or feeding them pap from the second month onwards were harmful practices. The point is that they did not care, and that is why thousands continued to perish in the ghastly slaughter of infants that was traditional child-rearing.

[zompist]

I agree with a lot of Salmoneus's points, especially about the economic factors that inhibit what seems to be brandrinn's highmindedness. You can change the world a little by changing ideas (e.g. valuing motherhood more); but you can't change it a whole lot. (And again, I'm going to rethink the discussion of land-richness in the Bé.)

But the bit on patriarchy is flawed, I think:

Female virginity is reinforced by women because it is in their economic interests. They may do it for reasons of ideology, but that ideology has evolved to fit their economic interests. Women whose value comes chiefly from reproduction will be dependent for their value on finding and holding husbands. It is in the interests of husbands to have faithful wives, and in particular ones that aren't pregnant by someone else when they marry. So, in competing for husbands it is in the interests of wives to compete in this regard - and being able to offer total chasteness and virginity helps them compete. So mothers encourage their daughters to do this. Likewise, it is in the interests of wives to have their husbands be faithful (as it gives them a monopoly on sex, and hence power), so unchaste women are the enemies of wives, and women pressure their peers to be chaste.

One problem is that people don't always act in their interests. Sexism is a good example— economists these days even point out that countries with high degrees of sexism are disadvantaged as they are inhibiting the productivity of half the population.

Second, these statements are quite narrow and Western-centric. Patriarchy does not reduce to "virginity". Virginity is not the only approach to preserving male bloodlines (just one counterexample: ancient Rome, where fathers decided whether to accept a newborn or not). Males don't always care about preserving their bloodlines. Chastity isn't only motivated by the desire to preserve bloodlines; there are other benefits, such as reducing disease, delaying pregnancy, or allaying the resentment of unmarried men in a polygamous society. "Women" don't pressure their peers to be chaste; some women do, other women find it profitable or natural or just plain fun to be unchaste, and some don't care. There are cultures where wives are cheerfully shared— e.g. the Yanomamo where wives may be shared with younger brothers, or the Arctic men who hospitably offer their wives to outsiders. There are cultures that don't seem to value virginity or marriage very highly, from the poor areas of Mexico City described by Oscar Lewis, to my wife's hometown of Iquitos, to American college campuses.

In fact, what society values women chiefly for "reproduction"? All I can think of is the self-image of the Victorian bourgeoisie. Historically it's a luxury to think of women only as mothers; they're generally needed as peasants, craftspeople, gardeners, cooks, clothing makers, cleaners, teachers, servants, etc.

So no, there's is no male-controlled institution that maintains virginity - there doesn't have to be, as it's already in the economic interests of women (in certain societies) as a result of the prices of various commodities.

That doesn't follow. Patriarchy might well benefit some women, while also being supported by male action. In fact sexism historically was enforced, and feminism opposed, by male action— whether ridicule ("feminist" is still a negative term for perhaps most Americans), teaching and preaching, job discrimination, family strictures, or actual terrorism. Again, please read Virginia Woolf on why there were historically few female achievers in Western society. It's not because they were obsessed with virginity.

As I suggested before, the only way I can see it happening is if there's a massive male-only profession.

As Daniel Dennett said, a failure of imagination is not an insight into necessity. One of the purposes of fantasy is to explore ideas like this. Obviously I happen to like plausibility (perhaps too much so for a good fantasy writer), but that's just a lagniappe. It's interesting to think about how a female-dominated society would work, even if— especially if— no terrestrial society has gone that way.

At the same time, I don't see it as that far-fetched. Biologically, we have the example of hyenas or the bonobos. Historically, there are many more models than the Western cult of virginity— the Iroquois, the Moso, and the Khitans, for instance, were pretty darn egalitarian. There are interesting cases in Western history, too— e.g. after the 19th century Chaco War, 90% of Paraguay's male population was killed; for a few generations at least, women were the major landowners.

[Salmoneus]

I don't think you're actually managing to disagree with me much.

First - no, people don't always act in their own interests. They act according to their ideologies, and as I said the ideology evolves when the situation change. Clearly, there are situations of disequalibrium, where people obey out-of-date principles. This is one reason why the situation of women became so bad under the Victorians - women continued to be confined to reproduction, but the value of reproduction was falling (mechanisation and increased access to overseas labour markets meant that labour wasn't as valuable any more, so neither were babies), so women became devalued. It took some time for ideology to catch up to the new environment (and it probably hasn't done so yet). Perhaps it's even true that ideology never catches up - but that doesn't mean that ideology and action don't have a base in the economic environment, just that there's lag in the system.

Second, I never suggested patriarchy reduced to virginity, and I don't know where you're getting it from. I'm quite aware that there are alternatives to virginity, and indeed I explore some in my own conworlding. I was responding to the example raised by Brandrinn, about virginity in our own historical society, and I explicitly said 'in certain societies' in my explanation of the phenomenon. "The Cult of Virginity has economic bases" does not mean "only the Cult of Virginity can satisfy the economic bases". Animals evolve to survive in their environment, but that doesn't mean that for each environment there will always be the same animals - there's a degree of convergent evolution, yes, but there are sometimes alternative paths as well. Moreover, path dependency in evolution means that frequently the 'best' solution will not be reached, even if there is a clear 'best' at all.

Third, I said 'chiefly', not 'entirely'. Many societies view women first as mothers (or past or potential mothers), then as engaged in industries seen as connected to motherhood, and finally as general members of society. Obviously, they have usually had other roles as well. But that doesn't mean that they are chiefly valued for those other roles. I think that for large chunks of our history, fertile mothers with no other career would have been better off than barren spinsters who also worked as cleaners. So the reproduction has a higher value than the production. [not that it has to for my explanation to work - the added value just has to be higher than the loss of utility from virginity]

Fourth, I never said that patriarchy wasn't supported by male action - of course it was. I said that there wasn't a patriarchal 'institution' that was responsible for maintaining virginity (or if there was, eg schools, it wasn't the key factor in maintaining it). Pressure can certainly be applied without the creation of institutions for the purpose.

------

Failure of imagination is the only insight into necessity; necessity is where imagination gives up and goes home.

Moreover, what other yardstick should we use for our 'exploration', if not reason and logic and evidence and imagination? Sure, you can just say by fiat 'so and so is the case', but what's the point? If your imagination can't find the route from the hypothetical world to reality, you can't bring back any lessons from it. You can't think about how something would work if you've not reason to think that it would - what part of 'because I said so?' can be explored.

That said, one of my problems with this whole scenario is that it is uninteresting. To me, a complicated system that has elements of matriarchy while still being perfectly explainable would be intriguing, different, exciting. We could work out what the less-expected consequences of it would be, and maybe find things that we hadn't expected at all. That's an exploration. The "you know our society? Well, like, swap the words 'man' and 'woman' for a rad new world" approach doesn't seem that interesting. Well, it's like us, but women do all the man stuff and men are like our women. OK, exploration finished. Elizabethan parable / Golden Age sci-fi short story over. [Even if there is also a bit of group marriage involved]

Finally, hyenas and bonobos aren't human (and yes, I know uesti technically aren't, but it's never seemed an important difference, really). Their biology is different - I don't know about bonobos, but hyena females do actually have significant biological advantages over the males. They also ahve really small societies.
Egalitarianism isn't relevent either - because we're not talking about egalitarianism. I've said I've not problem with an egalitarian society. They certainly happen, and they make perfect sense. Several of my own consocieties are fairly egalitarian. Egalitarianism and the inverse patriarchy of opposite-world are galaxies apart.

90% of the male population dying would be an example of the male population absenting itself from the sphere of production, so isn't a counterexample.

[Mornche Geddick]

One point: Almean humans are not the same species as terrestrial humans, so perhaps Almean women might really have some subtle advantage over the males in endurance. If it is a higher tolerance of heat, then a female warrior in tropical Belesao would have a real advantage. One might also expect to see other tropical kingdoms with elite female battalions.

Also, as I have often thought before, perhaps the reproductive physiology of Almean women is better than our own. The following is an idea I've had for an SF story about human genetic modification. What if, e.g. the cervix were under the control of the voluntary nervous system, like the muscles controlling the evacuation of the bladder? This would give Almean women huge advantages over their unfortunate terrestrial sisters. For one thing, they would have no need of tampons or sanitary towels, since they would only menstruate sitting on the toilet. For another, childbirth would be quicker - under 1 hour rather than several hours or even days, resulting in less stress to the organism, fewer complications and a much higher survival rate for mother and baby. Breech births would also be easier, especially if the woman could manipulate the baby's position so that the feet came through first. She would not actually be able to give birth however, before the uterus started contracting and and the amniotic membrane broke.

[Yiuel Raumbesrairc]

Breech births would also be easier, especially if the woman could manipulate the baby's position so that the feet came through first.

Isn't the head supposed to come first in humans?

[zompist]

I don't think you're actually managing to disagree with me much.

OK, that's good then. Though I still think this goes too far:

Many societies view women first as mothers (or past or potential mothers), then as engaged in industries seen as connected to motherhood, and finally as general members of society. Obviously, they have usually had other roles as well. But that doesn't mean that they are chiefly valued for those other roles.

How do we know what they were chiefly valued for? If it's ideological statements— what men said about women— then I'd suggest that Western literature is obsessed with love, not motherhood. But a deeper problem is that the very question is also a distortion. If you ask people about sex differences, they're going to talk about sex differences, not about common economic factors.

I think that for large chunks of our history, fertile mothers with no other career would have been better off than barren spinsters who also worked as cleaners. So the reproduction has a higher value than the production.

But here you're mixing at least three variables: marriage, class, and child-bearing. And, as I said, for most of our history there was no such thing as "mothers with no other career".

Moreover, what other yardstick should we use for our 'exploration', if not reason and logic and evidence and imagination? Sure, you can just say by fiat 'so and so is the case', but what's the point? If your imagination can't find the route from the hypothetical world to reality, you can't bring back any lessons from it.

First, I can't agree with this. We can learn from LOTR even if there are no such things as elves and magic rings. We can read Flatland with enjoyment even if we can't credit that geometrical figures can be intelligent beings.

And second, it's your notion of plausibility that's being violated, not mine. (I don't mean that to be hostile, it's more of a resigned shrug. The barrier seems to be your analysis of reproduction, which I don't share. I can only work with my own understanding of the world, not yours.)

That said, one of my problems with this whole scenario is that it is uninteresting. [...] The "you know our society? Well, like, swap the words 'man' and 'woman' for a rad new world" approach doesn't seem that interesting.

Now you're starting to make unfriendly caricatures. I don't care if you dislike my work, but I resent the implication that it's done on this shallow level. Unfortunately this seems to be a regrettable side effect of a project this size: people see a parallel to things they know, and assume that's all that's there. Maybe I should add footnotes or something. (I did mention a major influence, the Moso; you should really read Cai Hua's book and see if you can still maintain that Beic society is either impossible or an "Elizabethan parable".)

[brandrinn]

Wow! I haven't read Without Fathers or Husbands yet, but from the synopsis it sounds fascinating! Thanks for the recommendation. I think you really hit the nail on the head about making fantasy match reality: It's not that some of us don't care about reality, we all simply have our own theories about what's actually going on in reality.

Is the culture of the Erelaeans at Fananak affected by all this, or are they too far from the Beic homeland?

[zompist]

Fananak is in the southern, temperate half of Arcel, so it's not directly affected, but of course it's not far away. I don't know how the interaction goes yet... there's still a lot of Arcelian history and culture to work out.

[Mornche Geddick]

Breech births would also be easier, especially if the woman could manipulate the baby's position so that the feet came through first.

Isn't the head supposed to come first in humans?

Normally it does. In the 3rd trimester the foetus turns upside down, so that its head is expelled first. However that does not always happen and then you get a breech birth, where the baby's rump or feet come out first. Breech births are more likely to suffer complications such as head entrapment or cord prolapse (if the latter happens, caesarean section must be carried out quickly).

I was wrong BTW in saying feet first was better. Frank breech (both legs extended and the feet near the ears) is the safest breech presentation and luckily also the most common.

[rotting bones]

zompist:

13. Proof by Extremeification
A: What do you think about objection X?
B: That is an extreme case. Extreme cases are silly.

From: http://specgram.com/CXLVII.3/09.seely.rhetoric.html

J/K. No offense.

[dhok]

Does the Bé zone has any female immigrants from more male-dominated societies looking for more opportunities?

[brandrinn]

Does the Bé zone has any female immigrants from more male-dominated societies looking for more opportunities?

Considering the number of male immigrants to Pakistan, I'm guessing no. An Uytainese female probably wouldn't fancy a life of shlepping through the jungle, without an ancestor totem or potato to keep her company. Besides, how do we know foreign women would even appreciate the advantages of being empowered? There are plenty of women who think it's totally cool to hack their daughters' bits off, and see no great social injustice there. I had a sociology professor from Nigeria who knew several women who had the procedure done to them. When someone said it was a practice done so that men could "control women," clearly taking an etic approach, she got quite upset. It was not something men did to women, she insisted, as the women have plenty of agency in the situation. They make up fifty percent of the population, after all; it's their culture too. A woman born into such a society is not likely to think she is getting a raw deal. The emic perspective is what people use when they make decisions about their own culture and lifestyle.

[zompist]

If you're thinking about the southern cultures, there's a huge climatic difference, as brandrinn mentions; also it's a prohibitively long walk. Conceivably the Nyanese could do it, but any woman who had access to ships would probably be well off enough not to need refuge. (Though I imagine a few Mau pirates might have come from there.)

The Linaminče are another story— they already live in the jungle and have a long and complicated history of interaction with the Bé— but they also tend to be more sexually egalitarian (except for the Hake).

[rotting bones]

On the Daily Show, Fred Pearce says women prefer careers over having a family: http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-a ... red-pearce

What do you make of that?

[Yiuel Raumbesrairc]

On the Daily Show, Fred Pearce says women prefer careers over having a family: http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-a ... red-pearce

What do you make of that?

Pretty much that they're simply humans?

[rotting bones]

Pretty much that they're simply humans?

Wasn't someone asking why women would be happier serving in armies rather than raising children and stuff, or did I misremember?

[rotting bones]

The point is, we're not just talking about women in our social circles, but in sufficiently large numbers to make a Be-type society statistically feasible. Does this affect anyone's opinions on the realism of Beic culture?

[Yiuel Raumbesrairc]

Pretty much that they're simply humans?

Wasn't someone asking why women would be happier serving in armies rather than raising children and stuff, or did I misremember?

Perhaps, but it certainly wasn't me; to me, it's just normal to see such an answer, when you're really offered the choice.

(Fun fact : My sister is serving in my country's army. She likes it, she's happy with it. A lot happier than simply staying home looking after babies (oh gods), even though she will be having her second child within a month. If anything, I can understand Fanáo completely, as if we were sharing the same cultural biases.)

To me, the Bé were already fairly realistic to begin with, so it didn't change my view on them. Others might comment a little more