if I’m allowed a bit of biological essentialism for a minute, just to take you all with me on a little thought experiment… I think it’s important to not conflate male dominance with patriarchy inherently. patriarchy is about social organisation and as such I’d doubt even the most essentialist of feminists would seriously claim patriarchy is somehow innate to humans (meaning, inevitable), and indeed a lot of research into hunter-gatherer societies and inferences into prehistorical social organisation would suggest patriarchy as an organising structure has not always existed

but this is quite different from the question of whether or not male dominance is ‘innate’ or ‘natural’ (note: none of these things means it’s good). in a vacuum, men are still, biologically, stronger than women, and therefore could assert their dominance over women physically if they wanted to. the question becomes, just because they could, would they, necessarily? (obviously some would, but some women can be violent too; I’m talking widespread patterns that have predictive power). lerner in the creation of patriarchy talks about how men could not get away, in societies where women lived amongst their families, with asserting themselves physically over women without the threat of those women’s families advocating on their behalf. there was real incentive to not hit your female partner if her relatives could come along (especially her male relatives) and beat you up

this is, obviously, highly simplified. but there is a question therefore of, if this threat didn’t exist, would men have done it anyway? certainly when those conditions changed, male dominance appeared, various evolutions in social organisation arose due to various factors and now here we are under patriarchy. so just because patriarchy itself is clearly not inevitable and required certain conditions to be met to arise, male dominance, and male willingness to assert this dominance through violence, is not necessarily ‘unnatural’. now it’s not necessarily natural either, and certainly the issue is that knowing for sure whether it is or not is almost impossible to achieve as we live under conditions of patriarchy, so who’s to say how men would have behaved towards women if things had developed differently. but it’s food for thought and it’s a good reason to not conflate those terms. male dominance on a societal level is patriarchy, but on an individual level it’s difficult to say whether male violence towards women is a social symptom or a biological one. certainly the way a society is organised (even under some patriarchies) can diminish men’s will to enact violence against women, sure, but that’s due to social and/or legal consequences. without those it’s hard to say. anyways that’s all the bio essentialism I’m allowed tonight I have no clue as basically none of us do