A manospherian was telling me how the patriarchy was 'unavoidable', and sent me this to try supporting his point.

Link here: http://www.goldberg-patriarchy.com/logic.html

An extract:

A. (Patriarchy) The upper positions of the hierarchies of every one of the thousands of societies on which we have any significant evidence are overwhelmingly filled by men (patriarchy). A Queen Victoria or a Golda Meir is always an exception in her society and is always surrounded by a government of men. (There were more female heads-of-state, queens when no royal male was available, in the first two-thirds of the sixteenth century than the first two-thirds of the twentieth. There has never been a “matriarchy” or “Amazonian society.”(There have been a very few, tiny societies with relatively little hierarchy, but in all such societies an informal male dominance played a role similar to that of patriarchy.)

B. (Male Status Attainment) The highest-status (non-maternal) roles are occupied primarily by males. The high-status roles are high-status not primarily because they are male (ditch-digging is male), but because they have high status. This high status elicits from males, more strongly than from females, the behavior required to attain the status. Which roles are given high status and which behavior is required to attain these roles is, let us agree for argument’s sake, socially determined. But the greater impulse to do whatever is necessary to attain status—sacrifice health, safety, family, care of the infant, pleasure, and the like,-- for whichever roles are given high status is a function of male physiology (just as similar impulses lead men to more readily sacrifice these for hierarchical attainment and dominance in male—female encounters and relationships.).

C. (Male Dominance) Both men and women feel that the dominance resides in the male and that the woman must “get around” the man to attain her way. Even when male dominance is absent from law (as in the United States) or formal custom (as in “chivalrous” societies), the expectation is still one of male dominance. This is attested to in the U.S., for example, by the feminist’s detestation of male dominance and her incorrect attempt to explain it in purely social terms. One might well argue that, in some families in all societies, some women have more power—the ability to “get around” men to “get their way” by cleverness, persuasiveness, etc,—but what is universal is the feeling—expressed in adages, songs, etc. of every society--that there is a male dominance that must be “gotten around.” This reality may be abhorred or favored. (A preference for men who “take the lead” was prevalent seventy years ago, but it is not the values or attitudes that are primarily causal of dominance.)

“What about this” non- “exception"

As I have mentioned, most attempts to provide a society lacking the institutions we discuss are invocations, based on third-hand sources, of societies for which recourse to the original ethnography demonstrates the claims to be risibly unwarranted. These usually simply assert exceptionality without giving any details (for obvious reasons).

Other attempts invoke a factor having nothing to do with the institutions we discuss. For example:

The “fact” that some societies have a highest god who is female. It is far from clear that this is a fact, that there has been such a society. But let us, for argument’s sake, assume that there is. All this would demonstrate is that that religion is of little importance to patriarchy (since such societies all exhibit patriarchy) and that the universality of patriarchy must now be explained without reference to religion.

Often the claim that there is an exception refuses to specify the societal exception, but merely asserts that there is one. For example, the claim by Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon Kamin (in Not in Our Genes) that:

"[Cross-cultural universals] . . appear to lie more in the eye of the beholder than in the social reality that is being observed" is utterly untrue.

Indeed, to make their point the authors would merely have had to specify a society lacking one of the institutions I find to be universal. They can not do this because there is no exception

“Societies are patriarchal because women are tied down with giving birth and raising children and because men are bigger than women.”

We can ignore here the fact that physiology accounts for the fact that women bear and raise children, because there are many societies in which women work harder and longer outside the home--doing objectively more important economic work--than do men, (though, as we have seen, however objectively unimportant the roles played by men, some of these roles will be given higher status than any other non-maternal roles). Whatever the non-maternal roles played by women, these never include primary responsibility for hierarchical position. Similarly, while males are everywhere bigger and stronger, all evidence from both human beings and experimental animals imply that it is the Central Nervous System (CNS) difference relevant to dominance behavior, not physical size, that is primarily responsible. A one-generation, experimentally-created society stocked with infant daughters of very large parents and infant sons of very small parents would develop into a patriarchy of small men and large women.

“The myths of ‘ancient matriarchies’ and ‘Amazonian societies’ must be taken seriously as perhaps demonstrating that there were such societies.”

Even ignoring the fact that such myths were refuted by writers of the time they were alleged to exist, assuming that there were matriarchies just because there are myths about matriarchies makes as much sense as assuming that there were cyclopses just because there were myths about cyclopses.

We argued over this for some time.

But to no real fruition