Patriarchy as Organized Breeding
A Female Centered Reproductive Logic and Sexual Politics?
What if the greatest trick women ever pulled was convincing men that patriarchy was what they wanted?
That binding themselves to women—providing, protecting, laboring, marrying, fathering—was some kind of male domination fantasy, rather than a system that, structurally, served female reproductive interests.
Where patriarchy takes root and persists, it is enforced by women, not despite being a male-dominant reproductive order, but because it secures what women most need in high-investment mating systems: paternity certainty to ensure male investment, provisioning and long-term stability, status through exclusive access to one man, exit from sexual competition, and insurance against abandonment.
In systems built around marriage, lineage, and inheritance, women are not passive subjects. They are strategic enforcers because the system pays dividends. Women gatekeep other women, suppress promiscuity, reward male investment, and idealize loyalty. Not mainly for morality’s sake, but because their reproductive strategy depends on male commitment and control.
So maybe patriarchy wasn’t a male conspiracy imposed on women, but rather a system women helped design, sell, and uphold from the beginning because, in general, it worked.
And what if the greatest trick capitalism ever pulled on women was compelling them to forget their investment in it—and to help the market economy liberate them from patriarchy and into the circuits of capital accumulation? A shift not from domination to freedom, but from reliance on fathers and husbands to dependence on the market and the state. . .
