Patriarchy and Fatherhood

Novaseeker recently left a comment in this post over at Dalrock’s that is so good it clearly deserves its own post. Here it is in its entirety:

By saying that children don’t need fathers and women don’t need them to raise children successfully, you cut the legs out from under the arguments for child support.

Well, the thing is that in some places donors can actually be successfully sued for child support. It isn’t universal but there have been cases where sperm donors have been made to pay child support precisely because they are the biological fathers. It certainly isn’t 10% airtight for sperm donors, although it does vary by state.

On the broader issue, it really makes plain what everyone here already knows: fatherhood, in the era of feminist matriarchy, is solely dependent on whether the mother wants it to exist. A mother can choose full fatherhood (i.e., married to the bio dad), reduced, or semi-, fatherhood (divorced with “visitation” or “shared parenting” arrangements), or no practical fatherhood but financial, or no fatherhood at all. It’s a menu for mothers, now, and they can switch between different menu items at any time without cost to themselves. Fathers have precisely as much of a role in their children’s lives as the mother, at any point in time, wants and is willing to accept.

Of course, anyone who has been paying attention should not be surprised by this. You can’t really retain a meaningful fatherhood on a mass scale when you ditch patriarchy. More than anything else, patriarchy was about securing fatherhood — securing paternity, which is the basis of fatherhood. When you get rid of it, you ipso facto undermine fatherhood in a way that motherhood can never be undermined because fatherhood is simply more tenuous than motherhood is. And so we shouldn’t be surprised that in a society which has loudly and triumphantly and enthusiastically discarded patriarchy, that fatherhood is amorphous, tenuous, uncertain and in many ways simply failing.

A society can’t have this both ways, really. Either you support fatherhood institutionally, and get more fathers and less fatherlessness, or you undermine fatherhood institutionally in the name of equality and empowering women and their reproductive and romantic freedoms, and you get less fathers and more fatherlessness. It isn’t rocket science. But our society is so “all in” committed to burying all aspects of patriarchy under the banner of female liberation and empowerment that it will choose, again and again and again, every manner of artificial and nonsensical support mechanism to prop up fatherlessness, rather than simply admitting that it was a bad idea to get rid of patriarchy. In other words, as between less freedom/empowerment for women and more fathers, on the one hand, and more freedom/empowerment for women and less fathers (and more fatherlessness), our society will happily choose the latter, and with gusto and enthusiasm, and will simply find more props to support fatherless families.

The main point which can be taken from this comment is simple:

Patriarchy = Fatherhood

Or perhaps better stated…

A = Patriarchy

B = Fatherhood

If A, then B; if not A, then not B

(or something like that; its been way too long since I took a logic class)

In order to have effective Fatherhood, you need at least some form of structural Patriarchy (in a general sense of the term). Without it fatherhood, as an institution, cannot be sustained against the ravages of time + human nature. In terms of Dominoes, the domino of Fatherhood can only be placed upright after, or perhaps at the same time as, Patriarchy. Contra what most of society believes and states, Patriarchy is progress; our current social path is actually regression. The structural benefits of a strong institution of fatherhood, secured only by Patriarchy, are petering out now in the West. We can see the consequences all around us.

Fatherhood, as an institution, is only going to get worse as time passes. The West has pretty much dismantled/destroyed the foundation of Patriarchy, and put (in Novaseeker’s words) a feminist Matriarchy in its place. Of course, I don’t think the two are really separate, but that doesn’t matter in the context of this post. What does matter is that Fatherhood cannot be fixed until we rebuild a solid foundation for it. Simply reversing bad laws isn’t enough. A complete social reorganization will be necessary. And I just don’t see that happening voluntarily. There are simply too many who are invested in this system, man and woman alike, for peaceful change to happen on any meaningful time scale. The whole system would collapse before then. Which is to say that the whole system will collapse. Or at least, that is what I’m seeing from my vantage point right now. I’d love to be wrong, but I don’t think that I am.

With that in mind, the Benedict Option is something that Christians should be considering right now. I know that I am. Novaseeker has some thoughts of his own about the Benedict Option.

Also worth reading: this comment by Dalrock.