The Inevitability of Patriarchy by Steven Goldberg

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: there’s no reason to take feminism seriously. It’s a contradictory, nonsensical ideology whose most fervent proponents are all failures at love and life. It’s aborting and contracepting itself out of existence: each generation of whites born since the Sexual Revolution has been more conservative and patriarchal then the last. It’s a threat to men in the same way that a pile of dog turds is a threat to your shoe.

But if all that isn’t enough for you, you need to read The Inevitability of Patriarchy.

Much like The Managerial Revolution, The Inevitability of Patriarchy is a wonderfully explanatory volume that’s been left to molder in the pile of out-of-print books. Writing in the early 1970’s, the high-water mark of second-wave feminism, Steven Goldberg confronted Gloria Steinem, Shulamith Firestone, Germaine Greer and the other prophetesses of women’s lib… and laughed at them. Their arguments were ramshackle, their logic nonexistent, their beliefs nothing more than elaborate emoting.

Placed under the warm light of scrutiny, feminism shriveled like a raisin in the sun.

Goldberg begins the book by assaulting that most cherished of feminist beliefs, the rotten foundation of their teetering ideology: the concept of gender as a “social construct.” Armed with a library’s worth of anthropological evidence, he shows that virtually all societies, tribes and peoples throughout human history have been patriarchies, dominated by men:

Men do not merely fill most of the roles in high-status areas, they also fill the high-status roles in low-status areas. The higher the level of power, authority, status, prestige, or position—whether the area be economic, occupational, political, or religious—the higher the percentage of males. Thus the percentage of women in the work force in the United States has risen by 75 percent since 1900, but the percentage of women in the high-status area of medicine has declined during this period. In the Soviet Union, where medicine has a far lower status than it does in the United States, the majority of all doctors are women, but as one ascends from the level of practical medicine to the levels of authority the percentage of males rises until, at the top, males constitute the overwhelming majority.

It’s quite telling that even in the time since Patriarchy was first published, no one has managed to produce evidence of a truly matriarchal or even egalitarian society. Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas: every civilization of importance was founded and ruled by men. Gender is supposedly a “social construct,” yet it seems that men and women are “socialized” in exactly the same way across the globe, with the only exceptions being the occasional tiny, obscure village that’s still living in the Stone Age.

And people actually take feminist arguments at face value.

But it’s Goldberg’s discussion of human biology that really takes a sledgehammer to feminism. In his chapter on hormones, he explains that it’s the very physical nature of mankind that will forever ensure male domination. Goldberg vivisects feminist arguments like slabs of meat, including debunking the leftist proclivity of using exceptions to disprove rules (i.e. “Not all unmarried women become crazy cat ladies! My best friend has never been married and she likes DOGS!”):

Whenever a biologist speaks of men and women he is speaking in virtually absolute terms. For all intents and purposes every human being begins life as either a genetic male or a genetic female. When a biologist speaks of masculine and feminine characteristics he is almost always speaking in the statistical terms of probability. When one deals with probability of any sort he expects exceptions. The biological nature of height is not brought into question by the fact that some women are taller than some men or by the fact that within-sex differences in height are much greater than the between-sex differences in height. Few genetic females have testosterone levels approaching that which would be normal for a male; a woman whose testosterone level is even half that of a normal male displays undeniable signs of hirsuteness and general virilization. But even if 10 percent of all women had higher testosterone levels than 10 percent of all men one would not be led to the conclusion that the parameters of hormone distribution by sex are irrelevant any more than he would say that the fact that there are some six-foot women and five-foot men disproves the biological nature of human height… We speak of men being taller than most women because we observe that most men are taller than most women. This would all seem too obvious to even mention, but so many authors have pointed to exceptions to male-female differences in attempts to deny the importance of biology that it is worth introducing this point here.

Goldberg also finds time to rip apart John Money, the Josef Mengele of the American left, whose crackpot theories on gender-bending led to countless boys having their lives destroyed.

But just because mankind’s past was patriarchal doesn’t mean that its future will be, some may argue. Goldberg crushes this notion before it can get out of the gate. Because both men and women are natively inclined to seek male dominance, feminism will never achieve its goals because women will not allow it to:

Likewise, one who predicates political action on a belief that a society is oppressive until half of the positions of authority are filled by women faces the insuperable task of overcoming a male dominance that has forced every political and economic system to conform to it and that may be maintained as much by the refusal of women to elect widespread female leadership as by male aggression and ability. No doubt an exceptional configuration of factors will someday result in a woman’s being elected president, but if one considers a society “sexist” until it no longer associates authority primarily with men and until a woman leader is no longer an exception, then he must resign himself to the certainty that all societies will be “sexist” forever. Feminists make much of the fact that women constitute a slight majority of voters but in doing so make the assumption that it is possible to convince the women who constitute this majority to elect equal female leadership. This is a dubious assumption since the members of a society will inevitably associate authority with males if patriarchy and male dominance are biologically inevitable…

We can see the evidence of this today. Despite the hysteria about the GOP’s “War on Women,” the majority of married white women still vote Republican. Feminists try to tar traditional women as having “internalized misogyny,” yet by every metric of success—wealth, health, happiness—conservative women are beating the shit out of leftists. The kinds of women who swallow the feminist cant are societal deadweight: black baby mommas on food stamps, barren yuppies with more dogs than children, clueless college debutantes with six figures of student loan debt, the list goes on.

If they all got abducted by aliens tomorrow, nobody would even notice they were gone.

There’s more, way more in The Inevitability of Patriarchy, making it a one-stop shop for all your anti-feminist needs. For example, Goldberg destroys the foundations of modern feminism by turning its own logic against it: calling men and women “classes” in the Marxist sense makes no sense because individual men and women are dependent on each other for reproduction and survival, which completely goes against the Marxist conception of class. Additionally, Goldberg exposes Germaine Greer, Shulamith Firestone and other feminist polemicists as frauds, pointing out how books such as The Female Eunuch and The Dialectic of Sex either misrepresent or outright lie about scientific research in order to further their agendas.

Goldberg’s writing style is decidedly academic in tone, albeit with a dry humor that doesn’t pander to idiots. You can just sense the sheer joy he got from tearing these idiots apart. He’s also an equal opportunity offender, taking the time to point out—like I do—that feminism would have gotten nowhere had it not been supported by men (i.e draft-dodging hippie cowards who just wanted to get laid):

No doubt there are many reasons why some women will accept the illogic of feminism. Anyone wishing to explore this area should examine a contemporary America in which the rage of young women protesting professional discrimination is complemented by a revulsion toward professional roles by the men who are “supposed” to fill them. For an understanding of the forces that lead to the feelings of meaninglessness that so many men and women now seem to attach to their traditional roles perhaps one should begin not with the content of roles that were formerly capable of providing meaning, but with the failure of contemporary American society to inculcate in the society’s members the feeling that the society’s value system, its way of defining reality, is correct and meaningful. It is this ability, rather than the specific characteristics of the value system or the value system’s “humaneness,” that is the precondition for the society’s survival and that is relevant to the members’ current feelings of meaninglessness and the feelings of aloneness that are inevitable if the members have no meaning to share. When a society loses its ability to inculcate values its members fall into the abyss…

Men and women form a closed circle: what affects one will affect the other. The counterpart of the clit-swinging harridan is the effete onanist, the gelding, the slack-wristed pussyboy. Bitches create bitches. The boorishness of feminists is enabled and fostered by the slavering manbabies who suck up to them. John Scalzi, P.Z. Myers, Anil Dash: without them, feminism would collapse yesterday.

It is the sacklessness and cowardice of our fathers’ generation that created feminism; it will be up to us to slay the dragon.

If I were to critique The Inevitability of Patriarchy, it’s that its central argument is a bit on the light side. While Goldberg makes his point with aplomb, he spends too much time discombobulating individual feminist arguments for my taste. Admittedly, this sort of thing was necessary back in 1973, before a complete anti-feminist canon had been established, but it still seems like something of a diversion.

Aside from that, The Inevitability of Patriarchy is a must-read for men. No other book out there so effectively deflates and demolishes feminism. The empire never ended, the king never died. And he’s coming to take back what’s his.

Be afraid.

Click here to buy The Inevitability of Patriarchy.

Read Next: The Inevitability of Female Submission