The Philosophical Criticism Of Patriarchy

The human society can not exist without men and women since the male and female genders form the base of our society. But, in the history of human development, the social status of male and female were not equal. For historical reasons, at least since humans entered civilized period, the male in society had been in an absolute dominant position and had the dominant privilege, not only in family life but also in social economic life, political life and cultural life etc.. Compared to the male, the female, although being the other half of humans, had been inferior to the male as "secondary " and in a position of being enslaved and dominated. The long historical accumulations of male dominance, not only had formed a complete theory of male authority, which advocated male as the center and was suitable for the male-dominated ism, but also had supported the morality as well as the values of the concept, thinking mode and behavior style, which mainly aimed at depreciating and sacrifice the female while worshipping and maintain the authority of the male.Although contemporary human life has already been totally different from the past, and men and women's social status has changed greatly, in our real life the male-dominated ism marks, still retains here and there: the idea of the male being superior to the female had been nominally repealed, but actually, big paternalism and gender discrimination are absent nowhere; although gender equality has already become a clear law, in deep thought of people and even in the actual public policy, women are still in the arrangement of "second-class citizens" in today's world; meanwhile, the female are still in marginalized situation in social economic, political and cultural life. To improve the status of women and to realize the ideal of equal status between men and women, it not only needs various objective conditions provided by realistic social economic and political development and progress, but also needs to completely criticize the male-dominated ism and needs people fundamentally to change the two genders concepts of the values and morality.This paper, from the angle of philosophy, has a serious analysis and comprehensive reading of male-dominated ism.First of all, through analyzing the cultural foundation of the existing male-dominated ism, a basic understanding of its cultural background can be achieved, and the more fundamental thing is that it can reveal the cultural roots with which the male-dominated ism can exist in contemporary society. It is difficult to achieve the equal rights and the equal status between men and women since it is an interests issue as well as a cultural issue.Secondly, the concrete content of male-dominated ism will be valued and analyzed separately from two aspects of gender values and ethics. The appearance of male-dominated ism has historical inevitability and the rationality, but in the root it has the final aim of the sacrifice of women's overall interests for showing disdain for women, and bounding, suppressing even imprisoning women, which not only seriously constraint suppressed women's development and their talent show, but also result in the loss of the female self independence.Third, on the one side, the absolute dominance from male-dominated ism for women not only causes a female alienation– women are alienated to fertility tools, housework machine, passive sex object and thoughtless sexy symbols, and the appendage of male-dominated ism's gender cultural value orientation and evaluation standard; on the other side, the male, coexisting with women as the other half, can not escape the fate of the alienation of themselves: the value of male gender stereotypes in male-dominated ism causes alienation in the male psychology, which makes them superficially strong but inner fragile, in another word, the male expect themselves like oak trees underfoot, but in a tall problem, they strongly push responsibility onto women, which is actually a performance of self degeneration. The value of male-dominated ism also virtually increased men's own burden, and they are alienated to partial men with one-sided pursuit of so-called masculine, so-called decency and fame and interests and such kind of external so-called successful performance.Fourth, from the dimension of history and reality, the formation and the continuation causes of male-dominated ism are analyzed in a profound way. The influence of male-dominated ism in real life has both historical causes and realistic conditions. As a result, in the philosophical criticism for male-dominated ism, the most important thing is to analyze it with the combination of historical and realistic conditions, and achieve the real transcendence of male-dominated ism on the base of overcoming its historical limitations and changing realistic social conditions such as social economic, political culture and so on.Based on the mentioned above, finally in this paper, an experimental exploration has been made, for achieving future harmony between the male and the female. And also, the starting point and goal of writing this paper is to achieve real gender equality and harmony: criticism from the philosophical theoretical level can awaken not only the female's right consciousness but also the real self subject consciousness, the male being included. Therefore, conditions of theories and concepts can be created for the final realization of gender's harmony and people's free all-around development.