What Is a Gynocentric Society and Is the US One?
written by Ryan March 2, 2021
written by Ryan March 2, 2021
A gynocentric society is a community that prioritizes the life, health, and welfare of women over that of men. It’s a society that prioritizes giving women specific forms of power over men – specifically the power to live a longer life than men, the privilege to enjoy a safer lifestyle that impacts their health less.
In effect, a gynocentric society provides women with significant social advantages and privilege over men – so much privilege that around the early 1900s – around the time the women’s movement was just getting started – female life expectancy started to rise faster than male life expectancy.
If there is any single measure of what groups within a community enjoy more privilege and advantage, it’s life expectancy.
Is the US a Gynocentric Society?
How can the US match the description above of a “gynocentric society”, when according to modern feminists, most western societies live within a “patriarchy”?
Now, patriarchy as defined by feminists is slightly different than the dictionary definition. The primary definition from the Oxford dictionary is this:
“a system of society or government in which the father or eldest male is head of the family and descent is traced through the male line.”
However, there is a secondary definition that is more aligned with feminist ideology:
“a system of society or government in which men hold the power and women are largely excluded from it.
Of course, it’s best to go straight to the horse’s mouth. The following is the definition of
“patriarchy” as provided in Chapter 1 of a Women’s Studies 101 textbook titled Women’s Studies: Perspectives and Practices.
The definition in this textbook, as read by all impressionable college students who are unfortunate enough to find themselves sitting in a Women’s Studies 101 class is as follows:
“A key term for women’s studies writers and activists is patriarchy,
defined as a system where men dominate because power and authority are in the hands of adult men.”
So now we have two definitions – patriarchy and gynocentrism – which appear to be polar opposites of each other.
Both can’t be true, because the definitions negate one another.
So which truly represents modern society? Do men “dominate” because they have all of the “power and authority”,
or is it actually women who have all of the “power and authority”?
Let’s explore deeper.
What Is Power and Authority?
The claim by feminists that men hold power and authority in society is actually based upon the initial definition of what a traditional patriarchal society looks like.
“a system of society or government in which the father or eldest male is head of the family and descent is traced through the male line.”
In other words, feminists stipulate that because men used to be considered the “head of the family”, and typically held political or leadership roles in government and companies, that they then held the vast share of social “power and authority”.
But was and is this really true? First, we have to look at the population of men who actually hold positions of power in government and companies.
As of 2021, almost 30% of U.S. Senators and House Representatives are women.
As of the end of 2020, roughly only 7% of Fortune 500 company CEOs are female.
These are primary examples offered by most feminists when people ask for examples of how society is “Patriarchal”. How could anyone deny that men hold the vast power and authority in society when they hold most of the top leadership positions?
But if you take a step back, the larger picture starts to paint a different story. If “men” as a group hold most of the power, then one would expect that the majority of men in the world hold leadership positions, and that most women in the world are at the bottom of the social ladder — essentially they should make up the majority of the homeless population.
According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, the vast population of the homeless in the United States are actually men.
But how can mostly men make up majority of the most powerless population in society, if men as an entire gender hold a firm grip on overall power and authority?
The answer is far more complicated than feminists would like you to believe. In fact, the answer, as you’ll see, is that regardless of the gender of the very small population of people in power — every single one of them are driven by institutionalized and socialized biases to favor the welfare and privilege of women in society over men.
Power = Enjoying Better Social Outcomes
The truth is that a gender that has “power” would be the gender that holds the privilege of enjoying better educational outcomes, better health outcomes, and most importantly enjoying a longer life. Few could argue that the best measure of a privileged segment of society is the one that enjoys better health and a longer life.
Other measures of privilege and power – measures used by many activists to point out disadvantaged racial groups – include education, health, lifespan, and servitude.
Let’s examine each of these social outcomes to see which gender is actually the most disadvantaged in the United States.
Education: Women Fare Better
As of today, more women than men receive four-year bachelor degrees.
This tells us several things about which gender actually holds more privilege and power in this case.
- Women are able to afford college more than men.
- Girls are encouraged more than boys to attend higher education.
- Women have a quality of life that allows the flexibility to choose higher education.
Health: Women Receive Better Healthcare
We’ve covered a great deal of the social biases that negatively affect male health, and value female health higher. Review our article on Gender Bias in Healthcare for evidence proving that:
- There is more funding and opportunities for access to preventive care for women.
- There is far more research and research funding for health issues that affect women more than men.
- There are more social welfare programs targeting women’s health.
- Health insurance companies charge everyone the same even though women file more health insurance claims, while car insurance companies still get away with charging men more for auto insurance with the excuse that men file more claims.
- Doctors actually spend more time with women during doctor visits than they do with men.
One of the clearest examples of gynocentric bias in society is the media response to gender issues around COVID-19. Despite the fact that the male fatality rate from the virus is higher in men, most media headlines claim that “women fare worse”.
Another point in favor of gynocentric theory, and against patriarchy theory.
Lifespan: Women Started Living Longer After Industrial Revolution
Many people mistakenly believe that women have always lived longer than men. It’s a myth that women hold some biological advantage that has always helped them to live longer.
The reality is that men and women – when they both had a fairly equal burden of the demands of survival prior to the 1900s – lived exactly the same length of time.
There was a dip in male life expectancy during WWI, but that was only because men were forced to go off to war in order to protect society (see the section below on servitude). But it wasn’t until the start of the Industrial revolution – and the advent of modern appliances that made homemaking far less strenuous, that women started to enjoy the advantages of a better lifestyle.
Meanwhile, men started to suffer the disadvantages of going off to the factories and facing dangerous work conditions in order to manufacture those new gadgets and appliances.
It is interesting to note that male and female lifespans have started coming back together since the 1970’s, when more women started to head into the workforce – seeking “liberation”. Seeking the “privileges” that they were convinced by feminists of the era that men enjoyed over women.
Today, there are more women who are waking up to the fact that this one issue was probably one of the greatest feminist lies of the past century. In fact, we should call it: The Patriarchy Lie.
Servitude: Men Sacrifice Their Lives for Women
So far the overwhelming evidence shows that our society is actually a gynocentric one — it favors better outcomes for women over men. It favors women’s health and women’s lives over those of men.
There is no area that proves this more than which gender has always been, and is still, the gender that is convinced by society that their lives are less valuable and less important than the gender that enjoys greater privilege — the privilege to live.
While strides have been made in removing all of the traditional expectations women were forced to live up to, absolutely zero strides have been made to eradicate traditional expectations on men.
Today, conversations around “harmful traditional male gender roles” focus on terms like “toxic masculinity” – which is really only focused on behaviors that feminists have deemed are somehow harmful for women. They’ve developed words like “manspreading” or “mansplaining” to describe those things.
When anyone complains about a term like “toxic masculinity” feminists will claim that they’re only trying to help men stop behaviors that are harmful.
But if they really wanted to stop traditional male expectations that harm men, they would seek to eradicate all of the following traditional male expectations:
- The outdated and archaic selective service system that furthers the expectation that it’s the duty of men to literally die in order to protect women
- Expectations of men to pay for everything
- The belief that it’s men’s “duty” to do difficult duties for women like lifting heavy things or doing labor-intensive chores
- The expectation that in a crisis situation, men must put their bodies in the way of bullets or other dangers to protect any women around them
The reality is that it’s “chivalry” itself that is the most toxic part of masculinity for men. Those are the traditional male gender expectations that should be eradicated if we truly want to be fair and equal. If we really wanted to help men.
Gynocentrism Vs. Patriarchy
At this point it’s fairly obvious that there are far more examples proving that the United States and other western countries are in fact gynocentric, not patriarchal.
There is no greater privilege a social group can have than enjoying greater health and a longer lifespan. When you define power and authority has having power and authority over your health and your life – so you can enjoy better social outcomes than any other social group – that’s privilege.
And it should be no surprise that white women enjoy the best outcomes across all social measures – because they enjoy both female privilege and white privilege.
And that privilege comes directly from gynocentric biases in both past and modern society that truly put power and authority squarely in the hands of more of the female population than men.
