How come nearly every culture ever established patriarchy?

I can think of 2 potential reasons.
1) Women have to carry a fetus and go through some pretty difficult times to give birth. Men can continue working in the field while the woman is feeding and caring for the child.
2) On average men are bigger and stronger. I can’t help but think life in Afghanistan would be very different if women were bigger and stronger than taliban men.

In the Asian tribe you mentioned, are the women smaller, equal to, or larger than the men?

I really didn’t pay attention about the size of women and men. Your answer makes sense in a way, though.

But still, how come no community ever thought “Hey, it’s not about who is physically stronger…”

I think good ol’ testosterone plays a role, too. It creates a drive to dominate, a feeling of power and confidence. In general, women seem to care less about dominating and more about working out socially cooperative solutions.

Men are bigger and stronger and can easily overpower women, for the most part.

In some Middle-Eastern cultures, the girls/women select their husbands. One of the folkloric dances I do is a representation of that choice within a Bedouin community in Western Egypt.

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I agree that patriarchy seems to have been most common in recent history but I’m not 100% convinced that it was always that way. I consider this group and the links within this piece

It was, and is, a very mixed story in the Canadian aboriginal “community”: http://www.cbc.ca/news2/background/aboriginals/roleofwomen.html

I don’t think it was exactly true until we formed larger cultures. Male/female roles were driven by necessity and survivability during ancient times. The tiny blip in human history where women were seen as lesser is a mere transient that will die slowly but fall off sharply.

“The tiny blip in human history where women were seen as lesser”

Haha, hilarious!

Yes, we are talking about perhaps three thousand years out of several million and on into the future.

@ARE_you_kidding_me “three thousand years”.

ahem, from the Wiki: “The earliest signs of a process leading to sedentary culture can be seen in the Levant to as early as 12,000 BCE [...] The earliest proto-urban settlements with several thousand inhabitants emerged in the Neolithic. The first cities to house several tens of thousands were Memphis and Uruk, by the 31st century BCE [...] If the rise of civilization is taken to coincide with the development of writing out of proto-writing, the Near Eastern Chalcolithic, the transitional period between the Neolithic and the Bronze Age during the 4th millennium BCE, and the development of proto-writing in Harappa in the Indus Valley of South Asia around 3300 BCE are the earliest incidences…”

At least five thousand years of civilization – if you count it by the time writing was developed – not three. If you count in the culture before the writing system (and writing, by the way, has nothing to do with gender roles and patriarchy) it is fourteen thousand years.

Ok, still out of millions

so, all of recorded history up to and including the present day is a “tiny blip” to you?

Yes. We are infants