Patriarch Games:How Men Came To Rule.

Catalhoyuk in southern Anatolia, modern day Turkey, was a large Neolithic and Chalcolithic proto-city which existed for about one thousand years from 7500BC onwards. As far as archaeologists and anthropologists can tell, it seems that, in Catalhoyuk, men and women led very very similar lives. They did the same jobs, ate the same food, and were buried the same way. Relics of countless female figurines have been found. Even the height difference was minimal.

To the science journalist, broadcaster, and author Angela Saini, who visited Catalhoyuk while researching her new book about the patriarchy and its historical roots, this is evidence that the patriarchy did not come about because men, on average, are a little bit bigger and stronger than women. If that popularly held belief, and one she's keen to rebuff, was true we'd have ended up with the biggest and strongest men as world leaders. Which is not how anyone would describe Rishi Sunak, Joe Biden, or even Vladimir Putin. Two of them much smaller than the average man and one of them ageing and frail.

That's what Angela's talk, last night - for Skeptics in the Pub - Online, was all about. The Patriarchs - How Men Came To Rule The World sets out its stall pretty clearly from the off but it wasn't exactly the talk I'd expected but instead an interview, a chat even, between Angela and our host, Kat Ford from Merseyside Skeptics.

This had its pros (a more conversational nature, obviously) but it also had its cons in that sometimes it became a little digressive as is the nature of conversation. Angela, however, was very good at making sure she got the subject back on track whenever things looked in danger of drifting too far away or getting stuck in some kind of conversational cul-de-sac.

She began by reiterating the point I've made above. That anthropologists are generally in agreement that humans have not always had a male dominated society. What Angela wondered and what's she been researching bases itself on that widely held premise and asks, if so, how did the patriarchy come about? How did we get here?

Some people, out of a sense of fairness, crave equality but others, particularly those in privileged situations, crave inequality because it may give them status. Or at least the illusion of status. For these people, I find, sometimes their success is defined most vividly by the failure of others. It's not enough for them to succeed, others must fail so they can do so. I believe it's what they call a 'zero sum game'. A Venn Diagram with no intersection whatsoever.

With this in mind, we should not make the mistake of assuming that things, that our lives, will always improve or that progress will always be made. The last few years of global politics should have made it abundantly clear that we're not given chances to step forward and advance ourselves, we have to fight for them. We have to make the case for them as both the political and religious right have been doing so successfully over the last decade or so.

Though the roots of male dominated societies don't seem to extend as far back as Anatolia nine thousand years ago, the story is quite different in ancient Athens. Society there was very misogynistic, women had deep rooted and distinctly gendered roles and were not allowed to vote and the poet Hesiod (who was around, roughly, between 750BC & 650BC), a contemporary of Homer's, wrote deeply sexist material in which he blamed woman for pretty much all of the world's ills.

Most of us have met a bitter divorcee, usually in a pub, like that. But ancient Athens held a bit more sway than the guy propping up the bar of your local Wetherspoons and it became the blueprint for most modern European democracies. Patriarchal systems were exported alongside democracy and capitalism.

Even though recent translations, some of them by women - not something that happened much in the past, have found different interpretations (even of Hesiod) and discovered female writers and poets from the ancient Greek world, this has not been enough to change the received wisdom, now propagated by the controversial (for money) media commentator Jordan Peterson that men represent order and women represent chaos. An idea that doesn't even survive the most basic scrutiny.

Angela Saini is interested in fundamentally challenging the historical narrative (as well as, I'd imagine, the batshit chaos dragon theory espoused by Peterson) that the past was always, always, more patriarchal. That's simply not the case and it's observable in fairly recent history. Away from Europe and the Middle East, many societies were not organised in a patriarchal fashion until relatively recently when those ideas were imported into those societies. Often part and parcel of huge colonial projects.

Patriarchy, globally, may wear different clothes, adapt to local customs, speak different languages, and worship different Gods but none of that means it is either biologically inevitable (Angela mentioned an episode of Star Trek where Captain Kirk and the gang visit a female dominated planet - the reason the females dominate is simply because they're bigger than the men) or, in any way, just the natural order of things.

The two closest living relatives to us human mammals are the chimpanzees and the bonobos. Both chimps and bonobos have slightly larger males than females but while chimp society is dominated by the males, the female bonobos take the upper hand.

Angela Saini talked, briefly, about how the word 'patriarchy' can sound monolithic, cabalistic even. As if some shadowy group of men meet in secret and plot to keep women down. But, of course, that's not the case. As with everything in life, it's far messier than that. Thousands of years of ideas (many of them completely wrong) and self-interest have led to systems of power and systems of thinking falling into place that essentially act as a grift to keep women cooking and cleaning for men. Looking after men.

I could do with someone to look after me. I'm useless at looking after myself although, some how, I'm still here. But that's because I was brought up in that culture and I didn't question it. Very probably, in fact almost certainly, because it was beneficial to me.

Angela spoke about how patriarchy can reinvent itself and remodel itself for different times and challenges. While most may see the recent reversal of the Roe v. Wade abortion ruling in America to be a highly regressive move, Angela Saini disagreed. She's not a fan of it. Far from from it. But she sees it not as a regression but as a reinvention.

A new kind of populist patriarchal move and one that finds support with many young women. Angela lives in America now and she spoke of how many women she'd seen supporting, even celebrating, this rolling back of their own reproductive rights, this enclosure of their own bodies. Have they been co-opted into a hierarchical, and deeply misogynistic, system that ultimately fails them or are they, as one commentator suggested last night, suffering from some kind of cultural Stockholm syndrome? Who knows?

But as long as there are enough women supporting the patriarchy then things won't change as quickly as I think most women (and men) I know would like them to. Other problems regarding progress come in the form of social media (Angela spoke about leaving Twitter after receiving nearly endless racial abuse and having her family threatened on the platform). If women raise their heads above the parapet either in public, or online - essentially the same thing in many ways, they are harassed, abused, and threatened by an army of cowardly trolls and that's part of the problem.

As is the fact that often well meaning people try to counter these voices by arguing with them online which results only in the negative, regressive voice being amplified (I know, I've made this silly mistake). Peripheral Twitter trolls (some of which are almost certainly bots) should not be amplified. Do not feed the trolls. Ignore them. Block them. Don't let them drag you down.

I felt the talk could have carried on a bit longer but Skeptics in the Pub - Online are, usually, pretty rigid about timings so that was pretty much it (although we also managed to touch on the Iranian Revolution of 1979 (and the one that's happening now), the Bolshevik movement in the USSR, gendering skeletons, and female hunters in the Peruvian Andes) except for a fairly lengthy Q&A session that took in everything from Boudicca, Donald Trump, Hippocrates, Margaret Thatcher, and Iain M. Banks to gender reveal parties, the Barbie movie, weaponised incompetence, ancient Mesopotamia, and male guarding (both in human and pigeon populations)!

It had been an interesting and educational talk, and a pleasant evening in front of the computer, but I have a feeling that Angela Saina's book will be even better. As for the future of the patriarchy. Well, I've no idea.