America isn't a patriarchy

Part Deux

On the occasion of its birthday, I’m following up on my argument from last December: that America isn’t a patriarchy when compared to an actual patriarchy. By the way, saying things like this has a high cost. If you saw something original, a paid subscription is appreciated, because Substack dampens distribution of non-tribal writing.

The first installment

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In my parents’ extended families, and especially the Gujarati¹ side, girls were openly discriminated against. They were strictly controlled because a girl’s chastity must be preserved at all costs to her psyche under such a regime. I suffered under it because my grandmother passed it to my mother. I had no brother (until I found out about her son from a previous marriage), so I had no comparative case. But I can infer her likely treatment of a boy in comparison to the misery under which I grew up. I’m not sharing this to elicit sympathy, but rather to explain why I’m grateful for my birth here, where the liberal American culture enabled my freedom from a truly patriarchal regime.

I insist America isn’t a patriarchy — neither men nor women can directly constrain my choices like in the culture reproduced by my family in America. Not all Indians refuse to assimilate as my parents did, but I suspect it tracks class and educational attainment. Because if they can’t mesh with their own people across classes, they’re certainly not going to associate with other groups in their actual class. This sort of inclination is why inter-group class solidarity does not, and likely never will, work — America is, ironically, too heterogeneous to allow it.

I looked to the white girls at school with envy for being able to shave their legs and listen to American music and watch R-rated movies. Even something as simple as going to a party with boys present, not that I elicited any notice, so she needn’t have worried.

This is common for girls, especially those who grow up in America in immigrant families. Many I know had suffocating childhoods like mine (maybe minus the physical harm), but others also lived entirely double lives. One longtime Pakistani-descent woman friend married a white man, and her entire family shunned and barely spoke to her. Others would hide boyfriends that cohabited and, of course, never reveal that they’d had sex before marriage. That was the thing — my mother and most South Asian parents of any religious group see the girl’s virginity as honorific, or at least a source of shame if taken. This, of course, may not be the case for Gen Z kids of Indian immigrants and younger. But for the immigrants of the 60s and 70s….this was normal.

Louise Perry recently spoke with Ross Douthat of the New York Times about the sexual revolution, and, as is so often the case, they collapsed it into ambiguity —the ultimate PMC evasion: ‘no easy solutions.’ But then, the Times doesn’t exist to deliver potential solutions or even conclusions to the public. The sexual revolution they purported to discuss had a dual effect on me: the pill meant I could go to college and exercise my own will for once (even though I was compelled to live at home for most of it). Obviously, college means drinking, drugs, and sex. It’s a hedonistic context, and I wasn’t immune.

Women had to enter the workforce to fill the economic divide with their second income. That’s the utilitarian conclusion. The pill had to enable it by trading off a woman’s most fertile years. The pill and abortion’s legality freed women to live independently on a scale few other countries can boast. Regardless of why, it enabled so many life options; it’s no wonder many women in my generation and younger forego marriage entirely. Gen Z women in particular are going to have a low marriage rate, I predict, because of the general social anxiety crisis caused by the internet, not simply social media.

While I’m proud that America invented — among many others — the telephone, internet, airplane, automobile, light bulb, telegraph, refrigerator, polio vaccine, X-ray, and computer, technical progress has a social cost. It may have cost American identity itself precisely because our options exploded. Freedom requires bounds, like society requires norms.

Perhaps this is why Hindu ideas and symbols have permeated the majority culture and are thought to be of Buddhist origin, another beloved American philosophical strain (though unresemblant of Buddhism in the East). My birth would have been unlikely in any other country: my parents both landed in Chicago, my mother running away from a compelled marriage and landing in the ISKCON temple (which was its own problem that went unresolved), and my father being found as a vagabond by some ISKCON swami to be an actual missionary. That configuration of circumstances — two people from across India landed in the Midwest, proselytizing for the most recent Indian swami to convert legions of white people — is only possible in America.

Women were the beneficiaries of the above technical progress as much as men, because they’re the infrastructure enabling freedom to make something of oneself (or marry rich if that’s your goal, because we have no shortage of rich guys — to the detriment of most people). Women from less egalitarian cultures want to come here, not least because they can self-determine, and that’s why I’m grateful to be American. Marriage in India isn’t normatively about personal fulfillment, but utility and familial ties. Personality matters relatively little, not the only reason so many Indian women I know are in dissatisfying marriages. The couple is a unit secondary to the extended family. It’s not that companionate marriage is never found; it’s that the opposite is found more often than anyone would admit. My liberated life today would be impossible and my marriage likely unfulfilling. I will die on this mountain: America isn’t a patriarchy.

1. Gujaratis make up a large share of Indians in America and are likely to be small business owners.