By the beard of prophets, the patriarchy also has a beard.
If old (white) men have the most say and essentially determine what happens, then customs, values, and societal norms are based on the ideas and preferences of these old (white) men. Nowadays, you would think that patriarchy gets shaved but no, it still lingers around just like the tasteless and corny old boys' club jokes.
On 30 July 1955, the German Football Association (DFB) unanimously decided at its annual assembly that "...our clubs shall not be permitted to establish or include women's football divisions in order to prohibit our clubs, so long as they are in possession of their own pitches, from making them available for women's football matches as well as ensuring our clubs prohibit referees and line judges from directing women's football matches... this competitive sport is essentially alien to the nature of women... In the fight for the ball, female grace disappears, body and soul inevitably suffer damage and the display of the body violates decency and modesty." The DFB lifted the women's football ban at its annual assembly only in 1970, thus slightly trimming the
Beard of the Patriarchy
.
Women often perform unpaid work in the care/reproduction sector, or work for extremely low wages in the textile and electronic manufacturing industries in the Global South. There are endless manual tasks to be performed in these areas, which means that their work cannot yet be automated. This will not change in the foreseeable future, since the
Beard of the Patriarchy
has no interest in it at all: free care/reproduction work will continue to be carried out by women in secret, as will the underpaid manufacturing labour needed to enable men in freshly ironed shirts to devote themselves entirely to their glossy, fully automated machines.
And to the woman God said: "I will cause you much pain when you are pregnant; you shall bear children with pain; and your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall be your Lord... And to Adam he said: ... cursed be the field for your sake... In the sweat of your face you shall eat your bread..." Then the man sits in the shade under a tree, strokes his
Beard of Patriarchy
and exclaims: "Pain and work in the field are not mutually exclusive. So get to work, woman."
Public spaces are mostly occupied and designed by men. At the same time, women are pushed back into private spaces and the
Beard of the Patriarchy
does everything to keep them there. Do the following homework as soon as you leave the exhibition: At different times count the men and women in the streets, cafés, subways etc. for 5 minutes. After you have finished counting, spend a few minutes observing who is taking what space or who is avoiding whom. Make a note of your results and complete this experiment a total of ten times. Discuss the results with two women and two men and analyze your findings.
The German automotive industry has the most magnificent
Beard of the Patriarchy
. Across all employees, only 14% of the workforce do not identify as male. The more important the department, the more male the workforce becomes. For example, 92.5 % of the employees in the research and development departments are male, resulting in only 7.5 % of the employees identifying with different gender. Until 2010, not a single woman was represented on the boards of German automakers, and in 2018 only 4 out of 24 board members were female, a mere 16.7%. The automobile, and with it the promotion of motorised individual transport, is therefore not a "neutral" technology - it is completely dominated by men.