Well excuuuuuse me princess…

The assertions that "men have always been dominant," “men do not experience oppression in the way or scale women do historically,” or even “men have never been oppressed,” are all historically and anthropologically imprecise. Power throughout human history has been mediated primarily by class, lineage, and economic control, not by biological sex alone (Lerner, 1986). Most men in all known civilizations lacked authority, being peasants, laborers, soldiers, or slaves subordinated to elite hierarchies of both birth and office (Scott, 1990).

In ancient Egypt, women possessed independent legal and property rights; queens such as Hatshepsut (18th Dynasty) and Sobekneferu (12th Dynasty) ruled as Pharaohs with full titulary (Tyldesley, 1996). In matrilineal West African societies such as the Akan (Rattray, 1929) and among the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy) (Morgan, 1851), women held decisive roles in lineage, inheritance, and the selection or removal of male chiefs.

Throughout European feudalism, the overwhelming majority of men were serfs, legally unfree laborers bound to the estates of noblemen or ecclesiastical landlords. The feudal order did not empower "men" as a sex class but rather privileged noble birth (Bloch, 1939). Similarly, in imperial China, millions of peasant men faced forced conscription and corvée labor under dynastic systems ruled by male bureaucratic elites (Fairbank and Goldman, 1998).

More strikingly, numerous historical systems imposed direct and gendered subordination upon men themselves. In imperial China, court eunuchs were castrated to ensure their political subservience, a literal removal of male autonomy in service to dynastic stability. The Ottoman devshirme system forcibly extracted Christian boys to be converted and militarized as Janissaries, a state-managed gendered slavery. Among the Aztecs, ritual warfare (xochiyaoyotl) overwhelmingly targeted captured men for sacrificial death, showing the expendability of the male body. In modern conscription regimes, from the Napoleonic levées to industrial-age mass mobilizations, millions of lower-class men were compelled to die for national elites, a pattern of sex-specific coercion persistent across state systems.

Thus, while elite men frequently monopolized formal authority, this cannot be conflated with "male dominance" as a universal structural relation. Historical patriarchy was a hierarchy within the male sex as well as between the sexes, a pyramidal rather than binary order. Men as a sex were not the rulers of history; rather, history has often ruled through men, using them as laborers, soldiers, and instruments of elite power.

To claim that "men have always been dominant" is therefore not merely an oversimplification but a categorical error. It substitutes an elite fraction of men for the entire sex and erases both the agency of women and the subjugation of the majority of men under class and state domination. Or, to borrow the ironic tone of a certain 1980s adventurer, well, pardon us, princess, history is more complicated than that.

I don’t think any of that matters to you though, you’re just going to continue on and argue that these instances of oppression are somehow categorically different because you’re most likely a bigot yourself. I’d say good day but I don’t like bigots.

References

• Bloch, M. (1939). Feudal Society. University of Chicago Press.
• Fairbank, J. K., and Goldman, M. (1998). China: A New History. Belknap Press.
• Lerner, G. (1986). The Creation of Patriarchy. Oxford University Press.
• Morgan, L. H. (1851). League of the Ho-dé-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois. Sage and Brother.
• Rattray, R. S. (1929). Ashanti Law and Constitution. Clarendon Press.
• Scott, J. C. (1990). Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. Yale University Press.
• Tyldesley, J. (1996). Hatchepsut: The Female Pharaoh. Viking.
• Turnbull, S. (1991). The Ottoman Empire 1326-1699. Osprey Publishing.
• Hassig, R. (1988). Aztec Warfare: Imperial Expansion and Political Control. University of Oklahoma Press.