Sure, it was a bit unclear. The intent of my use of the term Patriarchy as I used it above was:
Is there such thing as an institutionalized Male-dominated system where women are deliberately suppressed for purposes of being more easily controlled for the sake of the males, or is it just a sort of natural development that most if not nearly all cultures worldwide have simultaneously developed into where males are dominant based on biological factors that are influenced by the economic and societal conditions which otherwise turn into a system where Males are in charge and women serve in "secondary roles"?
In other words:
Is the "Patriarchical System" which Feminists often claim is oppressing women an actual reality and construct with an institutionalized backing, or is it the product of a natural cultural development based on biological and social realities that various tribes and communities have simply adopted into their standard norms, which women themselves have accepted and mostly participated and advanced willfully?
This then goes into the next question of whether there's legitimate grounds for the claims that women were regarded as "property" and "Cattle" in a way which was against their wills and interests, based on the societal conditions of the time.
It's an extremely broad question, since it refers to ancient times as well as modern times, and I agree with Me Myself that it depends on the country.
I believe the most accurate depiction falls somewhere between your two options here. I don't view society in free countries today as typically being organized in a unified enough way to do something like, say, have most males deliberately suppress women to be more controlled, but at the same time I also don't view it as primarily based on biological and social realities. Rather, I view it generally as a set of interwoven social constructs, often unconscious ones, that typically lead to inaccurate assumptions about women and men and perpetuate from generation to generation.
There were certainly times in history, and in some places today, where patriarchy is institutionalized. Modern day Islamic regimes which you cited are examples, because some don't allow women to vote, or hold office, or drive cars, and others only recently have granted some of those rights. Many countries in the Americas and Europe only granted equal voting rights within the last century or so (with Switzerland having some parts where only men could vote until as late as 1991). There have been some other laws, like requiring woman to take the family name of the man upon marriage, which have generally been phased out over the previous decades. Another example is the Roman Catholic Church (with 1.2 billion nominal adherents) that expressedly disallows women from holding positions as priests, bishops, cardinals, or the pope. There's a Hadith that says women can't lead men in prayer, so in most places for the world's 1.5 billion Muslims, men control the religion.
But most I believe are more subtle, and less conscious. An example would be the trend of, when men and women get married, the woman typically replaces her family name with the man's. If they have a child, despite the mother carrying the child for nine months and giving birth, it's almost always given the father's family name (or, in some countries, both the names of the father and mother, of which only the father's is passed onto that child's child). There's nothing enforcing this; it's just generally how things are done, and most men I believe would be very uncomfortable if the opposite idea was even proposed (where they change their family name to be the same as that of their wife's, and then the child is given the mother's family name). This wasn't always the case everywhere; many cultures including several Native American tribes have a more matrilineal rather than patrilineal system. Some laws in the western world used to enforce patrilineal systems, but today in many places this is no longer institutionalized, and merely a cultural thing.
Another example is the medical profession. Prior to the mid-1800s in the United States, there were no female graduates from medical school. It's likely that some people may have viewed biological differences between men and women as being the basis for this. But by the early 1980's, up to about one quarter of graduates from medical school were women, and today, about half of graduates from medical school are women. So it wasn't a major difference in ability; it was something about culture, with incorrect assumptions about abilities, and this culture did change dramatically over time.
Today, there are still many positions of power that women are under-represented in, though generally gaining ground. There was a study by Credit Suisse in 2008 showed that corporations that have some women on their boards outperformed comparable companies that have all-male boards. Yet, women make up 15% of board seats in U.S. companies, and one third of companies do not have a single female board member (despite women making up a much larger portion of business school graduates than a mere 15%). Two more studies (by Catalyst and McKinsey & Co.) showed that in the Fortune 500, companies with 3 or more women on their boards outperformed even more, on average. Yet another study showed that, although fewer than 5% of Fortune 500 companies have a female CEO, the group of companies that do have a female CEO statistically outperformed the companies that have a male CEO. It's difficult to say what the cause of the outperformance of those mixed-gender boards is and female-led companies is, but either way, it doesn't seem that business ability is the crucial reason for the 85%/15% ratio of men to women in boardrooms across the country.
As Kerr pointed out, I do believe that the patriarchy that's in place can be harmful to boys and men in some cases, rather than just women. Some professions like nursing overwhelmingly consist of women. As Curious George pointed out with a thread in the political debates section, men are greatly underrepresented as teachers, and especially as teachers of young children. Gender roles can create a stigma for men that want to enter certain reputable professions, like nursing, or dental assistants, or teachers. The ideas that have floated around in cultures about how men are not or should not be as sensitive towards their children, or shouldn't show affection in certain ways, can be harmful to men. Boys that display feminine behavior are statistically much more policed by the adults in their life to confirm, than girls that display masculine behavior. Boys therefore have less freedom to express themselves in this regard, by having gender roles more strictly enforced on them as children.
So, I believe patriarchy still does exist as a set of social and in some cases institutional major influences on cultures around the world, and that its existence is harmful not only to women, but to many men as well. I believe it may disproportionally benefit the men at the top of political, social, and economic structures (with a stricter hold on governments, world religions, and corporations, certain professions like surgeons and big budget movie directors), while generally being harmful to most men and women that make up the bulk of society (such as putting downward pressure on women as they climb up through social structures, creating imbalances in things like family names for women, stigmatizing men that wish to pursue certain reputable, rewarding, and well-paying professions that are culturally reserved for women, forcing stricter and sometimes emotionally repressive gender roles on boys and men compared to girls and women, among other things.)
. I dont see how men would not gain anything from that.
