According to the EU "Statistics shows that for women between 16 and 44 years of age, domestic violence is thought to be the major cause of death and invalidity, ahead of cancer, road accidents and even war."
while this is not at all good, the choice of comparisons are poor given as cancer tends to get you after 44 and there aren't many female front-line soldiers in the EU's casualty-averse armed forces.
I think to a certain extent the traditional patriarchal family has been eroded by capital itself utilising women as wage-workers, which as conservatives frequently lament has undermined marriage as property-like relation as women are less dependent on their husbands incomes (the 'patriarchy of the wage' noted by dalla costa/james). there's clearly nothing inherently oppressive about consensual, long-term monogamous relationships per se.
With regard to sexual objectification, i don't think it's a) unidirectional or b) neccessarily a bad thing, insofar as fancying someone cos they look nice it doesn't inherently deny their subjectivity (more nuanced criticisms of objectification may have more merit)
A totally different kind of question. I'm reading this book on the Autonomia in Italy, one of the driving forces of which was feminist autonomous movements. There was conflict between them and workerist movements because the feminists believed women needed liberation as women, not just as workers.
Patriarchy is still a massive problem. According to the EU "Statistics shows that for women between 16 and 44 years of age, domestic violence is thought to be the major cause of death and invalidity, ahead of cancer, road accidents and even war." So to clarify, as my mate Tom puts it on his blog, "home (and a love relationship) is the most dangerous place where a women can be".
What's more, as one of Tom's correspondents mentions, we have a culture that views women as walking porn, and arguably (thought I don't quite get the argument - it comes from the feminist Autonomia) much of the quasi-feminist pro-choice argument has reinforced views of female sexual passivity.
All this notwithstanding, is it necessarily true - as these Italian groups concluded - that the traditional family unit per se is necessarily the female's object of revolutionary rage? Parallels were drawn with military conscription for workers. Of course, for many women worldwide this is the case - they are 'conscripted' to family: they're expected to marry, expected to be passive sexual objects and unpaid domestic workers, and expected to like it.
(In the west, arguably, the marriage expectations and domestic worker expectations are no longer prevalent, but the sexual objectification of women is probably more so than ever.)
But does all this mean that my wife has bought into patriarchy by choosing to marry me? Is there not something valid about life-long covenant, providing it's consensual?
Meanwhile, could anarchism do anything to ensure that family is not an arena of patriarchal power and control?