In the traditional "patriarchal" relationship, the man provides financial and physical security while the woman provides sexual gratification and housework. Our law (the institutionalization of our "patriarchal" values by our "maledominated" political system) puts teeth into the enforcement of only the male half of this contract.
It is the male body which must perform for the female body under penalty of law. No matter how angry a breadwinner is with his wife, failure to share with her would be grounds for incarceration. Nine states have gone even further and become "community property" states where a wife is legally entitled to half the paycheck, regardless of which of her own "services" she has decided to withhold. She can, at any time, go on strike and refuse to cook or clean for her indentured breadwinner. Obviously, no wife could or should be forced to provide sexual gratification (although some states still require rigorous proof before punishing spousal rape).
A wife's control over her husband's body is so extreme that we invented "alimony." (Alimony is the requirement that a man's body continue to serve the needs of the woman even after their marital contract has officially ended and she no longer has an expectation, let alone a requirement, to lift a finger for him for the rest of her life.)
Laws dealing with domestic violence have effectively given women a new form of control over men's bodies. Preferring to err on the side of caution, judges now allow almost any woman to throw almost any cohabiting man into the street. Based on her experience, one family law attorney estimates that half of these restraining orders are issued upon false allegations.
As a comparison, consider the aftermath of Men Don't Tell, a CBS movie about a battered husband. Our local affiliate flashed the MR Inc. telephone number during a news program which followed the movie and, by the next afternoon, we had received over 60 calls from battered men. Only two of these men had been able to obtain restraining orders (the police refused to enforce one of them, even when they caught her on his property, and the other man is currently bedridden while recovering from one stab wound to his heart and two in his lungs).
Most of the men reported that police either do not respond to their calls, or arrest the man when they arrive. The acceptability of the male body as a target for female abuse is reinforced in the media, where female violence upon men is portrayed as either justified or downright humorous.
The "control over a woman's body" buzz words are usually associated with the buzz word of "choice." Legalized abortion gives women the right to say: "Just because a child was conceived, neither biology nor some man can force parental responsibilities on me against my will." Men in our society have no equivalent right. Once a child is conceived, the woman can force parental responsibilities upon him, demand his body work for her for 18 to 21 years, and throw his body in prison if it resists.
No area of the law more graphically illustrates "control over one's body" than the Selective Service System. In no other context do we find an entire gender being forced to register their bodies and surrender sovereignty over those bodies to another power. (It is irrelevant but, unfortunately, necessary to point out that women more than men favor men only registration and the majority of local draft board members are women.)
Given our supposedly patriarchal heritage, it seems contradictory to find so many matriarchal strains within contemporary life. But, if social scientists have failed to categorize correctly our own society, despite a wealth of available evidence, there is no reason to believe that they have correctly analyzed the very incomplete remnants of societies which have long since disappeared.
While it is easy to misinterpret our own society, it is even easier to misinterpret foreign cultures. Just as American feminism tempts us to interpret the veils on Islamic women as signs of their oppression, wouldn't Tahitiancentric feminists be equally tempted to interpret the blouses on American women as signs of their utter subservience? We might or might not be descended from a simple patriarchy, but we certainly have never lived in one ourselves.