To clarify, this is the critique behind my initial post, which proved somewhat controversial:
I. Mainstream #feminism today tends to see “patriarchy” everywhere and (consistent with that view) focuses almost solely on issues affecting more women than men, and on differences of outcome where women seem to do worse than men.
II. Definition of #patriarchy (in bold, my emphasis):
“Social system in which the father or a male elder has absolute authority over the family group; by extension, one or more men […] exert absolute authority over the community as a whole.”
— Britannica.
“Social organization marked by the supremacy of the father in the clan or family, the legal dependence of wives and children, and the reckoning of descent and inheritance in the male line.”
“Society in which the oldest male is the leader of the family, or a society controlled by men in which they use their power to their own advantage.”
— Cambridge English Dictionary.
III. According to normal definitions of the term (and also because there are important issues affecting more men than women, and differences of outcome where men are clearly doing worse than women) prosperous liberal democratic countries today are obviously not patriarchies.
IV. When confronted with this error, #feminists often bend and distort the definition of “patriarchy” to make it a synonym of “sexism”, and (consistent with that redefinition) say that the patriarchy is also hurting men, and that ending the patriarchy will benefit men, too.
V. That redefinition of “patriarchy” is unnecessary and confusing. Why conflate two words with very very different meanings? Can we then say that the Taliban and the old tribes of hunter-gatherers were merely “sexist”, instead of outright “patriarchal”? Should we then lump together under the same category truly retrograde societies where a few old men are the only people legally entitled to exert absolute authority and to inherit and all women are legally subservient, and extremely egalitarian 21st-century Sweden? The redefinition is (conscious or unconsciously) disingenuous.
VI. In spite of all those issues, bona fide #feminists often accept this bizarre framing for the sake of moving the conversation forward and making actual progress against sexism, naïvely assuming that finally we are all now talking about the same thing (ie, fighting sex-based discrimination, wherever it occurs).
VII. After making this concession, inevitably it so happens that the original denouncers of the patriarchy get back to focusing only on issues affecting more women than men, and on differences of outcome where women do worse than men — ignoring or dismissing all male issues, just as before.
VIII. The result is that all participants in the discussion have now agreed that our modern, developed, equal-under-the-law societies are patriarchies (I invite you to re-read the three definitions above) while at the same time having made zero progress against actual sexism of any kind. In fact, participants make negative progress, because this swallowing-the-patriarchy move generates a lot of guilt and resentment.
I find this recurrent pattern dishonest, counterproductive, and irritating.
@tripu Reading your material, it really seems like the entire thrust of it is, "Not all men, don't say it's all men."
Which doesn't seem like a novel or useful contribution to the conversation.
If that’s your takeaway, I must have done a really bad job at explaining myself.
What does “not all men” even mean?
Which of the steps in my argument do you disagree with, and why?
@tripu You did.
Step III says: "According to normal definitions of the term (and also because there are important issues affecting more men than women, and differences of outcome where men are clearly doing worse than women) prosperous liberal democratic countries today are obviously not patriarchies."
And yet, if we were to device a series of observational tests which ask, "What structure would patriarchal societies take?" we'd find a lot of positive results.
“If we were to device a series of observational tests which ask, ‘what structure would patriarchal societies take?’ we’d find a lot of positive results.”
“Structure” is too vague a term, but I like this general idea. 👍 I agree that this would be a useful heuristic to “test for” #patriarchy.
To avoid biases, the experiment would have to be conducted having fixed, ex-ante, a few parameters and criteria. Otherwise, results could be interpreted to support pretty much any hypothesis.
In that spirit, here I suggest some improvements:
1️⃣ How many of those “structures” must exist for a society to qualify as “patriarchal”? ie, what if we find just two or three of those structures? or, what if we find many, but most of them are of low importance, or circumscribed to very specific areas of life?
2️⃣ For the sake of consistency, we should also ask “what structure would patriarchal societies NOT take?”, and test for that, too. Positive findings here would weaken our confidence in the hypothesis, namely that the society being examined is indeed “patriarchal”.
3️⃣ All participants in the test should commit to considering any conceivable aspect of life or measure of well-being as supportive of the patriarchy hypothesis iff statistically women do worse than men on average. And conversely, any area where statistically men do worse than women on average contributes to undermine the hypothesis. This is to proscribe the insidious sleight of hand of explaining that women on average earn less money than their male colleagues because “men exert power and control in society”, and also that boys on average fail school more often than their female classmates… because “men exert power and control in society” (!).
WDYT? Agree on the terms before conducting the “experiment”?
