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.
@tripu For example, we'd find that women's labor is devalued compared to men's labor, and we'd find a sharp divide in what's "acceptable" and "preferable" for the sexes to execute on.
@tripu You also cherrypick a specific set of dictionary senses that paint "Patriarchy" as exclusively a Handmaid's Tale. It's abnormal
E.g., Wikipedia offers: "Patriarchy is associated with a set of ideas, a patriarchal ideology that acts to explain and justify this dominance and attributes it to inherent natural differences between men and women. "
And...
You say that I “cherrypick a specific set of dictionary senses” for the term “patriarchy”, and offer three alternative definitions that supposedly “are more structural and less prescriptive”.
The problem is, you are cherrypicking even more, since none of the quotations you cite are listed as the first meaning, or appear in the first paragraph of those sources. This is not irrelevant in the context of our discussion, because the first entries in those dictionaries, and the first sentence in that encyclopedia, all give a very specific and prescriptive definition.
These are all the first entries/sentences from your own sources, verbatim (in bold, my emphasis):
👉 Wikipedia:
“Patriarchy is a social system in which men hold primary power and predominate in roles of political leadership, moral authority, social privilege and control of property.”
👉 American Heritage Dictionary:
“1. A social system in which the father is the head of the family. 2. Dominance of a society by men, or the values that uphold such dominance.”
“A form of social organization in which the father is the supreme authority in the family, clan, or tribe and descent is reckoned in the male line, with the children belonging to the father’s clan or tribe.”
