The online incel community has taken a break from blaming women for their ongoing failures in life to issue a collective tantrum over Netflix’s new drama Adolescence, which dares—dares, mind you—to portray incel culture as the toxic, rage-filled echo chamber it so demonstrably is.
It’s exactly why reactionaries have spent decades demonizing feminism: it keeps men defending the patriarchy that damages them too (although not as much as other people).
We need another big wave of feminism, this time learning all the mistakes from previous decades
The rising movement of questioning gender identity from and alongside the queer folk might hopefully be another nail in patriarchy’s coffin
Tbh, I think it’s the opposite. The focus is - ultimately - on individual outcomes rather than substantial societal changes. I think it’s the Zion in Matrix at the moment: the way the status quo has designed its own opposition should look like.
I’d argue patriarchy is a bad model for the social dynamics regarding sex. It’s just another rebranding of Marxist class conflict onto something other than economic class, and as a consequence it works about as well as that something actually resembles (or alternately is a proxy for) economic class. This means it works OK for race in the US (except for Asians, who get to be functionally white in some cases) but it it’s a bad fit for sex.
It’s why there are so many apologetics around patriarchy for all the myriad cases where reality just doesn’t seem to align with what you would expect based on it a priori. “The patriarchy hurts men too” is probably the most common, though you’d be hard pressed to argue “Capitalism hurts billionaires too” or “white supremacy hurts whites too” in the same kind of fashion. Because the moment you stop looking at the fraction of a percent of the top performers the idea that society was created by and for men to benefit men above women first and foremost just doesn’t align with observation.
What seems to be a more fitting model to me is malagency, the idea that agency is inappropriately assigned based on the sex of the party in question. Specifically that in general women are assumed to have less agency than they otherwise might while men are assumed to have more agency than they otherwise might. This fits neatly with lots of observations - ideas presented by a man being given extra credit or consideration than the same coming from a woman (because he’s seen as more responsible for his ideas than a woman might be), the very highest tiers of things having over-representation by men but also when men are also over-represented at the bottom (for example, rough sleeping homeless) because they are seen as more responsible for their own successes and failures as well, or why the criminal justice system treats men much worse than women (women are seen as less responsible for their transgressions). Etc, etc.
I take your point, but look at the way power is arranged in our society from the makeup of the ownership class to the way unpaid labor usually falls to women.
I do like the framing, but I see it as evidence of the patriarchy and how it damages men too and I don’t think it’s a difficult argument to make. Women have only recently, within my mother’s lifetime, been able to get their own credit lines separately from their husband. They recently lost their hard-won reproductive freedoms. They are far more likely to be killed by their long-term partners than are men. Furthermore, the issues that you bring up where men are worse off is also due to the expectations this system puts onto men, and who is worthy of charity & support.
There has been a long and sustained project to keep women from the levers of power through subjegation, and the perpetrators are the reactionary men who vote, terrorize, and argue that women shouldn’t be the equal of a man. Their ideology comes from a long western tradition that is thousands of years old. It seems in my mind incongruous to suggest that there was not a patriarchy in Roman times, when a paterfamilias could legally kill anyone in his family (including his wife), or during the middle ages or Renaissance when women were kept from political or religious offices (with minimal exceptions), or today when women are legally restricted from moving between States due to pregnancy. There is certainly a continuum between what constitutes patriarchy or not, but I don’t think it’s time to slide over to the “not” side yet, especially as the hits keep coming.
I do appreciate your well-thought out post though, and will certainly incorporate your points into my position in the future.