I suppose there's a bit of a trend to follow here in questioning the sanewashing of ideals, especially on the left. But come on, if you're going to dunk on feminists as a group, there are feminist thinkers. You could engage directly with one of them and their ideas. Pulling some definitions and attacking popular usage of a term out of context feels unrepresentative of how you usually treat concepts you disagree with.
You could look at someone like Bell Hooks, who adds in a dash more nuance in her definition:
“a political-social system that insists that males are inherently dominating, superior to everything, and everyone deemed weak, especially females, and endowed with the right to dominate and rule over the weak and to maintain that dominance through various forms of psychological terrorism and violence.”
She wrote a whole book on the harm that patriarchy does to men in her book “the will to change”. She calls out the violence men do towards other men, the stunting of emotional expression and ultimately a lack of true openness to love and acceptance, among other things, as part of the cost of the pursuit of dominance. She also talks about the population that gets excluded and includes men who fail to live up to the dominance model of masculinity. Whether through effeminacy or simply by failing to gain power over other men.
Or you could look at popular religious ideas like complementarity. Billions of Christians who all believe that God is a male and that men are meant to rule over their wives. Or wives taking their husband's names. Or patrilineal naming of children. These reflect deeply held ideology, boosted by world spanning institutions over millennia.
I think there's plenty of room to argue which median individual suffers more or lives a worse life, but that’s kind of tangential to patriarchy. More men could suffer, and more acutely from patriarchy, than women, and that would still be consistent with a system that defines masculinity around dominance and control. It would just need to punish “weak men” as a class more than “women”. You could even say that is true in pockets, if you consider class, race, queerness. I mean, if there is a winner of the oppression Olympics, it is the poor trans woman of color, right? The group expected to, but furthest from achieving manhood through dominance.
I'd love to read your perspective on “patriarchy” as an idea, I just don't think this addresses a particularly strong or interesting version of the concept. I'd love to see you go deep instead of superficial.
That you would consider Bell Hooks’s definition of patriarchy to be “nuanced” is laughable. It’s pretty much just “men are domineering bad guys” dressed up in critical theory jargon
I agree; a philosopher critiquing feminism should have something insightful to say about Irigaray, Kristeva, Butler, etc., rather than churning out Intellectual Dork Web-level stuff. But that kind of care takes time, and you're not going to be able to crank out a high volume of content doing that.
My own posture is ambivalent. I shrug at, let us say, Jessica Valenti's resentment toward men, yet I also enjoy the philosopher's life. In the old days, men were professionally radioactive if they weren't family men by age thirty.
I mean, I agree, but the commenter above was suggesting that she ought to have been engaged with in response to a post arguing against the existence of a patriarchy, so obviously it's fair to ask what the relevance of doing so would be.
The relevancy is that it’d be (considerably) more charitable than citing strangers on the internet, especially super polemic ones. If not Butler then whoever is able to best defend the view that western patriarchy exists today.
Look, I don't think any of the major figures of the feminist movement are going to be able to proffer good, empirical arguments for the existence of the patriarchy in the 21st-century West. They'll either be decades/centuries out of date, or else they'll make a bunch of broad, sweeping assertions about gender-based subordination with no evidence, or else they'll point out various disparities that disfavor women without weighing them against any counterbalancing disparities that disfavor men, or without considering any benign/non-discriminatory explanations for the disparities. If you disagree, just point me to your favorite defense that avoids these pitfalls. Preferably by Irigaray, Kristeva or Butler.
In what way? The halls of power are still heavily dominated by men, we've rolled back bodily autonomy over reproductive health and the US just elected, at a minimum, a serial sexual abuser.
On the violence front, the US just had an election and "your body my choice" started tending almost immediately afterwards. And that was just a public escalation of the kind of rhetoric women have been getting in private for years.
On the dominating front, everything going on in the manosphere, the whole idea of grinding and being an alpha. It's all dominance games. That in a climate with stagnant wages and even more to lose out on if you can't make it to the top.
Heck, the whole shift to tradition and complementarity boils down to "women = weak and should only take care of kids+home, men = strong and do everything else. So men should rule". And that's built into the faith of billions.
Hooks is one of a number of prominent feminist thinkers that might be referenced (I brought her up because she is well known for identifying men as victims of patriarchy). Past any of her specific writing, my wider point was to ask a philosophy heavy substack to engage with source material rather than internet gestalt. Hoping for a deeper critique than "I haven't read her work, but a snippet didn't sound like my personal lived experience and so I'm happy to reject all broader arguments because of that"
I find the idea that I am in any real sense "endowed with the right to dominate and rule over the weak and to maintain that dominance through various forms of psychological terrorism and violence" by virtue of my gender completely unrecognizable. I think that if I tried to do this to (say) a woman, I would at best face massive social censure as a disgusting misogynist and my victim showered with sympathy as a deserving survivor; at worst, I would go to jail. (And these are good things, obviously.)
I imagine you'd probably agree with this assessment of what ordinary men like me can and can't reliably get away with, but would nevertheless point to high-profile examples of celebrities or politicians making it through scandals along these lines. However, I don't think that's a healthy way of thinking about things. OJ Simpson got away with murdering his wife and went on to continue his fabulously wealthy life; I don't think we should draw from this that we live in a Black Murderer Supremacist society that "endows black people with the right to rule over whites and maintain that dominance through violence (specifically murder)." Instead, to assess the Black Murdererarchy claim, it would be a lot better to look at how well most black people who try to emulate OJ's feat do, and how stacked most institutions are against them. Do we pay lots of taxes to try to put them in jail forever, or even execute them? Do most judges sympathize with them and give them relatively diminished sentences compared to other offenders? Are employers across the country champing at the bit to hire them if they get released? Do they end up with better lives overall than non-murderers, or white murderers? Maybe OJ was a fluke.
Your comment has additional examples of things like Nick Fuentes saying "your body, my choice" and the manosphere being explicitly misogynistic, but these guys seem pretty marginalized. The Nick Fuentes thing, for example, went viral precisely because so many people on the internet were reacting to it with abject horror and disgust, not because there's some broad societal consensus that that slogan is great. I'm sure if I go back to 2012 I could find "kill all men"-type hashtags trending, but I don't think that meant we lived in a matriarchy back then. It would just be narrow cherrypicking.
Isn't it true that Donald Trump - who will soon arguably be the single most powerful man in the world - has nominated at least four men with long histories of abusing women to positions of prestige and power in the last month? It's hard to square that with your claim that men using violence to control weaker women is always met with significant censure, let alone legal punishment.
I think political appointments are a singularly bad weathervane, because partisanship means hundreds of millions of people will be primed to automatically disbelieve whatever the allegations are, misogyny or otherwise. That's compatible with the allegations still being a large net negative for the subset of society that does believe them, and which in fact reports on them constantly rather than sweeping them under the rug. Trump endorsed Mark Robinson for a state governorship even after it was revealed he secretly posted in the past in support of slavery, Holocaust denial, etc.; I don't think mainstream Republicans actually like those things, they just refuse to believe any left-wing media due to extreme tribalism.
I realize you could immediately say that "willingness to disbelieve sexual assault allegations, even if you condemn them once believed" is another symptom of patriarchy, but again, I think the nature of epistemic polarization with regards to political journalism is the real culprit here, and that the gendered aspect is essentially incidental. If we really want to study how people feel about sexual assault, we should look at broader trends in the vast majority of contexts which are less polarized.
Sure, I'm not saying that every man could escape consequences for abuse like Trump's appointees can, or that his choices by themselves prove patriarchy is real. But I do think we should avoid the equally simplistic narrative that says allegations like this are always devastating - especially since, apart from the high-profile examples we tend to be aware of, it absolutely is the case that men from every walk of life routinely abuse women with no serious repercussions.
>In what way? The halls of power are still heavily dominated by men, we've rolled back bodily autonomy over reproductive health and the US just elected, at a minimum, a serial sexual abuser.<
"The halls of power are dominated by men"--What does this mean? That men are over-represented among politicians? The author already addressed this stupidity! Jews are also over-represented among the rich, famous, and powerful. Do you accept this as evidence of a system of "Jewish supremacy" pervading our culture and invisibly conspiring to oppress non-Jews?
The other parts of this statement express the notion that losing political fights is tantamount to points being scored in some kind of gendered paytreearkee vs feminist conflict. Would you accept that, if Kamala Harris had won the election, this means that paytreearkee has been defeated and now the US is a maytreearkee because it elected a leftist brown woman? I doubt it!
Further down in this comment you cite trolling and social media trends as evidence of your sociological theories while asking the author of this piece to "engage with source material rather than internet gestalt." Just zero critical thinking here what so ever.
"The author already addressed this stupidity! Jews are also over-represented among the rich, famous, and powerful. Do you accept this as evidence of a system of "Jewish supremacy" pervading our culture and invisibly conspiring to oppress non-Jews?"
The error here is the Jews referred to are not Jews in the sense that women are women. Women are easily distinguished from men. Likewise, Orthodox and Hasidic Jews are also distinguishable, like the Amish. They tend to be insular and by doing so have retained their identity down through the centuries. These people are NOT rich, famous or successful in our culture.
Most of the successful Jews referenced above are assimilated Jews (think Jon Stewart). They will cease to be Jews over a few generations. In order to become successful Jews coming from insular cultures had to assimilate into the dominant culture.
There is a reason for this. To have a successful society we need common cultural touchpoints. Immigrants coming here have to agree to abandon elements from their culture of origin that don't fit in here. For example, one of our Korean scientists felt strongly that his daughter should marry a Korean. Another Korean scientist told him, this is America. Here your daughter and mine will marry whoever they chose. I don't care if my daughter marries a white or black man as long he treats her right. But if it is important to you that your daughter marry a Korean, then you should go back to Korea. And he did.
Women desiring to be successful cannot follow this model They cannot assimilate into men. And they are intrinsically part of our society. The question becomes why do they have to become men to be able to have the success men have? The reason why is the Patriarchy.
In their revolutionary pretensions the left habitually conflates nature and culture. Naturally, we live in a "patriarchy" (in a sense). Socially and culturally we live in the opposite.
But beyond that, the entire proposition is made nonsensical when it is realized that in a modern industrial society the overwhelming majority of men -- the supposed beneficiaries of patriarchy -- hold no power whatsoever. This realization alone should be enough for any clear-thinking person that the real power structure of our society is not predicated on sex at all -- and that it is meaningless to talk in such terms unless we are waging an apocalyptic war on nature itself.
The existence of disparate outcomes (eg, more men in positions of power) does not necessarily imply the existence of discrimination. Otherwise, your examples are pretty much all vibes (except for abortion, which is a complicated issue that doesn’t provide any evidence for sexism as opposed to just social conservatism—for one thing, many millions of women are anti-abortion). How about you provide examples of ways in which society actually discriminates against women? I doubt you can point to many at all. In fact, women get affirmative action in many fields, meaning our society cares about helping women so much we actively discriminate against men!
>I suppose there's a bit of a trend to follow here in questioning the sanewashing of ideals, especially on the left. But come on, if you're going to dunk on feminists as a group, there are feminist thinkers.<
"Feminist thinkers" are even worse than stereotypical low-effort online leftists, because at least the latter aren't so unbearably pretentious about what they believe. This is like responding to an article dunking on flat earthers with "come on, there are flat earth scientists you know, you haven't responded to their research in enough detail!"
>You could look at someone like Bell Hooks, who adds in a dash more nuance in her definition:
“a political-social system that insists that males are inherently dominating, superior to everything, and everyone deemed weak, especially females, and endowed with the right to dominate and rule over the weak and to maintain that dominance through various forms of psychological terrorism and violence.”<
The "nuance" here appears to be nothing more than additional bombast and hyperbole, with the result that it's even more retarded and even less connected to reality than the CNN definition used by the author. It absolutely astounds me to see this sort of total drivel posted unironically and being upvoted. I can't think of anything anyone could've possibly said which would serve to better prove the author's point. The rest of your comment is filled with exactly the same shallow, hare-brained tropes that the author already criticized in his original post, such as the insane troll logic that violent crime perpetrated against men is somehow further proof of "paytreearkee." Talk about an unfalsifiable premise!
Also, it's bell hooks. The name is deliberately stylized in lowercase. You should know this as an apparent scholar of feminist literature!
I am often critical of the feminist movement, and I care deeply (and write often) about men's problems. But this post is much shallower than your usual content, and I honestly suspect you will look back on it in a few years and wince (as I do about many things I wrote about gender relations back in the day). You ignore millennia of history and centuries of rich social science to invent your own definition and rubric, in service of an edgy headline that results in people talking past each other.
A patient feminist with more time than I have today could make a compelling line-by-line rebuttal to your point-scoring exercise - but as even you sense and admit, this exercise is an unproductive distraction. Patriarchy is not about subjective assessments of who is "better off" or better treated. It's not about a "weighted average" you pulled from thin air.
Patriarchy is about *power.* Wikipedia calls it "a social system in which men typically hold authority and responsibility while also excluding women from it." Men have held, and still hold, disproportionate power over women at the household, workforce, community, and political levels for centuries. For centuries, this has been rationalized by subconscious, unscientific, socially constructed (and often, religiously reinforced) mindsets about gender roles and capacities. It is simply absurd to pretend that these deeply embedded mindsets and ensuing power imbalances have disappeared. It may not be as evident on your campus, but it's a lot more evident in Oklahoma, or most of the rest of the country.
There are many obvious ways in which men retain disproportionate power in our society. Men dominate the upper echelons of business, the military, and the court system. Congress is 72% male, a record low; in my lifetime it was 94% male. There has never been a female president, and another female candidate just lost to a transparently sexist and sexually abusive candidate. In fact, the female candidate's much-mocked mannerisms were directly shaped by the unequal pressures on women to constantly smile, laugh, be agreeable, and not assert themselves too forcefully. In huge swaths of the country, men are still expected to be breadwinners and make decisions for the family, while women are expected to (and do) disproportionately cook, clean, and take care of the children. Some of this inequity is voluntary, but much of it is socially pressured or ingrained.
Your response to this conceded imbalance of power is that it "doesn’t seem enough to make there be a patriarchy." Oh, well...I guess that settles it? And your entire analogy to anti-semitism doesn't fit at all. If Jews had in fact held overwhelming majority power over most of the world for most of human history, indelibly shaping our institutions and mindsets in ways that work to the continued disempowerment of non-Jews, saying so would not be the crackpot conspiracy theory it is today, it would be the truth. It seems to me your actual point is "some feminists on the internet are sometimes guilty of Motte and Bailey, or misuse/exaggerate the extent of patriarchy today." Which is true, but not what you titled this piece.
Feminists will be the first to tell you that patriarchy hurts men in many ways. I've been toying with a post myself suggesting that in 2024, patriarchy arguably hurts men most, for some of the reasons you provide here. It deprives women of power, and deprives men of happiness. But that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. If someone tried to dismiss some weighty philosophical term ("there is no utility," etc) so nonchalantly, you'd quickly surmise that they don't know what they're talking about. People who've engaged with these issues at a deeper level than social media are going to get the same impression from this one.
This is a trivial redefinition. Old people are also the majority of politicians and upper level executives in jobs. Doesn't entail that young people are oppressed. You should just list the oppression that occurs rather than some disputed proxy for oppression.
>There are many obvious ways in which men retain disproportionate power in our society.
This is not obviously wrong or a negative.
>If Jews had in fact held overwhelming majority power over most of the world for most of human history, indelibly shaping our institutions and mindsets in ways that work to the continued disempowerment of non-Jews
I'm not sure about BB but I personally dispute that contemporary institutions and mindsets work to the disempowerment of women.
>If Jews had in fact held overwhelming majority power over most of the world for most of human history, indelibly shaping our institutions and mindsets in ways that work to the continued disempowerment of non-Jews, saying so would not be the crackpot conspiracy theory it is today, it would be the truth.<
Going by your own justification of "paytreearkee," this is exactly the case! Jews are disproportionately wealthy and powerful, being significantly over-represented in the upper echelons of society. If you applied your standards consistently, you would agree with anti-semites that we live under Jewish supremacy. And the author pointed all of this out in the article already!
Do you think Jews have in fact held overwhelming majority power over most of the world for most of human history, indelibly shaping our institutions and mindsets in ways that work to the continued disempowerment of non-Jews?
You seem to be saying that because historically patriarchy existed, it must still exist. Obviously this is wrong. Otherwise, your only evidence for its continued existence is the disparate representation of men in positions of power. I simply reject the idea that disparate outcomes necessarily imply discrimination. Perhaps women are less interested in the sacrifices that come with acquiring and holding positions of power, and/or more interested in other things like family. Perhaps men, especially on the tail ends of the skill/intelligence distributions, are simply better (there are more high IQ men than women, so to the degree IQ helps acquire positions of power, we would expect a purely meritocratic system to overrepresent men).
People always comment on the tendency of the right towards conspiracy theories, but as this article shows the left is just as, if not more, guilty of this style of thinking. When it comes to differences in outcome, the left always assumes there is some structural conspiracy behind the inequality, rather than even considering that there might be an inequality in ability that explains the observations. This is true when it comes to both the racial and gender grievance-mongering that is endemic among the modern left.
Hanania argues that the Left’s “conspiracies” are more sophisticated but the Right’s conspiracies are plainly loony/dumb. I agree but I also think that many Lefties who argue for the existence of institutional racism, patriarchy, etc. are often just mid wits repeating talking points, so not much brain power is at work. They are wordcels more so than penetrating sociologists.
Yeah, I don't think belief in patriarchy and the like are true conspiracy theories or are even *that* irrational. That's simply because the conditions for their truth are incredibly nebulous, and moreover there are ways of defining relevant terms under which they're technically true. Feminists can always retreat from "society oppresses women in favor of men" to "men are overrepresented at the top" or whatever when convenient, but there's no real motte to retreat to from "Democratic leadership is running a child sex trafficking ring at the Comet Ping Pong pizza restaurant in Washington, DC." At least, not a motte I often see taken.
> When black people were the victims of Jim Crow laws, there was not debate about whether they were institutionally oppressed.
This just isn’t true. The Supreme Court’s rulings repeatedly denied that there was systemic discrimination against black Americans. Look at Cumming v. Richmond, for example.
As one of your female followers who is agnostic and maybe even a bit against assuming there is significant structural patriarchy in West, I have to disagree with you on the way to argue against it.
I think when challenging the concept of patriarchy, there are much more productive paths than a point by point comparison of well-being of different sexes as you said yourself because this comparison can lead to counterintuitive outcomes. Many of the points you mentioned such as men having shorter life expectancy, higher rates of being victims of war and crime, and even higher rates of being victims of rape apply to Afghanistan society too, although there are many laws specifically discriminating against women and an overwhelming intuitive understanding that Afghanistan IS a patriarchal society. If we want to follow this point by point comparison then we need to discuss how many underage boys being sexually abused is equivalent of how many girls banned from school which is in my opinion a crude practice.
I had a paragraph making that point, that so long as you need to do the point scoring to assess whether there's patriarchy there is not patriarchy. But I also argued that even if you do the point scoring, it's not obvious which sex is treated better.
Yes and honestly, that was the best paragraph of it. It might need more elaboration in order to become a convincing argument but I thinkbit was worth the effort
You don't actually know any women who are willing to speak honestly with you, do you?
This is such a horrible take that I am not immediately unsubscribing only because you are very young, and I have some hope that you will come to see the error of your thinking on this topic, and soon, and will post about it.
I call bullshit on this one. Men are widely known to be more physically violent generally. Looking at intimate partner murders, the first reference for the US I found had a male-female-victim ratio of 4 murdered women per 1 murdered man. I would consider the possibility that David Benathars "The Second Sexism" is not an unbiased source.
Velopulos, C. , Carmichael, H. , Zakrison, T. & Crandall, M. (2019). Comparison of male and female victims of intimate partner homicide and bidirectionality—an analysis of the national violent death reporting system. Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery, 87 (2), 331-336. doi: 10.1097/TA.0000000000002276.
You confuse the ability to inflict harm with the incidence of initiation and participation in partner violence.
Results. Almost 24% of all relationships had some violence, and half (49.7%) of those were reciprocally violent. In nonreciprocally violent relationships, women were the perpetrators in more than 70% of the cases. Reciprocity was associated with more frequent violence among women (adjusted odds ratio [AOR]=2.3; 95% confidence interval [CI]=1.9, 2.8), but not men (AOR=1.26; 95% CI=0.9, 1.7). Regarding injury, men were more likely to inflict injury than were women (AOR=1.3; 95% CI=1.1, 1.5), and reciprocal intimate partner violence was associated with greater injury than was nonreciprocal intimate partner violence regardless of the gender of the perpetrator (AOR=4.4; 95% CI=3.6, 5.5).
I don't understand your point. The thing you quoted states men are more likely to inflict injury than women so isn't that non-equality when the violence gets severe? In the most severe case (murder) I don't think it's very useful to talk about reciprocity.
Based on what I know about males and physical violence generally it seems unlikely that romantic partnerships would be an arena where the large gender imbalance present in all other areas of life would reverse to the point of equivalence.
In the study women were reported to have committed half the reciprocal violence and 70 percent of the non-reciprocal violence, and you don’t see a problem. My ex was very violent,all and I never reciprocated, but if I had she would have suffered grievous harm, and you would have blamed me. I don’t think it’s wise to hit someone who can easily deck you, practically speaking. But the female violence in this huge study doesn’t bother you at all. It’s not a problem even when non-reciprocal. Males should just take it.
Social concepts like patriarchy or white supremacy or class struggle or "Jews control the world" are used when the user wants to enhance their faction's political power, which requires that the "identified problem" of the concept is a group of people that will always exist and can be easily identified and different groups of people can be convinced to "organize" (translation: grant us political power) against.
In the patriarchy case, you will sometimes see people say "the patriarchy is bad for most men too!" and I unironically applaud them for trying to be fair about it and expand the tent, but it accidentally reveals the main issue with the "identity focused moral framework" concept - if that's true, then the real problem we should honestly care about is not "patriarchy" but "people who use power to harm people of any category."
This therefore explains the reason that prominent anti-patriarchy people do not actually act on that "bad for men too" claim in any real way - because if the "real" problem is "powerful people doing harm" then that implicitly (potentially) indicts them as well, because by definition, as "people attempting to gain power" they might get (or already have!) power and might use it for Bad.
Explicit example: if I am a prominent anti-patriarchy politician, I might pass a law mandating more women in college. This gets me (no matter my gender) support from anti-patriarchy voters. But, if I am a prominent anti-bad-things politician (a superset of "patriarchy", and by definition a bigger problem) then I have to actually ensure that my law helps ameliorate some harm (rather than just being intended to strike against the patriarchy), doesn't hurt some other people, or takes focus/resource away from some other more widely beneficial law, or enhance my/others' power in a way that might be abused later on. It's obvious which ideology is more helpful to me getting votes and avoiding criticism.
My assertion is that if your animating ideology is "anti-patriarchy" instead of "anti-doing bad things with power", then your goal is simply factional power, rather than... reducing bad things.
Pre-emptively: if you claim that I just want to ignore or downplay the plight of the victims of patriarchy/white supremacy/the rich/evil Jewish cabals, then I claim that you're doing it even worse, because the objective language definition of your ideologies excludes and downplays the concerns of any other group that is left out of the headline, or may indeed be nominally part of them.
I claim that people who focus on patriarchy, because it is definitionally a my-faction power-enhancing concept, are inevitably going to:
1) downplay the harms suffered by men (even men who are extremely not-well off)
2) ignore the harms suffered by groups not on the sex/gender axis (People from Oregon! Soccer players! Namibians!)
3) be incentivized to not consider the harms of well-intended anti-patriarchy laws/policies/norms, even to women
Patriarchy is not bad because it's bad for women, it is bad because it is bad for people. If you want to help women, but choose to do so by focusing on patriarchy (or any other inter-identity-competition focused concept) then my accusation is that you are being insufficiently devoted to the cause of actually preventing harm to women by artificially limiting the target of your ire AND the appeal of your cause.
True. I think the issue of “doing bad things with power” is more inherent and prevalent in the state, which seems to be a good reason to be an anarchist.
It's frustrating that throughout this article, you mention repeatedly that mere disproportionate outcomes or overall better or worse treatment isn't enough to establish the existence of a [whatever group]iarchy... but then seem to ignore the obvious conclusion that should come from that observation, which is that that feminist claims about the existence of a patriarchy might not be based on that sort of tallying. Because personally, I'm not aware of any serious feminist philosophers who argue that patriarchy is just the sum total of all the ways women's lives are bad in any way compared to men's lives, or that we would automatically be in a matriarchy if it happened to be that the average woman's life was 1% better than the average man's. Rather, the claim is that there is a *specific arrangement of social power in favor of men* that is expressed through various specific social, economic, and political arrangements. That's totally compatible with the claim that women's lives are better than men's in some ways, or even better overall. I'd be happy to come on your channel again sometime and debate/discuss this, because I think it's an area where a lot of your criticisms are just orthogonal to the basic idea as classical feminists defend it.
- Why do we care more about domestic violence when a woman is the victim? Why do we care more about sexual violence and rape commited by men on women?
Very simple: men are on average significantly stronger, taller, and bigger than women. The vast majority of women is utterly unable to physically hurt a man, the vast majority of men is perfectly capable of physically overwhelm pretty much any woman. If the average man commits domestic violence on the average woman, he may kill her. If the average woman commits domestic violence on the average man, she may bruise him at worst. If a man tries to sexually assault a woman, he will almost always be strong enough to have his way. I cannot even see how a woman could sexually assault a man. That is why there are no violence shelters for men. To shelter them from what exactly?
- Conscription stuff:
Pretty much all western countries have abolished conscription decades ago. The ones who keep it have strict neutrality policies and allow for alternative service, like Austria. South Korea is the only country where male conscription is arguably an injustice. Also, the reason men are drafted and not women is the exact same one mentionned above. Men are just stronger than women and they are just more adapted for military service.
Like, I am not even fundamentally disagreeing with your post. I agree that the primary victims of male violence are other men, and that the disparity in outcomes feminists are mad about - the 'wage gap' or the lack of women in STEM - are the consequences of individual choices and preferences rather than oppression. But we can make that argument without preaching to the choir with tired MRAs talking points.
Interesting read. I only gave it a quick pass but I don't believe the focus on anti-female violence in spite of higher male victimization has much to do with male expendability. Or at least, I can come up with a good justification for that discrepancy.
There's a lot of overlap between demographic indicators of high risk for perpetration and victimization (in America: black, male, young, low-income). That suggests to me higher male victimization is primarily because men seek out dangerous situations (start fights, join gangs, etc.). No-one is seeking out men as easy targets. Women are really more vulnerable and I think people instinctually understand this.
I guess men are still disadvantaged in that they have danger seeking brains. I also don't suppose there's a lot of room a the utilitarian framework for blaming victims for their suffering.
On a related note: I wouldn't be surprised if lower male life expectancy also came down to poor choices. I recognize I'm just being lazy here. There are surely studies on this.
I stopped reading after a bit because I think others are right that the premise just sort of fundamentally misunderstands what the discussion is about. The claim is that there exists an unjust social hierarchy between men and women, or something like that--which is why it's called the patri*archy*. If somebody says Emperor Palpatine stands in an unjust hierarchical relationship with the rest of us, it's just beside the point to argue that it's hard to say whether he's better off than me in some comprehensive sense, given that he's a decrepit old man and I'm not, etc. Indeed, the claim is even compatible with Palpatine being worse off then me *precisely because* he stands in such a relationship--he has to worry about people betraying or assassinating him, he has to be conscious about what image he presents all the time, running the Empire is probably a lot of work and really stressful, etc. (The latter point is the moral of Shooting an Elephant, by Orwell, sort of.)
Yeah, this is not good at all. Respond to actual feminists, not stuff you made up.
Patriarchy is about power, not outcomes. It is a structural property of societies. It is completely possible to have a patriarchy where outcomes for men are systematically worse. Military service is an EXCELLENT example of this. Patriarchy historically reserves military roles for men. Is this good for men? No, not generally, especially once artillery becomes a thing. But it is still patriarchal.
Try actually engaging with the opposing view. This is all just chasing a red herring.
I suppose there's a bit of a trend to follow here in questioning the sanewashing of ideals, especially on the left. But come on, if you're going to dunk on feminists as a group, there are feminist thinkers. You could engage directly with one of them and their ideas. Pulling some definitions and attacking popular usage of a term out of context feels unrepresentative of how you usually treat concepts you disagree with.
You could look at someone like Bell Hooks, who adds in a dash more nuance in her definition:
“a political-social system that insists that males are inherently dominating, superior to everything, and everyone deemed weak, especially females, and endowed with the right to dominate and rule over the weak and to maintain that dominance through various forms of psychological terrorism and violence.”
She wrote a whole book on the harm that patriarchy does to men in her book “the will to change”. She calls out the violence men do towards other men, the stunting of emotional expression and ultimately a lack of true openness to love and acceptance, among other things, as part of the cost of the pursuit of dominance. She also talks about the population that gets excluded and includes men who fail to live up to the dominance model of masculinity. Whether through effeminacy or simply by failing to gain power over other men.
Or you could look at popular religious ideas like complementarity. Billions of Christians who all believe that God is a male and that men are meant to rule over their wives. Or wives taking their husband's names. Or patrilineal naming of children. These reflect deeply held ideology, boosted by world spanning institutions over millennia.
I think there's plenty of room to argue which median individual suffers more or lives a worse life, but that’s kind of tangential to patriarchy. More men could suffer, and more acutely from patriarchy, than women, and that would still be consistent with a system that defines masculinity around dominance and control. It would just need to punish “weak men” as a class more than “women”. You could even say that is true in pockets, if you consider class, race, queerness. I mean, if there is a winner of the oppression Olympics, it is the poor trans woman of color, right? The group expected to, but furthest from achieving manhood through dominance.
I'd love to read your perspective on “patriarchy” as an idea, I just don't think this addresses a particularly strong or interesting version of the concept. I'd love to see you go deep instead of superficial.
That you would consider Bell Hooks’s definition of patriarchy to be “nuanced” is laughable. It’s pretty much just “men are domineering bad guys” dressed up in critical theory jargon
I agree; a philosopher critiquing feminism should have something insightful to say about Irigaray, Kristeva, Butler, etc., rather than churning out Intellectual Dork Web-level stuff. But that kind of care takes time, and you're not going to be able to crank out a high volume of content doing that.
My own posture is ambivalent. I shrug at, let us say, Jessica Valenti's resentment toward men, yet I also enjoy the philosopher's life. In the old days, men were professionally radioactive if they weren't family men by age thirty.
What, uh, is Judith Butler’s best argument for the existence of the patriarchy?
Who gives a shit? She had nothing to do with the development of the concept and is a third-tier figure at best.
I mean, I agree, but the commenter above was suggesting that she ought to have been engaged with in response to a post arguing against the existence of a patriarchy, so obviously it's fair to ask what the relevance of doing so would be.
The relevancy is that it’d be (considerably) more charitable than citing strangers on the internet, especially super polemic ones. If not Butler then whoever is able to best defend the view that western patriarchy exists today.
Look, I don't think any of the major figures of the feminist movement are going to be able to proffer good, empirical arguments for the existence of the patriarchy in the 21st-century West. They'll either be decades/centuries out of date, or else they'll make a bunch of broad, sweeping assertions about gender-based subordination with no evidence, or else they'll point out various disparities that disfavor women without weighing them against any counterbalancing disparities that disfavor men, or without considering any benign/non-discriminatory explanations for the disparities. If you disagree, just point me to your favorite defense that avoids these pitfalls. Preferably by Irigaray, Kristeva or Butler.
Hooks’ definition sounds nothing like modern western society to me. Isn’t this even more evidence that we don’t live in a patriarchy?
In what way? The halls of power are still heavily dominated by men, we've rolled back bodily autonomy over reproductive health and the US just elected, at a minimum, a serial sexual abuser.
On the violence front, the US just had an election and "your body my choice" started tending almost immediately afterwards. And that was just a public escalation of the kind of rhetoric women have been getting in private for years.
On the dominating front, everything going on in the manosphere, the whole idea of grinding and being an alpha. It's all dominance games. That in a climate with stagnant wages and even more to lose out on if you can't make it to the top.
Heck, the whole shift to tradition and complementarity boils down to "women = weak and should only take care of kids+home, men = strong and do everything else. So men should rule". And that's built into the faith of billions.
Hooks is one of a number of prominent feminist thinkers that might be referenced (I brought her up because she is well known for identifying men as victims of patriarchy). Past any of her specific writing, my wider point was to ask a philosophy heavy substack to engage with source material rather than internet gestalt. Hoping for a deeper critique than "I haven't read her work, but a snippet didn't sound like my personal lived experience and so I'm happy to reject all broader arguments because of that"
>In what way?
I find the idea that I am in any real sense "endowed with the right to dominate and rule over the weak and to maintain that dominance through various forms of psychological terrorism and violence" by virtue of my gender completely unrecognizable. I think that if I tried to do this to (say) a woman, I would at best face massive social censure as a disgusting misogynist and my victim showered with sympathy as a deserving survivor; at worst, I would go to jail. (And these are good things, obviously.)
I imagine you'd probably agree with this assessment of what ordinary men like me can and can't reliably get away with, but would nevertheless point to high-profile examples of celebrities or politicians making it through scandals along these lines. However, I don't think that's a healthy way of thinking about things. OJ Simpson got away with murdering his wife and went on to continue his fabulously wealthy life; I don't think we should draw from this that we live in a Black Murderer Supremacist society that "endows black people with the right to rule over whites and maintain that dominance through violence (specifically murder)." Instead, to assess the Black Murdererarchy claim, it would be a lot better to look at how well most black people who try to emulate OJ's feat do, and how stacked most institutions are against them. Do we pay lots of taxes to try to put them in jail forever, or even execute them? Do most judges sympathize with them and give them relatively diminished sentences compared to other offenders? Are employers across the country champing at the bit to hire them if they get released? Do they end up with better lives overall than non-murderers, or white murderers? Maybe OJ was a fluke.
Your comment has additional examples of things like Nick Fuentes saying "your body, my choice" and the manosphere being explicitly misogynistic, but these guys seem pretty marginalized. The Nick Fuentes thing, for example, went viral precisely because so many people on the internet were reacting to it with abject horror and disgust, not because there's some broad societal consensus that that slogan is great. I'm sure if I go back to 2012 I could find "kill all men"-type hashtags trending, but I don't think that meant we lived in a matriarchy back then. It would just be narrow cherrypicking.
Isn't it true that Donald Trump - who will soon arguably be the single most powerful man in the world - has nominated at least four men with long histories of abusing women to positions of prestige and power in the last month? It's hard to square that with your claim that men using violence to control weaker women is always met with significant censure, let alone legal punishment.
I think political appointments are a singularly bad weathervane, because partisanship means hundreds of millions of people will be primed to automatically disbelieve whatever the allegations are, misogyny or otherwise. That's compatible with the allegations still being a large net negative for the subset of society that does believe them, and which in fact reports on them constantly rather than sweeping them under the rug. Trump endorsed Mark Robinson for a state governorship even after it was revealed he secretly posted in the past in support of slavery, Holocaust denial, etc.; I don't think mainstream Republicans actually like those things, they just refuse to believe any left-wing media due to extreme tribalism.
I realize you could immediately say that "willingness to disbelieve sexual assault allegations, even if you condemn them once believed" is another symptom of patriarchy, but again, I think the nature of epistemic polarization with regards to political journalism is the real culprit here, and that the gendered aspect is essentially incidental. If we really want to study how people feel about sexual assault, we should look at broader trends in the vast majority of contexts which are less polarized.
Sure, I'm not saying that every man could escape consequences for abuse like Trump's appointees can, or that his choices by themselves prove patriarchy is real. But I do think we should avoid the equally simplistic narrative that says allegations like this are always devastating - especially since, apart from the high-profile examples we tend to be aware of, it absolutely is the case that men from every walk of life routinely abuse women with no serious repercussions.
>In what way? The halls of power are still heavily dominated by men, we've rolled back bodily autonomy over reproductive health and the US just elected, at a minimum, a serial sexual abuser.<
"The halls of power are dominated by men"--What does this mean? That men are over-represented among politicians? The author already addressed this stupidity! Jews are also over-represented among the rich, famous, and powerful. Do you accept this as evidence of a system of "Jewish supremacy" pervading our culture and invisibly conspiring to oppress non-Jews?
The other parts of this statement express the notion that losing political fights is tantamount to points being scored in some kind of gendered paytreearkee vs feminist conflict. Would you accept that, if Kamala Harris had won the election, this means that paytreearkee has been defeated and now the US is a maytreearkee because it elected a leftist brown woman? I doubt it!
Further down in this comment you cite trolling and social media trends as evidence of your sociological theories while asking the author of this piece to "engage with source material rather than internet gestalt." Just zero critical thinking here what so ever.
"The author already addressed this stupidity! Jews are also over-represented among the rich, famous, and powerful. Do you accept this as evidence of a system of "Jewish supremacy" pervading our culture and invisibly conspiring to oppress non-Jews?"
The error here is the Jews referred to are not Jews in the sense that women are women. Women are easily distinguished from men. Likewise, Orthodox and Hasidic Jews are also distinguishable, like the Amish. They tend to be insular and by doing so have retained their identity down through the centuries. These people are NOT rich, famous or successful in our culture.
Most of the successful Jews referenced above are assimilated Jews (think Jon Stewart). They will cease to be Jews over a few generations. In order to become successful Jews coming from insular cultures had to assimilate into the dominant culture.
There is a reason for this. To have a successful society we need common cultural touchpoints. Immigrants coming here have to agree to abandon elements from their culture of origin that don't fit in here. For example, one of our Korean scientists felt strongly that his daughter should marry a Korean. Another Korean scientist told him, this is America. Here your daughter and mine will marry whoever they chose. I don't care if my daughter marries a white or black man as long he treats her right. But if it is important to you that your daughter marry a Korean, then you should go back to Korea. And he did.
Women desiring to be successful cannot follow this model They cannot assimilate into men. And they are intrinsically part of our society. The question becomes why do they have to become men to be able to have the success men have? The reason why is the Patriarchy.
In their revolutionary pretensions the left habitually conflates nature and culture. Naturally, we live in a "patriarchy" (in a sense). Socially and culturally we live in the opposite.
But beyond that, the entire proposition is made nonsensical when it is realized that in a modern industrial society the overwhelming majority of men -- the supposed beneficiaries of patriarchy -- hold no power whatsoever. This realization alone should be enough for any clear-thinking person that the real power structure of our society is not predicated on sex at all -- and that it is meaningless to talk in such terms unless we are waging an apocalyptic war on nature itself.
The existence of disparate outcomes (eg, more men in positions of power) does not necessarily imply the existence of discrimination. Otherwise, your examples are pretty much all vibes (except for abortion, which is a complicated issue that doesn’t provide any evidence for sexism as opposed to just social conservatism—for one thing, many millions of women are anti-abortion). How about you provide examples of ways in which society actually discriminates against women? I doubt you can point to many at all. In fact, women get affirmative action in many fields, meaning our society cares about helping women so much we actively discriminate against men!
>I suppose there's a bit of a trend to follow here in questioning the sanewashing of ideals, especially on the left. But come on, if you're going to dunk on feminists as a group, there are feminist thinkers.<
"Feminist thinkers" are even worse than stereotypical low-effort online leftists, because at least the latter aren't so unbearably pretentious about what they believe. This is like responding to an article dunking on flat earthers with "come on, there are flat earth scientists you know, you haven't responded to their research in enough detail!"
>You could look at someone like Bell Hooks, who adds in a dash more nuance in her definition:
“a political-social system that insists that males are inherently dominating, superior to everything, and everyone deemed weak, especially females, and endowed with the right to dominate and rule over the weak and to maintain that dominance through various forms of psychological terrorism and violence.”<
The "nuance" here appears to be nothing more than additional bombast and hyperbole, with the result that it's even more retarded and even less connected to reality than the CNN definition used by the author. It absolutely astounds me to see this sort of total drivel posted unironically and being upvoted. I can't think of anything anyone could've possibly said which would serve to better prove the author's point. The rest of your comment is filled with exactly the same shallow, hare-brained tropes that the author already criticized in his original post, such as the insane troll logic that violent crime perpetrated against men is somehow further proof of "paytreearkee." Talk about an unfalsifiable premise!
Also, it's bell hooks. The name is deliberately stylized in lowercase. You should know this as an apparent scholar of feminist literature!
I am often critical of the feminist movement, and I care deeply (and write often) about men's problems. But this post is much shallower than your usual content, and I honestly suspect you will look back on it in a few years and wince (as I do about many things I wrote about gender relations back in the day). You ignore millennia of history and centuries of rich social science to invent your own definition and rubric, in service of an edgy headline that results in people talking past each other.
A patient feminist with more time than I have today could make a compelling line-by-line rebuttal to your point-scoring exercise - but as even you sense and admit, this exercise is an unproductive distraction. Patriarchy is not about subjective assessments of who is "better off" or better treated. It's not about a "weighted average" you pulled from thin air.
Patriarchy is about *power.* Wikipedia calls it "a social system in which men typically hold authority and responsibility while also excluding women from it." Men have held, and still hold, disproportionate power over women at the household, workforce, community, and political levels for centuries. For centuries, this has been rationalized by subconscious, unscientific, socially constructed (and often, religiously reinforced) mindsets about gender roles and capacities. It is simply absurd to pretend that these deeply embedded mindsets and ensuing power imbalances have disappeared. It may not be as evident on your campus, but it's a lot more evident in Oklahoma, or most of the rest of the country.
There are many obvious ways in which men retain disproportionate power in our society. Men dominate the upper echelons of business, the military, and the court system. Congress is 72% male, a record low; in my lifetime it was 94% male. There has never been a female president, and another female candidate just lost to a transparently sexist and sexually abusive candidate. In fact, the female candidate's much-mocked mannerisms were directly shaped by the unequal pressures on women to constantly smile, laugh, be agreeable, and not assert themselves too forcefully. In huge swaths of the country, men are still expected to be breadwinners and make decisions for the family, while women are expected to (and do) disproportionately cook, clean, and take care of the children. Some of this inequity is voluntary, but much of it is socially pressured or ingrained.
Your response to this conceded imbalance of power is that it "doesn’t seem enough to make there be a patriarchy." Oh, well...I guess that settles it? And your entire analogy to anti-semitism doesn't fit at all. If Jews had in fact held overwhelming majority power over most of the world for most of human history, indelibly shaping our institutions and mindsets in ways that work to the continued disempowerment of non-Jews, saying so would not be the crackpot conspiracy theory it is today, it would be the truth. It seems to me your actual point is "some feminists on the internet are sometimes guilty of Motte and Bailey, or misuse/exaggerate the extent of patriarchy today." Which is true, but not what you titled this piece.
Feminists will be the first to tell you that patriarchy hurts men in many ways. I've been toying with a post myself suggesting that in 2024, patriarchy arguably hurts men most, for some of the reasons you provide here. It deprives women of power, and deprives men of happiness. But that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. If someone tried to dismiss some weighty philosophical term ("there is no utility," etc) so nonchalantly, you'd quickly surmise that they don't know what they're talking about. People who've engaged with these issues at a deeper level than social media are going to get the same impression from this one.
>Patriarchy is about *power.*
This is a trivial redefinition. Old people are also the majority of politicians and upper level executives in jobs. Doesn't entail that young people are oppressed. You should just list the oppression that occurs rather than some disputed proxy for oppression.
>There are many obvious ways in which men retain disproportionate power in our society.
This is not obviously wrong or a negative.
>If Jews had in fact held overwhelming majority power over most of the world for most of human history, indelibly shaping our institutions and mindsets in ways that work to the continued disempowerment of non-Jews
I'm not sure about BB but I personally dispute that contemporary institutions and mindsets work to the disempowerment of women.
>If Jews had in fact held overwhelming majority power over most of the world for most of human history, indelibly shaping our institutions and mindsets in ways that work to the continued disempowerment of non-Jews, saying so would not be the crackpot conspiracy theory it is today, it would be the truth.<
Going by your own justification of "paytreearkee," this is exactly the case! Jews are disproportionately wealthy and powerful, being significantly over-represented in the upper echelons of society. If you applied your standards consistently, you would agree with anti-semites that we live under Jewish supremacy. And the author pointed all of this out in the article already!
Do you think Jews have in fact held overwhelming majority power over most of the world for most of human history, indelibly shaping our institutions and mindsets in ways that work to the continued disempowerment of non-Jews?
You seem to be saying that because historically patriarchy existed, it must still exist. Obviously this is wrong. Otherwise, your only evidence for its continued existence is the disparate representation of men in positions of power. I simply reject the idea that disparate outcomes necessarily imply discrimination. Perhaps women are less interested in the sacrifices that come with acquiring and holding positions of power, and/or more interested in other things like family. Perhaps men, especially on the tail ends of the skill/intelligence distributions, are simply better (there are more high IQ men than women, so to the degree IQ helps acquire positions of power, we would expect a purely meritocratic system to overrepresent men).
People always comment on the tendency of the right towards conspiracy theories, but as this article shows the left is just as, if not more, guilty of this style of thinking. When it comes to differences in outcome, the left always assumes there is some structural conspiracy behind the inequality, rather than even considering that there might be an inequality in ability that explains the observations. This is true when it comes to both the racial and gender grievance-mongering that is endemic among the modern left.
Hanania argues that the Left’s “conspiracies” are more sophisticated but the Right’s conspiracies are plainly loony/dumb. I agree but I also think that many Lefties who argue for the existence of institutional racism, patriarchy, etc. are often just mid wits repeating talking points, so not much brain power is at work. They are wordcels more so than penetrating sociologists.
Yeah, I don't think belief in patriarchy and the like are true conspiracy theories or are even *that* irrational. That's simply because the conditions for their truth are incredibly nebulous, and moreover there are ways of defining relevant terms under which they're technically true. Feminists can always retreat from "society oppresses women in favor of men" to "men are overrepresented at the top" or whatever when convenient, but there's no real motte to retreat to from "Democratic leadership is running a child sex trafficking ring at the Comet Ping Pong pizza restaurant in Washington, DC." At least, not a motte I often see taken.
Great read! I found an interesting doc a while ago that summarizes a lot of the literature on this topic: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RDnpCSIghRBlsXoY-YOG3jtfG7ELEkn995KkC0OqHro/edit
> When black people were the victims of Jim Crow laws, there was not debate about whether they were institutionally oppressed.
This just isn’t true. The Supreme Court’s rulings repeatedly denied that there was systemic discrimination against black Americans. Look at Cumming v. Richmond, for example.
Where in Cumming did the opinion say that Blacks were not oppressed. It was more like a “so what if they are oppressed” decision.
Yes, this was a particularly galling claim.
As one of your female followers who is agnostic and maybe even a bit against assuming there is significant structural patriarchy in West, I have to disagree with you on the way to argue against it.
I think when challenging the concept of patriarchy, there are much more productive paths than a point by point comparison of well-being of different sexes as you said yourself because this comparison can lead to counterintuitive outcomes. Many of the points you mentioned such as men having shorter life expectancy, higher rates of being victims of war and crime, and even higher rates of being victims of rape apply to Afghanistan society too, although there are many laws specifically discriminating against women and an overwhelming intuitive understanding that Afghanistan IS a patriarchal society. If we want to follow this point by point comparison then we need to discuss how many underage boys being sexually abused is equivalent of how many girls banned from school which is in my opinion a crude practice.
I had a paragraph making that point, that so long as you need to do the point scoring to assess whether there's patriarchy there is not patriarchy. But I also argued that even if you do the point scoring, it's not obvious which sex is treated better.
Yes and honestly, that was the best paragraph of it. It might need more elaboration in order to become a convincing argument but I thinkbit was worth the effort
With Noahpinion’s post and now yours, it looks like substackers are being more based than usual today.
Well, I'm a pretty based guy.
Could you please share the link to Noahpinion’s post?
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/no-you-are-not-on-indigenous-land?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
You don't actually know any women who are willing to speak honestly with you, do you?
This is such a horrible take that I am not immediately unsubscribing only because you are very young, and I have some hope that you will come to see the error of your thinking on this topic, and soon, and will post about it.
And given your altruism and hope for the future you will provide the following counterpoints...?
I will not. Same reason as I won't debate Flat-Earthers, Moon-hoaxers, anti-vaxxers, etc.
"This holds true even regarding severe violence."
I call bullshit on this one. Men are widely known to be more physically violent generally. Looking at intimate partner murders, the first reference for the US I found had a male-female-victim ratio of 4 murdered women per 1 murdered man. I would consider the possibility that David Benathars "The Second Sexism" is not an unbiased source.
Velopulos, C. , Carmichael, H. , Zakrison, T. & Crandall, M. (2019). Comparison of male and female victims of intimate partner homicide and bidirectionality—an analysis of the national violent death reporting system. Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery, 87 (2), 331-336. doi: 10.1097/TA.0000000000002276.
You confuse the ability to inflict harm with the incidence of initiation and participation in partner violence.
Results. Almost 24% of all relationships had some violence, and half (49.7%) of those were reciprocally violent. In nonreciprocally violent relationships, women were the perpetrators in more than 70% of the cases. Reciprocity was associated with more frequent violence among women (adjusted odds ratio [AOR]=2.3; 95% confidence interval [CI]=1.9, 2.8), but not men (AOR=1.26; 95% CI=0.9, 1.7). Regarding injury, men were more likely to inflict injury than were women (AOR=1.3; 95% CI=1.1, 1.5), and reciprocal intimate partner violence was associated with greater injury than was nonreciprocal intimate partner violence regardless of the gender of the perpetrator (AOR=4.4; 95% CI=3.6, 5.5).
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1854883/
I don't understand your point. The thing you quoted states men are more likely to inflict injury than women so isn't that non-equality when the violence gets severe? In the most severe case (murder) I don't think it's very useful to talk about reciprocity.
Based on what I know about males and physical violence generally it seems unlikely that romantic partnerships would be an arena where the large gender imbalance present in all other areas of life would reverse to the point of equivalence.
In the study women were reported to have committed half the reciprocal violence and 70 percent of the non-reciprocal violence, and you don’t see a problem. My ex was very violent,all and I never reciprocated, but if I had she would have suffered grievous harm, and you would have blamed me. I don’t think it’s wise to hit someone who can easily deck you, practically speaking. But the female violence in this huge study doesn’t bother you at all. It’s not a problem even when non-reciprocal. Males should just take it.
Social concepts like patriarchy or white supremacy or class struggle or "Jews control the world" are used when the user wants to enhance their faction's political power, which requires that the "identified problem" of the concept is a group of people that will always exist and can be easily identified and different groups of people can be convinced to "organize" (translation: grant us political power) against.
In the patriarchy case, you will sometimes see people say "the patriarchy is bad for most men too!" and I unironically applaud them for trying to be fair about it and expand the tent, but it accidentally reveals the main issue with the "identity focused moral framework" concept - if that's true, then the real problem we should honestly care about is not "patriarchy" but "people who use power to harm people of any category."
This therefore explains the reason that prominent anti-patriarchy people do not actually act on that "bad for men too" claim in any real way - because if the "real" problem is "powerful people doing harm" then that implicitly (potentially) indicts them as well, because by definition, as "people attempting to gain power" they might get (or already have!) power and might use it for Bad.
Explicit example: if I am a prominent anti-patriarchy politician, I might pass a law mandating more women in college. This gets me (no matter my gender) support from anti-patriarchy voters. But, if I am a prominent anti-bad-things politician (a superset of "patriarchy", and by definition a bigger problem) then I have to actually ensure that my law helps ameliorate some harm (rather than just being intended to strike against the patriarchy), doesn't hurt some other people, or takes focus/resource away from some other more widely beneficial law, or enhance my/others' power in a way that might be abused later on. It's obvious which ideology is more helpful to me getting votes and avoiding criticism.
My assertion is that if your animating ideology is "anti-patriarchy" instead of "anti-doing bad things with power", then your goal is simply factional power, rather than... reducing bad things.
Pre-emptively: if you claim that I just want to ignore or downplay the plight of the victims of patriarchy/white supremacy/the rich/evil Jewish cabals, then I claim that you're doing it even worse, because the objective language definition of your ideologies excludes and downplays the concerns of any other group that is left out of the headline, or may indeed be nominally part of them.
I claim that people who focus on patriarchy, because it is definitionally a my-faction power-enhancing concept, are inevitably going to:
1) downplay the harms suffered by men (even men who are extremely not-well off)
2) ignore the harms suffered by groups not on the sex/gender axis (People from Oregon! Soccer players! Namibians!)
3) be incentivized to not consider the harms of well-intended anti-patriarchy laws/policies/norms, even to women
Patriarchy is not bad because it's bad for women, it is bad because it is bad for people. If you want to help women, but choose to do so by focusing on patriarchy (or any other inter-identity-competition focused concept) then my accusation is that you are being insufficiently devoted to the cause of actually preventing harm to women by artificially limiting the target of your ire AND the appeal of your cause.
True. I think the issue of “doing bad things with power” is more inherent and prevalent in the state, which seems to be a good reason to be an anarchist.
It's frustrating that throughout this article, you mention repeatedly that mere disproportionate outcomes or overall better or worse treatment isn't enough to establish the existence of a [whatever group]iarchy... but then seem to ignore the obvious conclusion that should come from that observation, which is that that feminist claims about the existence of a patriarchy might not be based on that sort of tallying. Because personally, I'm not aware of any serious feminist philosophers who argue that patriarchy is just the sum total of all the ways women's lives are bad in any way compared to men's lives, or that we would automatically be in a matriarchy if it happened to be that the average woman's life was 1% better than the average man's. Rather, the claim is that there is a *specific arrangement of social power in favor of men* that is expressed through various specific social, economic, and political arrangements. That's totally compatible with the claim that women's lives are better than men's in some ways, or even better overall. I'd be happy to come on your channel again sometime and debate/discuss this, because I think it's an area where a lot of your criticisms are just orthogonal to the basic idea as classical feminists defend it.
Since you admit women don't read your blog,what is the point of making this post a 2nd time
Dude, get a grip.
- Why do we care more about domestic violence when a woman is the victim? Why do we care more about sexual violence and rape commited by men on women?
Very simple: men are on average significantly stronger, taller, and bigger than women. The vast majority of women is utterly unable to physically hurt a man, the vast majority of men is perfectly capable of physically overwhelm pretty much any woman. If the average man commits domestic violence on the average woman, he may kill her. If the average woman commits domestic violence on the average man, she may bruise him at worst. If a man tries to sexually assault a woman, he will almost always be strong enough to have his way. I cannot even see how a woman could sexually assault a man. That is why there are no violence shelters for men. To shelter them from what exactly?
- Conscription stuff:
Pretty much all western countries have abolished conscription decades ago. The ones who keep it have strict neutrality policies and allow for alternative service, like Austria. South Korea is the only country where male conscription is arguably an injustice. Also, the reason men are drafted and not women is the exact same one mentionned above. Men are just stronger than women and they are just more adapted for military service.
Like, I am not even fundamentally disagreeing with your post. I agree that the primary victims of male violence are other men, and that the disparity in outcomes feminists are mad about - the 'wage gap' or the lack of women in STEM - are the consequences of individual choices and preferences rather than oppression. But we can make that argument without preaching to the choir with tired MRAs talking points.
Interesting read. I only gave it a quick pass but I don't believe the focus on anti-female violence in spite of higher male victimization has much to do with male expendability. Or at least, I can come up with a good justification for that discrepancy.
There's a lot of overlap between demographic indicators of high risk for perpetration and victimization (in America: black, male, young, low-income). That suggests to me higher male victimization is primarily because men seek out dangerous situations (start fights, join gangs, etc.). No-one is seeking out men as easy targets. Women are really more vulnerable and I think people instinctually understand this.
I guess men are still disadvantaged in that they have danger seeking brains. I also don't suppose there's a lot of room a the utilitarian framework for blaming victims for their suffering.
On a related note: I wouldn't be surprised if lower male life expectancy also came down to poor choices. I recognize I'm just being lazy here. There are surely studies on this.
I stopped reading after a bit because I think others are right that the premise just sort of fundamentally misunderstands what the discussion is about. The claim is that there exists an unjust social hierarchy between men and women, or something like that--which is why it's called the patri*archy*. If somebody says Emperor Palpatine stands in an unjust hierarchical relationship with the rest of us, it's just beside the point to argue that it's hard to say whether he's better off than me in some comprehensive sense, given that he's a decrepit old man and I'm not, etc. Indeed, the claim is even compatible with Palpatine being worse off then me *precisely because* he stands in such a relationship--he has to worry about people betraying or assassinating him, he has to be conscious about what image he presents all the time, running the Empire is probably a lot of work and really stressful, etc. (The latter point is the moral of Shooting an Elephant, by Orwell, sort of.)
Yeah, this is not good at all. Respond to actual feminists, not stuff you made up.
Patriarchy is about power, not outcomes. It is a structural property of societies. It is completely possible to have a patriarchy where outcomes for men are systematically worse. Military service is an EXCELLENT example of this. Patriarchy historically reserves military roles for men. Is this good for men? No, not generally, especially once artillery becomes a thing. But it is still patriarchal.
Try actually engaging with the opposing view. This is all just chasing a red herring.