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.
Ironically feminism gets you closer to this than anything they’ve cooked up over a very long period of time
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).
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.
Try not limiting your look to the very top. Because much like the top, the bottom is heavily weighted towards men.
“The Patriarchy hurts men too” is an apologetic. The religious equivalent is “God works in mysterious ways.” The whole and entire point is so that when reality does not align with what is predicted by the model (whether that model is Patriarchy or an all knowing, all powerful, all good monotheistic God) to dismiss reality without thinking about it further. The whole point is to make Patriarchy unfalsifiable, which is not a positive thing for any model you expect to be able to predict anything because it can explain literally anything a posteriori and so has no predictive power. The whole point here is that malagency makes predictions that align with reality more consistently than Patriarchy.
Look at say criminal justice. Under a model based on Marxist class conflict, you would expect criminal justice to be wielded primary against the oppressed class while the oppressor class is given a lighter touch if at all. This neatly aligns with what we see with economic class (which is what Marxist class conflict is meant for) and also for race (because race in the US in a lot of ways is tied to and behaves like economic class), so for sex you’d expect to continue to see the same, right? Except you don’t. By most measures you might use to demonstrate how criminal justice racially oppresses black folk and is easier on white folk if you break it down by sex instead of race the numbers look an awful lot like the criminal justice system oppresses men and is easier on women.
Which is what you would expect under malagency - men being perceived as higher agency for good or for ill means men are seen as more responsible for their actions and thus effectively more responsible for their crimes. I was actually surprised that the recent black child slavery case out of WV (practically in my backyard) had the woman get a longer sentence than her husband, though I have yet to find an article that details who was charged with what (beyond “several charges” and which charges were found guilty (beyond “most of them”).
The fallout of coverture (which I am almost certainly spelling wrong), wherein a woman’s assets and debts (and responsibility for some crimes) belonged to her father or later husband. A single woman no longer under her father could legally hold debts, property, etc (the term used was femme sole), but if she married those things would then be under her husband. The thing is, it’s harder to collect on debts the debtor never actually agreed to, so most (but not all) lenders would refuse credit lines to women without a male cosign, because of the additional difficulty in pursuing payment if things went south. This neatly falls under the same umbrella - women were often refused credit lines without a male cosign because they were (first legally and then later due to social inertia seen as) less responsible for their debts, while men were responsible for both their debts (and until coverture ended) and those of their daughters and spouse.
Interestingly, being pro-life or pro-choice is not a strongly gendered phenomenon (according to polling from 2024, about 45% of men are pro-choice vs about 60% of women). The abortion issue isn’t men oppressing women, it’s (mostly religious) conservatives who see abortion as killing babies versus liberals and progressives who see a fetus as an essentially meaningless clump of cells.
…which is more about efficacy of violence than propensity for it. There have been several studies going back my entire life that suggest that women engage in violence in a relationship as often or more often than men, the difference is largely about size and strength.
It seems in my mind incongruous to argue that nearly all cultures (not quite all, as you might point to say the Hopi or the Mosuo (sp?) or a few other exceptions) worldwide for all of history are in any way a single, coherent system of any kind.
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 think there’s been a lot of room for this incel type stuff because not enough attention has been paid to the welfare of boys. It’s very common to hear how it started from the feeling that nobody cares.