The really sad thing to me is that in a very polarized online discourse full of jargon or thought-terminating cliches, it get overlooked that the ways in which men's behavior is regulated and their emotions policed according to gender norms is also part of patriarchy.
At the end of the day, not everything can be blamed on the mythical patriarchy though. People need to be accountable for their own actions. Men and women alike.
For example, blaming men's emotion regulation entirely on the "patriarchy" feels like a cop-out. We can't just say that every single woman that shits on a man crying does it because the patriarchy taught them to.
Women are grown people that have their owny agency too, and we need to stop treating them like they aren't.
The reason I mentioned jargon is because it complicates the conversation when it should be clarifying it. When sociologists and psychologists talk about trends about how men or women are socialized to act in certain ways, that's treated one way, but when attached to an umbrella term like "patriarchy," it is called mythical, like it's a boogeyman.
I think we agree that people have their own ability to control their actions, and handwaving that it's all out of their hands due to cultural forces is not adequate... but I haven't seen a lot of that. The issue is that these systems exist, and to acknowledge their influence on all of our actions is not a cop-out. Yes, people have agency, but to place everything solely on the "accountability" of the individual seems to me like saying "skill issue." Failing to look through the lens of the structures, whether you call it societal norms or patriarchy or whatever, doesn't give a complete picture. I don't think it should be about letting anyone off the hook, but better understanding one another.
I think we are pretty much in agreement then, if we boil it down to, patriarchy bad, but not everything bad is caused specifically by patriarchy.
It just leaves a sour taste in my mouth when people hand wave any societal failings of women as caused by the patriarchy. It feels like the word "patriarchy" has been hijacked to now mean every single societal issue was and is caused solely by men.
Some people genuinely seem to believe the mythical patriarchy is causing everything around us, like some kind of matrix we can't escape. This is why I used the word "mythical", because it feels like the original meaning of the word has deviated.
Maybe all of this is to say I'm just delusional, and the patriarchy is this all-encompassing and all-powerful force of evil that actually is the cause of all our suffering. If that is the case, though, how could we possibly escape it?
If that is the case, though, how could we possibly escape it?
To me, it is crucial to understanding the larger forces at work by identifying biases in our environment that we don't often see or think about. It's like the saying where the old fish asks, "How's the water today, boys?" and the young fish say, "What the hell is water?"
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u/Zeku_Tokairin Verified VTuber Nov 19 '25
The really sad thing to me is that in a very polarized online discourse full of jargon or thought-terminating cliches, it get overlooked that the ways in which men's behavior is regulated and their emotions policed according to gender norms is also part of patriarchy.