I don't oppress women. Women oppress me. And pointing that out makes me the asshole.

But is there a thing, let's call it "pop feminism", which is widespread enough and whose adherents share enough basic ideas and positions, that we can usefully predicate things of it? Absolutely. And, well, that's the problem.

For example, when I see people use terms like "patriarchy" in earnest, I tend to grimace a bit. Not because I think they're crazy radical idiots, but because I think they're dangerously behind the times. The concept of unilateral patriarchy (i.e., a system in which most/all advantages based on gender accrue to men while most/all disadvantages based on gender accrue to women) is something like thirty years out of date at this point. We know now that the enemy is gender essentialism, which rigid, constrained roles and systemic advantages/disadvantages emerge from. We also know now that it's not a unidirectional oppression -- the resulting roles have aspects which harm people of all genders, and give at least some advantages to people of all genders.

But for every one person who gets this there are a thousand, or more, who just read sites like Jezebel, or feminism-related tags on Tumblr/Facebook, and end up imbibing pop-feminism ideas that are woefully out of touch with what we now actually know about gender in our society. What's worse, those ideas tend to reinforce essentialist gender roles rather than seek to overturn them.

The wage gap, currently being argued in the usual stupid way in another front-page thread, is actually a wonderful example of this. Research has shown, time and again, that much of the gap results from women being assigned, by society as a whole, a "childbearer/caregiver" role. And the consequences are clear. Women are more likely to work part-time, women who work full-time work fewer hours and less overtime, women actively seek out "child-friendly" workplaces, women start out with relative earning parity but it falls off a cliff once they have or start thinking about having children, a whole raft of stuff that adds up really really quickly.

A real solution to this would be to throw out the essentialism and the notion that child-rearing is "women's work". A real solution would seek to push women out of automatically assuming that bearing and raising children is a vitally important life goal, and would seek to push men out of automatically assuming their role doesn't involve caring for kids. A real solution would question basic ideas about what a successful life looks like and throw out any and all assumptions about "I am of this gender, therefore I should desire that"

But pop feminism doesn't do any of that. Instead it assumes that being a woman is mostly identical with wanting to have children and be their primary caregiver. So pop-feminist articles focus on how to "have it all", how to "balance" raising two kids with working 80-hour weeks at a law firm or running your own business, and argue that the important thing is to provide things like on-site day-care and generous maternal-leave policies to ensure women can keep right on performing the same rigid role they've had imposed on them for centuries.

What's more, we know these policies really don't work. There are countries which have implemented them, and they still see drastic drop-offs of women's lifetime earnings post-childbirth. What those policies do really well is make it easier to slide back into that role of "raising children is what I'm really supposed to do with my life".

But rather than attack the real problem, and ask the real, really hard questions about gender roles and how to overturn them, most people who identify as "feminist" just forward and share and retweet the same old pop-feminism drivel. And if you believe there isn't a relatively large group of people who identify that way and do exactly that, with relative ideological unity in terms of underlying assumptions, then I just don't know what Internet you're spending time on.

When people now use words like "patriarchy" now, they don't mean "all and any man opressing all women", they mean what you talk about, rigid gender roles. You post basically describes the patriarchy and how it's bad. The idea that women should so some work (e.g. nursing) and men shouldn't do some work (e.g. nursing), is patriarchy.

I can't find any FAQ on Jezebel (since I don't read it much), so I can't find their definition, but there are definitions on http://finallyfeminism101.wordpress.com, a Feminist 101 site.

Feminists recogise that patriarchy does affect men negatively. (e.g. reddit's SRS Fempire on just that: http://www.reddit.com/r/SRSDiscussion/comments/1a0bef/xpost_... )

Imagine a patient with appendicitis who goes to a doctor, and the doctor just hands over a prescription for pain medication and says "no worries, this will make you feel better right away".

The pain meds will make the patient feel better for a bit, but really they're just masking a symptom of the underlying disease, which is still there. And sooner or later that appendix must be treated or got rid of, or the patient's going to die.

The pop-feminism practised in places like SRS, Jezebel, Tumblr, etc. is the social-justice equivalent of giving the appendicitis patient pain meds. "Smashing the patriarchy" will still leave the underlying disease of which it's a symptom (essentialism and roles assigned on the basis of gender) untreated.

Of course, that's an oversimplification, since the popular conception of "patriarchy" is deeply flawed in other ways (it lacks the explanatory power to say anything more glib than a 101-style "of course it hurts you too, sweetie" to men who are also being harmed by the deeper disease of essentialism, to take one example).

But I've long since given up trying to get this through to most people on internet boards, which is why I now do it under throwaway accounts.

Now I'm confused. I'm an SRSer, and "the patriachy" is gender roles. "smashing the patriachy" means ending gender roles & essentialism.

* the popular conception of "patriarchy" is deeply flawed in other ways (it lacks the explanatory power to say anything more glib than a 101-style "of course it hurts you too, sweetie" to men who are also being harmed by the deeper disease of essentialism, to take one example).*

Here's a thread on SRS talking about how the patriachy hurts men: http://www.reddit.com/r/SRSDiscussion/comments/1a0bef/xpost_...

Believe me, us social justice/feminist/SRS people do have serious conversations about lots of things, including men.

Firstly, the fact that you continue to use and insist on an overladen (with decades' worth of baggage) term that obscures what you're talking about, rather than just say what you claim to mean, is not an encouraging sign to me.

Secondly, if SRS is really a place where "serious conversations", as you put it, take place, then they certainly were adept at hiding it from me back when I frequented. After a while, one gets rather tired of the LOL DILDZ and LOL MRAS and wants to actually accomplish some good. Perhaps it's now a better place, but given how toxic the culture was I very much doubt it.

If bearing and raising children is not a vitally important life goal I don't know what is. The failure to do so would literally spell the end of civilization. Perhaps this view accounts for birth rates declining below sustainable levels in developed nations.

> [...] and would seek to push men out of automatically assuming their role doesn't involve caring for kids.

Of course no father should assume this.

But I feel this entire argument is pushing for indistinguishability more than equality. There will never be indistinguishability between men and women. Equality doesn't mean eliminating all differences.

Gender roles are pervasive, but are more obvious for women, who tend to get defined in terms of their wombs rather than any individual characteristics. Essentialists who hold traditional/conservative views don't really go much beyond that -- bearing and raising children is what women are for. Essentialists who hold progressive/liberal views try to hide this, but are still basically assuming that all women really want, deep-down inside, to be mothers above all other goals, so the discourse is all about how to do other things at the same time as that.

And that's a problem regardless of who's doing it or why. A developed civilization can remain viable without needing every woman to be a baby factory first and foremost, so why do we still push that attitude from basically all sides?

And although there probably always will be some life paths that are incompatible with having children, most of the ones that are incompatible today are not necessarily incompatible; they're only contingently incompatible as a consequence of how our society is structured (with its focus on career advancement and measuring one's worth in terms of titles and raw dollar values, and the resulting need to work insane hours). We could tear down all those assumptions, and have a society where everyone has the option of multiple ways to lead a fulfilling life, with raising children being one of those. But we don't do that, and even the popular incarnations of movements which claim to advocate for real equality of opportunity don't try.

We could tear down all those assumptions, and have a society where everyone has the option of multiple ways to lead a fulfilling life, with raising children being one of those.

Yep, that's what feminists are doing, smashing the patriarchy.

But we don't do that, and even the popular incarnations of movements which claim to advocate for real equality of opportunity don't try.

Feminism is doing this.

Regardless of the existence of the patriarchy as a phenomena - and there are many critics of the theory, from the right and the left -, it makes no sense to dismiss it as a conspiracy theory.

Anti-feminists would tend to view it as a conspiracy, or no longer existing ("women can vote, so it's all OK now, right?"). Sadly this sort of attitude/meme does exist....

What you described is a conspiracy. Of course feminists don't describe their own conspiracy theories as conspiracy theories, they want them to appear legitimate.

Patriarchy as it is commonly understood in feminist circles is more nuanced than your straw-man. It's bottom-up, not top-down. You'd have to stretch the definition of "conspiracy" awfully far to cover an emergent property of a set of principles and societal norms.

Ultimately patriarchy as a social force and concept is totally provable has statistical and philosophical evidence that shows it exists. Every basic women's studies or feminist book goes over this to some extent.

>totally provable has statistical and philosophical evidence that shows it exists.

Except that alternative explanations are dismissed. If the "evidence" supports many possible conclusions, then it is not proof of a single specific conclusion like "patriarchy".

It seems like you are saying that is there is indeed a real conspiracy of institutions created and/or controlled by men, in which case I totally agree. We have well documented cases, historically and in the present, of institutions and systems that are dominated by men.

> Except that alternative explanations are dismissed. If the "evidence" supports many possible conclusions, then it is not proof of a single specific conclusion like "patriarchy".

I've yet to see convincing alternative explanations. All of the evidence points to existence of patriarchy as a social institution.

It seems like you are deliberately choosing to respond with non-sequiturs and strawmen because you don't want to have an honest conversation.

>I've yet to see convincing alternative explanations. All of the evidence points to existence of patriarchy as a social institution.

Just as creationists view all evidence as pointing to the existence of god. If you start with a conclusion, and twist everything to suit that end, you can't reasonably expect people who didn't start with the same bias to agree with your conclusions.

Nope. And neither are the societal structures that privilege women.

Western women have always been among the safest, most privileged human beings on the planet. Predictably, and unfortunately, modern western feminists never compare the plight of the average man with the plight of the average woman when determining who wins the Oppression Olympics; instead, they look jealously toward men at the top of society and declare that because women aren't a part of that, they're more oppressed.

And sadly, it gets more ridiculous than that. I've seen people on this forum actually say, with similar words:

Institutionalized misandry cannot exist, because most people at the top of society are men. Women don't have the institutional power to oppress men. Any oppression men face is a result of The Patriarchy.

Ignoring the fact that oppression can come from outside of congress (university policies, for example), those people are defining patriarchy to simply mean "Oppressive policies written by people with penises, even if feminists support those policies".

And that's what makes it dogma.

You are of course entitled to your opinion, but I think you'd be better served by engaging with a more nuanced and complex version of these views. What you describe here is caricature. And in all I think it says more about you than feminism.

A common refrain in feminist circles is that patriarchy hurts everyone. A good example is parental leave as it applies to men. Paternity leave in the US is absurdly bad, suggesting that we as a society do not value the time a father spends with his child. Along those lines, men are typically graded on a patronizingly terrible curve when it comes to childcare. And so on.

Note that these aren't just laws, but societal norms, especially the latter where people praise you for doing basic shit like picking up your kids from work or whatever. If you view patriarchy as an emergent property, then the idea that "laws written by men" are a sufficient description of the concept is just absurd. You could of course take the least coherent out of any group which espouses a belief and engage with that, but that's not an honest way to have a discussion.

So like I said maybe don't engage with the most ridiculous possible presentation of feminism.

That's like saying that because there is a significant amount of shared ideas in US politics (e.g.: "US Independence was a good thing"), that US politics is now some sort of group think where dissent is not allowed and everyone thinks the same!

Nobody made that claim, that is my point. Responding to strawmen is not productive, respond to the actual conversation.