I had an interesting conversation with a feminist on Reddit. She replied to my post about why left-wingers support feminism. In the post, I said I don’t believe in a patriarchy or toxic masculinity.
She cited examples of women being forced to marry young as a patriarchal issue. She cited women having to bear children in America without abortion rights as a patriarchal issue. She cited women being domestically abused as a patriarchal issue.
I told her women being forced to marry young was more prevalent in the past. Nowadays, forced marriages are illegal. The examples she cited don’t indicate a patriarchy, because the average man (most men) don’t have more power than the average women. For example, a man is more likely to be arrested for domestic violence even if he is the victim.
Feminists believe there is a patriarchy because they look at the men, in the top 1% or 5%. They assume all other men have very minimal issues in their lives. Most rich people will be treated better, regardless of gender.
When I disagreed with the feminist, she called me stupid and an “incel.” I remained calm and told her I’m not an “incel.” It seems like feminists want men to think in a gynocentric point of view. Anything that isn’t gynocentric seems misogynistic to them. I don’t think advocating for men’s issues and women’s issues is mutually exclusive.
I actually disagree on this.
Money is power. Men are stereotypically the primary household earner. Women in those relationships rely on the men to provide an income, and men’s ability to take that away gives them power. Obviously, this isn’t strictly a good thing for the guy, since it comes with stress for him to provide, but it does skew power in the relationship.
Consider a normal distribution, with the x axis being “strength” and the y axis being “number of people” - lots of people are medium strong, few people are very strong or very weak. If you split that into two - one for men and one for women, and compare the top 1% strongest men and women, the men would be stronger. Since it’s a normal distribution, it also shows that the average man is stronger than the average woman. There are still many, many women that are stronger than the average guy, but as a population men are stronger.
I submit that “power” follows a normal distribution as well. I’m sure we agree that the top 1% of men are more powerful than the top 1% of women, so it would follow that the average man would be more powerful than the average woman.
That’s because women like to marry up.
It is true that the richest people in the world, are men. Women have more social power than men. For example, people tend to believe women more when it comes to domestic abuse. Police are more likely to arrest the man.
I’d add that the poorest people are also men.