The concept of patriarchy refers to a social system in which men hold primary power and women are marginalized. While the degree and manifestation of patriarchy may vary across cultures and societies, if you examine a list of presidents, CEOs, top academics, and billionaires it’s difficult to conclude women are given equal treatment-unless you genuinely believe women are inferior, and so have achieved less.

Ugh, new forum, same old story. And I just don’t have the patience of go through yet another rabbit whole with yet another pseudo-academic online feminist.

I’ve done it enough that I’ve given up hope on breaking through all that brainwashing. I reply to you, but not for you. This reply is for anyone else reading this who still has the capability of independent thought.

“men hold primary power”: There’s multiple interpretation of that phrase, and feminists leverage this to both claim that patriarchy is everywhere and imply that it creates inequality in favor of men. Once you disambiguate the phrase, you quickly find out that both are rarely true at the same time.

Specifically:
A) “men hold primary power” means that men as a class wield the power of how society function. They, as a class, make the rules. And they do so only understanding their own needs and desires and as a result, they rule to the benefit of men at the expense of women.

The opposite interpretation is:
B) The positions of authority are held by men, but they do not wield this authority on their own behalf, they wield it on behalf of stakeholders where one the most important of which is women. As a result the authorities create a society that primarily oppresses men to the benefit of women.

So feminists like GravyMan like to go around claiming that we live in a patriarchy by mentioning male billionaires, top politicians etc… And then usually they imply that this means that there is inequality that favors men and oppresses women. They usually only imply it because this gives them wiggle room to wiggle out of the claim. Here he didn’t straight out claim a direct link of inequality he just said “it’s difficult to conclude [the opposite]”, but that’s a difficult one to wiggle out of.

So yes, obviously, the prevalence of men in positions of power implies that we live in some kind of patriarchy for some definition of patriarchy. But the question is: which definition is the one that applies to our society?

And if you look at the rates of completed suicide, the rates of homelessness, the rates of homicide victims and more recently post secondary education. Then contrast this with social efforts to help victims of violence, suicide risks, education opportunities that are gendered for the benefit of women. It becomes quite clear that we’re far closer to definition B) than we are to definition A).

Furthermore, people like me, who are concerned with the general trend of callousness towards men and accompanying misleading ideology that takes away empathy and aid resources from those men, we don’t like the term “Patriarchy”. We see how it is misused to imply things that are not true about the way society function. And we see how it’s definition is so malleable and routinely exploited to the detriment of men. So we try to condemn its use wherever we see it.

While I agree with OPs three other points. I don’t generally like to spend much time on them. I think ideas are more important than labels.

And at the end of the day there is just one core concept that can unravel all of the misandry found within feminism. And I can summarize it in a simple question:

What happened to your empathy and compassion for men?