Still confused about patriarchy

[PixelZing]

What's the feminist take on the fact that, even if we live in such patriarchy, the attention given to issues affecting men/boys is insignificant compared to the same attention given to issues of women/girls?

The list of such issues seems pretty long to me (paternity leave, family court bias, domestic abuse shelters, unequal sentencing, workplace fatalities, due process for false accusations, under-representation in HEAL, men's health funding, suicide rates, homelessness, ...) so I'd say there is plenty to advocate about.

(and BTW I don't even understand why we clump men and boys in the same category, wouldn't be more humane to put boys in the same category of women/girls, since they are affected by similar problems that affect girls?)

I don't understand what you mean. What's the difference between advocating for women and advocating for feminism?

I found this dated March 2025

Are you a feminist? It depends how you ask - YouGov While just 35% of Britons identify as a feminist, 83% believe men and women should be equal in every way.

You gov

Feminists advocate for women.

Women may not believe they are feminists, and they choose not to identify as such, but if they believe that woman should have equal opportunities and should be recognised for the work that they do, then they are the women feminists are fighting for and yes, they are feminists.

The patriachy has done a great job of making feminism a dirty word.

Men need to campaign for their own rights, rather than expecting us to do it. Also things like paternity leave and court rights ARE women's issues. Things are unequal because childcare is largely seen as a woman's responsibility.

R.e. suicide, I believe women actually attempt more, but men succeed more as they are more likely to use violent methods such as hanging. It is still a feminist issue, as it's related to the pressure of gender roles, socialisation, and how we are expected to express emotions.

Patriarchy hurts us all, but the difference is, men hold the institutionalised power. Men could change things if they wanted to. Men could advocate for themselves. But the only time these topics are brought up is when we discuss women's rights. They're are brought up as a 'what about men though'. If you want a domestic violence shelter for men, set one up.

Anyway, feminism is concerned with centering women, which is how it should be. That's not to say these issues aren't important, but feminism has no need to pander to men, who are more than capable of creating space to talk about their own problems.

> men hold the institutionalised power
Some men hold the institutionalised power. I am a man and don't hold anything.

Just some points:

> Men could advocate for themselves
...and yet they often don’t. Why is that? This was my initial question about patriarchy. If men are the ones who hold power, why don’t they advocate more for their own rights? You might argue that they simply don’t care enough to advocate. Okay, fair point. But then it turns out that...

> They're are brought up as a 'what about men though'
So, they do have grievances about men’s issues, and yet they still don’t advocate. There must be some external factor holding them back. It could be HR policies, or it could be the fear of jeopardising their marriage—judging by other MN threads, the go-to advice for women when their husbands start raising men’s issues seems to be to divorce him on the spot.

I personally would never bring these things up in real life, let alone in a professional setting. It’s just not done.

judging by other MN threads, the go-to advice for women when their husbands start raising men’s issues seems to be to divorce him on the spot

i dont generally go on relationship threads but this sounds like a load of rubbish

I’d love some links to threads where this happens as I’ve never seen it. And I do spend time on Relationships.

> men hold the institutionalised power
Some men hold the institutionalised power. I am a man and don't hold anything.

AAah, it's all becoming clear now.

On average, men have more power than women. You, personally, might not have much power but I'm confident you have more than you realise and, in the unlikely event that you really don't.... you are an outlier.

But then, most men don't realise their privilege or how the world just adapts around them.

@RufustheFactuaIReindeer and @MrsTerryPratchett Yup, i agree. I HAVE seen threads where a woman comes on because her H has gone down some rabbit hole and starts ranting about "feminism has gone too far" and complaining that women "want it all while men must work AND do the chores" or whatever and usually it turns out he's a financially and emotionally abusive twat.

Things are changing though.

Young women have outearned young men for over a decade now, with this only reversing around the age of motherhood, which suggests that it's women's choices that cause this reversal (because motherhood is a lifestyle choice really with the planet already creaking from the number of humans on it).

The Economist also did a study years ago which found that childless female execs 'continue to be promoted more aggressively than their male peers' which further suggests that it might indeed be women leaving the workplace more than discrimination that drives the pay gap. Certainly, a lot of my colleagues seemed to switch focus in their 30s once they had a husband with a good salary and became mothers. We see people on here mentioning this all the time, how their priorities changed.

Now, young women are earning 9% more than young men (£2200 per annum) which is I think greater than the lead young men had previously. In the US there are now several cities where women earn more full stop.

And the same article mentioned that the number of men that are NEET (not in employment, education, or training) has risen by 40% since the pandemic but only 7% for women. This echoes another US stat I saw which said that the percentages of women earning >$60k and men earning <$35k are rapidly increasing. Certainly, white working class boys seem to not be doing too well over here.

I see some feminists commenting things like "well, they've had the lead for the last thousand years", but if you're a young man who's only been on this planet 20 years, you're not going to feel particularly encouraged in the situation that your female peers earn 10% more than you but also get all the support whilst 'straight white males' are demonised.

So I don't think 'most' men are necessarily privileged. The ones that hold the power took it years ago. Were I a young male right now I'd not be counting on the fact my fortunes will reverse a few decades down the line as has done for men in the past.

I do sometimes wonder if this situation is what has led to the rise in popularity of men like Andrew Tate.

Are you actually suggesting that women, specifically feminists, are responsible for a sex-trafficking rapist? Where’s that list of rules?

There are a lot of men currently pushing back against equality, Tate is just one of them.

No. I'm suggesting that society's increasing dismissiveness of men is pushing them to follow extremist views.

Similar to how people are now supporting the Reform party and how Germans supported the Nazi party after being squeezed into poverty facing WW1.

Hitler claimed to be advocating for the German people at a time nobody else seemed to be in the eyes of many. Andrew Tate claims to be advocating for men at a time when many feel they're being downtrodden. This is how extremists get into power. People like Trump. Leftists often seem completely blindsided by it.

‘Society’s increasing dismissiveness’. Who is ‘society’ in that sentence? Because do I think the patriarchy is harmful to many men? Yes. Do I think that’s women’s fault? No.

Feminism gave us the chance to radically change things for the better. What could have happened is women worked more, had bank accounts, had the chance to vote, and join unions, and be paid correctly, and make choices about their lives. Men could have met that with love and seized their chance. To fully participate in the lives of their children. To talk about emotions, relationships and the home. To learn new skills and share all the roles. But they didn’t. A significant and increasing section of men are choosing to let women work, raise children, run the home, hold the sky up, while they play video games in their mum’s spare room, putting zero effort into equal, respectful relationships, shagging around when they can, ignoring the children that creates. They’ve let women do all the work, bad for women. Leaving them with no role, bad for men.

If we all went back into the kitchen, do you believe these men would do the work required? I don’t. ‘Society’ is men too. And you could argue that since men disproportionately hold the power and money, the ‘society’ that dismisses men is… men.

But this is where feminism often falls down IMO, with it's rigid division of men/women and dismissal of many others factors like ethnicity, poverty, etc.

Part of the issue is the whole identity politics thing and rolling everything into groups.

For example, a group comprising of nine homeless men and Bill Gates would be seen as more privileged than 10 female execs each earning £100k, despite 90% of the former group sleeping outside. This kind of methodology doesn't really work when the power is held by a small proportion of people.

And left leaning ideologies tend to be hugely biased - I say this as a centrist. They'll happily say that innocent men need to challenge the bad men if they don't like being tarred with the same brush, but following events like Rotherham and the 1200 'Egypt style' sexual assaults on that one NYE in Germany they won't apply the same methodology. It's suddenly all about the 'islamaphobic backlash' rather than saying that if innocent Muslims don't want to be tarred with the same brush then they need to challenge the misogyny in their culture.

And where's the outrage about the pay gap favouring young women the last ten years?

Young women have outearned young men for over a decade now, with this only reversing around the age of motherhood, which suggests that it's women's choices that cause this reversal (because motherhood is a lifestyle choice really with the planet already creaking from the number of humans on it).

Yeah, women’s choices. How about both of the parents making that choice to have children? How come both of their salaries don’t drop? How come when a man (on average) chooses to become a parent his salary doesn’t drop? Hmm I wonder. Women out earning men until the point where they start getting senior and in charge, then expected by their husbands to pick up the slack at home and take a greater role in the parenting than the dads do.

@LastRoIo What do you mean by feminism?

Well, it's hard to deny that a lot of women become less career focused after having children, so there's always likely to be a bias in favour of the man in this situation unfortunately.

Realistically, a lot of women don't want to rush back to work and let the man look after the baby. We see this in the threads where the OP is saying she doesn't want to go back to work or where DH is annoyed at her change of mind to stay part time etc.

A lot of people seem to talk the talk in regard to women doing men's roles etc, but then on an individual basis they say things like "well, as he earns more we decided I'd stay at home". People need to make these individual sacrifices on a wider scale to really change things but most people don't want to do it if it impacts there quality of life.

The issue is not what's talked about, but where does the power lie? We may be talking more about women but that's because we have masses of catching up to in terms of things like understanding women's bodies for medicine, their needs in the workplace and so on. We are still operating very much in a world built for and by men and dominated by men, aka in the patriarchy. So yes, we need to keep talking about women's issues.

Men and women are welcome to talk about men's issues in a sincere and direct way as long as it's not just a way to shut women up about their issues, as too often happens. Men's issues deserve much better than to be used as a way to shut women up, but again, that's a symptom of the patriarchy, not of 'too much talk about women's issues'

Interesting that the exact same argument is made on Stormfront to prove Jews control the world. And both are equally wrong.

'The ones in charge are men' is not the same as 'men are in charge'.

There is no patriarchy. Equal rights for women have been achieved decades ago and we now have full parity.

Nowhere in my post did I state either ‘the ones in charge are men’ or ‘men are in charge’ - please read again more carefully.

The fact that men hold disproportionately more power manifests in disadvantages for women in myriad systems; medical research, investment in business, the fucking workplace. This is evidenced, umm, EVERYWHERE, but if it’s new to you then start with reading Invisible Women for a very data-based approach to the reality and impact of this disparity.

‘Equal rights for women have been achieved decades ago and we now have full parity’ is fundamentally untrue. Rather than list the endless places I can disprove this statement (gender pay gap, % female leadership
in society and business, investment levels etc etc) I’d like you to provide sources to corroborate your naive (at best) statement.

Dude you just said that women are out-earning men at this stage and then making a lifestyle choice for motherhood - your next argument about women then becoming less career focused ‘because men are the earners’ therefore doesn’t work.

I mean, it was BS anyway but this lack of clever rhetoric just offends me - at least follow your ‘logic’ through mate.

@custardlover

This statement—“men hold disproportionately more power”—is often taken to mean that men as a group are in charge, implying that the average man has more power or privilege than the average woman. But that’s an oversimplification. The reality is that a small group of men at the top hold most of the power, while the vast majority of men (and women) have little control over major societal structures.

If we look at political leadership, corporate boards, or influential institutions, it’s true that the highest positions are often filled by men. But these positions represent an elite minority, not the general male population. The average man isn’t sitting in a boardroom making decisions that affect millions of lives. He’s working, paying bills, and facing his own challenges—many of which are not all that different from the struggles faced by women.

The error comes when people take the fact that the top of the pyramid is male-dominated and apply that reality to all men, creating the misleading narrative that men collectively enjoy power. In truth, most men have no access to this kind of influence. They’re as subject to the decisions of elites as anyone else.

It’s more accurate to say that power is held by a small group of individuals who, historically and statistically, have been predominantly men—but this elite group does not represent the lived experience of most men.

I don’t just mean at the top
of the pyramid - that’s an assumption in your part. However that is absolutely true and that fact that it’s an elite still means that the majority (not elite minority) of men’s lives are therefore made easier than women’s (citing eg research into endometriosis which impacts millions of women or the menopause which impacts all women and yet has been covered pathetically through medical history or the fact that cardiac arrests manifest differently in women and those symptoms are not taught as prolifically as the manifestation in men etc etc etc). However I also mean the everyday advantage than all men wield over women - not as a plotting cabal as you seem to imagine I mean - but just a 100x a day, every day. The fact that a man’s appearance is given much more license in society to age, to be ‘unbeautiful’, to be anonymous, without it correlating with a lack of value attributed to the man. The fact that women have the pink tax and have to spend more on everyday living (despite earning less on average) than men - deodorant / clothes / shoes / body wash / haircuts etc all of which are far cheaper for men. The fact that the overwhelming amount of caring labour (usually unpaid) is society falls to women, in a family or in a workplace. And then of course there is the ongoing, low-lever sexual harassment and objectification that every women has to put up with.

The energy women have to put into dealing with all of that means we start the day with a disadvantage. Just every day.

Still waiting for you to evidence your point on the assertion that we achieved gender parity years ago. Got any data for that? No. I didn’t think so.

I just don't think you're arguing in good faith when you mention stuff like pay gap. It's been done to death and proven time and again that it's an earnings gap based on choices of profession and other factors. Women aren't paid less for the same work.

As to the rest, men and women are subject to different societal expectations. There will be advantages for both sexes. That doesn't make it a patriarchy.

Oh, I go on Relationships threads quite a lot. It is definitely 100% rubbish.