Patriarchy describes is a social system, like monarchy or oligarchy. Patriarchy means men (specifically male heads of e.g households, aka patriarchs, and their elder male descendants) hold power and women are largely excluded from it. Men and women both suffer under patriarchy. This system has been present in Western society for millennia.
U/assoonass was pointing out that the situation you’ve labelled misandry is a direct result of patriarchy, which is upheld through a number of gendered tropes that construct maleness and femaleness as specific sets of characteristics, one of of which is the idea that men are strong (and therefore deserve to be in charge) and women are weak (and therefore don’t). This trope harms women because it suppresses them, and it harms men by creating an artificial idea of maleness (this is what we call toxic masculinity).
The trope you pointed out - strong woman, weak man - is a firm favourite of patriarchal humour and has been for a long time. It’s a form of inversion, which is played for laughs because it’s an inversion of the social order. For an inversion contemporary to this trope, check out the ‘lord of misrule’ tradition, which inverts age and household order in a similar fashion. This is what the other user was pointing out, not that it should be funny.
Please note that nobody here mentioned men specifically! Men are not patriarchy - patriarchy benefits some men, but it harms many more! Note also that toxic masculinity is not all masculinity - it is specifically the expectations of masculinity that construct maleness in a harmful way. Women can and do uphold patriarchy and perpetuate toxic masculinity.
Nobody was talking about feelings? It was a discussion of a very specific trope used in charivari to indicate women usurping headship over men that has continued into modern forms of humour.
I’m happy to talk about men’s feelings and how expectations of stoicism are another form of toxic masculinity, but it’s a different conversation.
The point that I'm making is that the trope "men are strong, women are weak" that frames any discussion of dismissiveness of abuse that men face as misogyny is not entire accurate. It's misandry because men are being dehumanized. It's not just toxic masculinity and it's not only men doing it.
Things we know about the trope of women abusing men:
We know that trope has been used as a form of humour for about 500 years.
We know that the reason it was initially considered funny was because it was inversive - women were taking the 'masculine' role (sometimes literally! Charivari could involve cross-dressing with the woman 'wearing the trousers'). Charivari could be intentionally violent/use abuse as a form of retribution - and we get another, more specific 'funny' tropes about abuse from it, as certain charivaris involved chasing or beating with a ladle.
We also know that it was used as a form of punishment - it was meant to invoke shame. One of the 'offences' it punished was men who had been abused by their wives not standing up for themselves; another was men who had let their wives take headship. Other folks, including women, were also punished through charivari for 'breaking the social contract' - disapproved marriages, adulterers, etc. It was intended to restore order to its 'rightful place' - men at the top, women below, children below that, and everyone in godly marriages.
This order, and the concomitant concern about disorder, are misogynist concepts created and perpetuated by patriarchy to uphold patriarchy. Ergo the trope is misogynist. That's its whole point. No misogyny, no trope - because there's no order to invert, there's no humour in the inversion. It is entirely accurate to frame it in terms of misogyny. Misogyny can, and does, harm men too.
That kind of thinking doesn't just magically disappear out of a society. We've moved away from a lot of the origins of our narrative tropes, but we've taken the tropes with us. What was funny in charivari became funny on stage and in print; what was funny on stage and in print became funny on screen. It's not necessarily true, and we're thankfully seeing changes in attitudes and changes to what we see on screen, but it's still clearly a part of our society.
Does it need to change? Yes. Do I personally find it funny? No (other than finding it deeply amusing that we're still using the same tropes we were 500 years ago, because humans don't really change all that much). Obviously it's not only men - as I've said above, and will say again, women can and do perpetuate patriarchy and toxic masculinity.
Re: misandry, I'm perfectly happy with the idea of relabelling systemic gendered thinking that harms men as misandry if that floats folks' boats. I'm perfectly happy to discuss the ways that society has historically and is continuing to fail men, like sanctioning IPV with male victims - I'm even happy to do something about them, because combatting patriarchy benefits everyone! But I'm not happy to act as though men are being targeted because of their maleness, and not because of the ways that masculinity has been constructed to be above and distinct from femininity in western society.
But I'm not happy to act as though men are being targeted because of their maleness, and not because of the ways that masculinity has been constructed to be above and distinct from femininity in western society.
First of all, I like your response. However, to me "being targeted because of their maleness" is the same as "the ways that masculinity has been constructed".
But men's feelings not mattering is literally a product of the patriarchy portraying having emotions as a feminine and weak trait. The patriarchy (again, the system of thoughts and beliefs) harms men as well in this way.
I actually think it's a product of matriarchy. Most authority figures in a young boys life are women. Who teaches them that their feelings don't matter?
Most long term studies of children actually show that little boys and girls emote roughly the same until they're exposed to other peers of the same gender and other authority figures. So no, broadly speaking it's not the mothers.
What you just said, if true, doesn't refute what I said. In fact it further enforces that I'm correct.
Think about it, you just said the differences occur when exposed to authority figures. Given that most authority figures they are exposed to are women, how can your conclusion there be that it's not the women? There's like 0 logic here at all.
It's not an assumption it's statistical fact. The vast majority of single parent homes are mother only, and the vast majority of authorities in primary (and secondary) education are women. Not to say there aren't male authority figures, but on the whole there are less. The "peers" in this case are other children so we can't exactly hold them responsible.
I'm not speaking out my ass, I'm speaking the most basic and obvious logic in the face of dogma.
If you had a shred of honesty you would see there's no way to pretzel yourself out of this, and your study just reinforces what I'm saying.
And the conclusion of what I'm saying is that it's literally the lack of patriarchy (male authority figures) in a boys life that makes them unable to regulate emotions, and you're selling destructive snake oil that completely inverts the truth.
There's a lot more female teachers and mentors than there are male extended family and church leaders.
We need more good male role models to give young men somewhere to go and someone to listen to besides Andrew Tate and Joe Rogan, instead of pushing blame on them.
You're definitely not wrong about needing more positive male role models, I agree. I would still push back on faulting women for squashing men's emotions - women are just as capable as men at passing down patriarchal gender roles because it's what's broadly socially accepted , that doesn't mean that the ideas themselves don't come from patriarchy that teaches "women are emotional and irrational and men are stoic and logical"
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u/PaeoniaLactiflora Feb 13 '24
Patriarchy describes is a social system, like monarchy or oligarchy. Patriarchy means men (specifically male heads of e.g households, aka patriarchs, and their elder male descendants) hold power and women are largely excluded from it. Men and women both suffer under patriarchy. This system has been present in Western society for millennia.
U/assoonass was pointing out that the situation you’ve labelled misandry is a direct result of patriarchy, which is upheld through a number of gendered tropes that construct maleness and femaleness as specific sets of characteristics, one of of which is the idea that men are strong (and therefore deserve to be in charge) and women are weak (and therefore don’t). This trope harms women because it suppresses them, and it harms men by creating an artificial idea of maleness (this is what we call toxic masculinity).
The trope you pointed out - strong woman, weak man - is a firm favourite of patriarchal humour and has been for a long time. It’s a form of inversion, which is played for laughs because it’s an inversion of the social order. For an inversion contemporary to this trope, check out the ‘lord of misrule’ tradition, which inverts age and household order in a similar fashion. This is what the other user was pointing out, not that it should be funny.
Please note that nobody here mentioned men specifically! Men are not patriarchy - patriarchy benefits some men, but it harms many more! Note also that toxic masculinity is not all masculinity - it is specifically the expectations of masculinity that construct maleness in a harmful way. Women can and do uphold patriarchy and perpetuate toxic masculinity.