Sure, and I wouldn't be bringing up the same subject when consoling a friend who was just treated this way by their partner, or talking to a friend who just treated their partner this way. But the context here is the discussion section of a post of a screenshot of a post of a stranger recounting their experience. I'm not trying to help Silverwing Secundus; they're not here in this thread. There's a lot of discussion in this comment section about common experiences and gender relations. So it seems perfectly natural to bring up one of the most significant influences on the way people of opposite genders interact in our society.
Patriarchy isn't "men bad", it's a social system that places men and women into predetermined, rigid boxes. This harms both men and women, since none of us are as rigid as the system demands us to be.
"Boys don't wear pink"
"Girls play with dolls"
"Men don't cry"
"Women who dress 'that way' deserve it"
All of those are patriarchy reinforcing statements. Again, this harmful belief that "men shouldn't have feelings" and them then bring rejected by women due to opening up is, on a macro level, due to the patriarchy. On an individual level, they're just people being assholes to their loved ones.
I honestly wish that a better word had been chosen than "patriarchy". Because at first blush it does look like "men bad" in an environment in which there are people who are predisposed to dismiss it as such.
Particularly since the patriarchy harms everyone. It can smack of "you're the enemy and it's your fault you're suffering" to the uninitiated. And bad faith actors are using that to misrepresent feminism and perpetuate the patriarchy.
Yes ultimately it comes down to toxic gender roles but I think calling those roles patriarchy is unfair and inherently ties blame to men. Doing so in a context where a man is clearly the victim is belittling and I would argue adding to the idea that men need to shoulder the burden of a sexist society.
Yeah, if it's not intended to be anti-men there's plenty of other words that could be used. Patriarchy as a concept is as the other poster described, but weaponization of the term is a different layer from the term itself. There's all sorts of mental gymnastics involved when you talk to people whose main patriarchy problem is their mother.
That having been said it's important to remember that in terms of the overall bulk of humanity, men are significantly more externally violent and rapey than the general population of women by at least an order of magnitude. My gut feeling on the situation is that a lot of the sentiment in this thread is directly related to that outcome, but it's still important to remember that on average if you put a woman and a man in a locked room, the woman is in far more danger.
That's not what that word means. “patriarchs” aren't men in general, that's why it's possible (and in fast true) that the patriarchy harms people of all genders.
As this post demonstrate, men don't benefit from it, e.g. it makes us live shorter, it encourages suppressing our emotion, it encourages our aggression. Because some (mostly) men in power benefit if we don't unionize, let ourselves be pressed into shit jobs or the military, and so on.
Read the other messages here and you might understand.