Back by popular demand, this week’s episode is the “Feminist Rage Social Media Showdown: The Sequel.” The Woman Beings watched enraging pieces of social media, ranted about it, and voted on which posts fueled their feminist rage the most. Here’s a little rant from Emma on the patriarchy that stemmed from that conversation!
The definition of patriarchy that they're working off of is a bit flawed.
So, the thing is that patriarchy, which is a male dominated and favored society, actually hurts all. And those things that he's bringing up about men having higher rates of prison sentencing, about men having higher suicide rates, being higher victims of of violent crime, those are all symptoms of the patriarchy. And we actually talked about this in our feminism myths episode, which you should definitely listen to. The thing is, those are all symptoms of a patriarchal society because of the pressures and the norms that are put in place, such as toxic masculinity, that put men into those positions. Patriarchy hurts everybody and the idea that we live in a better society than we used to live in does not mean that we've reached any form of equality.
I've heard this argument about race, too. He's saying, “Oh, well, you shouldn't complain because we have made all these advancements in society. This is the best we've ever had it.” I've heard the same thing about racism, where people say the United States is like one of the least racist countries in the world. We have the lowest amount of racial division of other countries in the world, which might be true. It's hard to rank something like that, but the issue is that racism still exists. The issue is that sexism also still exists.
The issue is not how racist we are compared to somebody else or how sexist we are compared to somebody else or even compared to a past reality. The issue is that it's still happening in some form. So that argument is just a way to misdirect people.
If that didn’t enrage you enough, listen to the rest of the episode here.
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