Hirota wrote:On top of that, If men were privileged, and we lived under a patriarchy, and ours was a culture that promotes rape and defends rapists, then none of this would have happened. Since it did happen, that is evidence that there is no patriarchy.
You go too far. One incident doesn't prove squat. However, let's take your assertions one at a time:
If men were privileged
Men can be privileged in many various ways. Women can also be privileged in many various ways. This can both occur simultaneously because they can be privileged in different ways. One incident regarding police covering up evidence in order to harm a defendant on the basis that that defendant is male does not prove all privilege on the male side has been abolished forever.
ours was a culture that promotes rape and defends rapists
Our culture unironically DOES do that - when the rapists are female. There's reams of 'research' and squirrely definitions (mostly pushed by feminist academics, but with the help of traditionalists) that attempt to minimize female on male rape and assert that it basically does not exist. This defends rapists. We play rape in movies for laughs - like in Wedding Crashers for instance. Remember the rape scene? It was played for laughs.
The thing is, we don't do that when it's rape against women by men. We do it when women are raping men. This is true even though nearly as many women rape men as men rape women (at least among adults - children and teens the data is hard to gather).
we lived under a patriarchy
There's that word again. Let's refresh the definition:
In sociology, patriarchy is a social system in which males hold primary power and predominate in roles of political leadership, moral authority, social privilege and control of property.
Well, if you go far back enough, that fits, although it no longer fits today. While men still predominate in the role of political leadership, women now predominate in moral authority, social privilege, and control of property. Although one could argue social privilege. Control of property however is unique, in that it didn't say ownership of property, but control of property. Therefore a family where the wife makes the majority of spending decisions (which is a majority of them) means that she has control of the property.
Let's keep reading.
In the domain of the family, fathers or father-figures hold authority over women and children.
Again, go back far enough, and this was certainly true. It's certainly not true now, but it was once. I'll allow it.
Keep in mind, up until this point, there's nothing evil or nefarious here, it's simply about who has the authority. It's a bad system, but it's not a bad system for nefarious reasons (yet).
Feminist theory defines patriarchy as an unjust social system that enforces gender roles and is oppressive to both men and women.
That's a new change incidentally. I'm positive it didn't used to say that. Let's take a look at the edit history. Ah there it is, February 2015 it changed. It used to be this:
Feminist theory defines patriarchy as an unjust social system that is oppressive to women. In feminist theory the concept of patriarchy is fluid and loosely defined.[31] It often includes all the social mechanisms that reproduce and exert male dominance over women. Feminist theory typically characterizes patriarchy as a social construction, which can be overcome by revealing and critically analyzing its manifestations.[32]
Prior to the widespread use of "patriarchy", feminists used the terms "male chauvinism" and "sexism" to refer roughly to the same phenomenon.[33] Author bell hooks argues that the new term identifies the ideological system itself (that men are inherently dominant or superior to women) that can be believed and acted upon by either men or women, whereas the earlier terms imply only men act as oppressors of women.[34]
There's the hatred.
Superior is a bad term, as roughly no one thinks of men as "superior" to women. There's a lot of that "separate spheres" bullshit. Dominant is still widely believed.
That being said, I am glad to see the liberal feminists backpedaling so hard in the face of the radical feminist definition:
Radical feminists view society as fundamentally a patriarchy in which men dominate and oppress women
...
Radical feminists assert that society is a patriarchy in which the class of men are the oppressors of the class of women.[8] They propose that the oppression of women is the most fundamental form of oppression, one that has existed since the inception of humanity.[9] As radical feminist Ti-Grace Atkinson wrote in her foundational piece "Radical Feminism" (1969):
The first dichotomous division of this mass [mankind] is said to have been on the grounds of sex: male and female ... it was because half the human race bears the burden of the reproductive process and because man, the ‘rational’ animal, had the wit to take advantage of that, that the childbearers, or the 'beasts of burden,' were corralled into a political class: equivocating the biologically contingent burden into a political (or necessary) penalty, thereby modifying these individuals’ definition from the human to the functional, or animal.[10]
Radical feminists posit that, because of patriarchy, women have come to be viewed as the "other" to the male norm, and as such have been systematically oppressed and marginalized. They further assert that men as a class benefit from the oppression of women. Patriarchal theory is not generally defined as a belief that all men always benefit from the oppression of all women. Rather, it maintains that the primary element of patriarchy is a relationship of dominance, where one party is dominant and exploits the other for the benefit of the former. Radical feminists believe that men (as a class) use social systems and other methods of control to keep women (and non-dominant men) suppressed. Radical feminists seek to abolish patriarchy by challenging existing social norms and institutions, and believe that eliminating patriarchy will liberate everyone from an unjust society. Ti-Grace Atkinson maintained that the need for power fuels the male class to continue oppressing the female class, arguing that "the need men have for the role of oppressor is the source and foundation of all human oppression".[11]
That has never existed. Ever. Men being in charge of politics? Indubitably. Men as a class oppressing women as a class to benefit themselves as a class?
Never fucking happened. Men don't have an in-group bias.
