Yup. Patriarchy did them dirty. Society told them they had to be strong, stoic, and without emotion. And when that butted up against the realities of being a human we didn’t have any community to lead them towards living a good and healthy life.
Calling it “patriarchy” is thinly-veiled victim blaming, implying that men suffer primarily because of other men’s decisions. Everything you describe is perpetuated and maintained by both sexes. The social fabric of modern society, its implicit rules and conventions, is not a male establishment.
Western society is not, at all, a “patriarchy”.
Patriarchy did em dirty, but feminism also left them behind. It’s not just patriarchal society that forces men to be strong and stoic, it’s also self-professed feminists, especially women. Feminists say men should be more in touch with their emotions, but when they do so women have no interest in them. That’s one of the realities of life you mentioned.
Every single woman I know wants a guy in touch with their emotions. And those who found them, married them.
Tell your friends to stop trying to date under 25 year olds. We get over that shit at about this age.
That’s still patriarchy, my guy. They’ve been raised to be complicit in a system that doesn’t benefit them, and they’re perpetuating it because they don’t like how it feels to step outside of it.
I disagree that it’s fair to call that patriarchy, but that’s beside the point. The failure of feminists to take any action against it or even to sound like they care is what I was getting at. That is by definition not patriarchy, it’s the indifference of feminism.
Feminism may not be directly attacking men, but it’s also not helping men except as an occasional side effect of helping women. Men have no acceptable paradigm to help them navigate society.
Any attempt at “Men’s theory” or some such gets simultaneously attacked by feminists and misogynists and quickly gets subsumed into one of those two camps.
See? Dismissive, refusal to acknowledge systemic issues, rugged individualism. That’s holdovers from patriarchy and feminists should reject that thought process.
When women have a problem, it is society’s fault and we should fix it. When men have a problem, it’s their own fault and they individually should fix it. That’s not fair, and the fact that no one in the feminist sphere seems to give a shit leaves young men deciding to turn to misogynists for moral support.
Red pill types will say, “we see you. This is a problem. You’re not crazy.” That’s very powerful when there’s no alternative.
You can fault the Right for a lot of things but they got there first on this one. They have a story for why things suck and they’re pounding the drum on it relentlessly. It doesn’t matter that this story is full of holes when the alternative is not compelling.
