Clearly you haven't read anything I've written for a while because this is what I primarily write about now - how patriarchy is a dominance based hierarchy with just a small number of men at the top of the pyramid of power. It's an entire system based in social stratification that is not just the nexus with gender inequality but with all inequality. Racism, homophobia, police brutality, and garden variety bullying are all manifestations of a the patriarchal dominance hierarchy. So is the constant jousting for status and position that is so commonplace with men. So yes, I am very, very well aware that men suffered and continue to suffer under this system.
And at the same time, 50 years ago there were hundreds of rights that men had that women did not. These, along with the social beliefs that women were inferior and that their place was to be assistants and helpmeets to men was an overtly and widely held belief. A lot of these beliefs still exist in the collective unconscious even if the laws have changed. Men have never had their fundamental human rights up for discussion in the Supreme Court. FFS, martial rape wasn't even a crime in all 50 states until 1993!! I could go on and on, but you already know this stuff. And still you wonder why women are so upset and angry.
Absolutely, men do have real issues and concerns that need to be cared about and addressed, but to most women they take a back seat to the fact that they've been sexually harassed on an ongoing level since they were 10 or 11 years old, that many men still don't take them seriously or recognize their authority when they have it. Even women in the highest levels of government and business have to constantly demand that they be accorded the basic respect that a man would be given in the same situation.
Role incredulity is a form of gender bias where women are mistakenly assumed to be in a support or stereotypically female role — secretary, administrative assistant, court reporter, nurse, wife, girlfriend — rather than a leadership or stereotypically male role, such as CEO, professor, lawyer, doctor, or engineer.In these instances, women must expend extra energy and time to assert and sometimes prove their role. Their words may lack the credibility and authority inherent in their position. (emphasis mine)
Role incredulity surfaced as a common theme in our research dataset of women’s stories from interviews, open-ended survey responses, social media posts, and public articles.
In other words, women are still struggling to be seen as fundamentally equal in a world where many men don't want to see that happen. That is what the backlash to feminism is mostly about. Many men don't want to hear how women are still pervasively treated like shit in this world because then they'd have to do something about it and they either don't care or they think it ought to be that way because women exist for them. Because they are lower than them in the hierarchy, women really just ought to accept that they are not on the same level and stop bitching about it. And the more men (who still have the vast majority of power in every sector) refuse to listen and care, the angrier and more reactionary a lot of women get. If feminism has gone over the top, it's because things are still so fucking horrible in a large number of ways for women. And in that context, expecting most of them to prioritize your issues and needs is unrealistic.
I personally think we all need to work together to get ourselves somewhere better - but we have to talk about what is actually going on that got us to this place, and most men (you included) don't want to admit what those issues are. The Jordan Petersons of the world want to take us back to when things were actually less equal than they are now and pretend that's going to solve anything. It's not going to help women, that's for sure, but it's also really not going to help men.
