Patriarchy is a social system. It has certain core elements that are expressed in slightly different ways depending on the time frame and the particular culture. An obvious example of this is the Middle Ages in Western Europe, where "manly men" often publicly wept as a display of chivalric or religious devotion, and yet at the same time treated women as literal chattel. Men in modern America have been taught in the past few hundred years to artificially suppress and stuff their emotions and although they still are messaged that men have the right to control "their woman" they don't (in most cases) literally think of her as chattel.
These are both examples of patriarchal beliefs influencing what norms are acceptable for men even though they have some differences - because as you yourself noted, patriarchy is a social system. It's a framework, — essentially a male led dominance hierarchy system that involves all sorts of other social stratification other than just gender. The core element of patriarchy is that it is a Might Makes Right system where traditional power is maintained by coercion, intimidation, and restriction of access to power and opportunity for those not part of the traditional power elite. Racism, homophobia, and garden variety bullying are all manifestations of a patriarchal dominance hierarchy system.
By contrast, egalitarian cultures, such as most modern forager tribes, do not tolerate any sort of hierarchy or attempts to dominate or control others.
“Nearly all researchers who write about hunter-gatherer bands emphasize the extraordinarily high value they place on individual autonomy. Hunter-gatherers’ sense of autonomy is different from the individualism of modern Western capitalist cultures. Western individualism tends to pit each person against others in competition for resources and rewards. It includes the right to accumulate property and to use wealth to control the behavior of others. In contrast, as Tim Ingold (1999) has most explicitly emphasized, hunter-gathers’ sense of autonomy connects each person to others, in a way that does not create dependencies. Their autonomy does not include the right to accumulate property, to use power or threats to control others, or to make others indebted to oneself. It does, however, allow people to make their own day-to-day and moment-to-moment decisions about their own activities, as long as they do not violate the band’s implicit and explicit rules. For example, individual hunter-gatherers are free, on any day, to join a hunting or gathering party or to stay at camp and rest, depending on their own preference.
Intimately tied to hunter-gatherers’ sense of autonomy is what Richard Lee (1988) has called their “fierce egalitarianism.” Egalitarianism, among hunter-gatherers, goes far beyond the western notion of equal opportunity. It means that nobody has more material goods than anyone else, that everyone’s needs are equally important, and that nobody considers himself or herself superior to others. Such equality is part and parcel of hunter-gatherers’ autonomy, as inequalities could lead those who have more to dominate those who have less. Hunter-gatherers, of course, recognize that some people are better hunters or gatherers than others, some are wiser than others, and so on, and they value such abilities. However, they react strongly against any flaunting of abilities or overt expressions of pride.”
Aside from the fact that the APA spent 13 years evaluating data and reaching their conclusions (and that thousands of other experts have reached the same conclusions), it's patently obvious to anyone who knows what they are talking about that a male dominated social system that arose out of and is steeped in Might Makes Right teaches men to be aggressive, dominate others, control women, etc. and a system such as that of forager tribes centered in egalitarianism does not and in fact, doesn't even tolerate that, much less teach or reinforce it.
Ergo, what passes for "traditional" masculinity in our culture is the exact same thing as patriarchal norms. Again, educate yourself around the term Man Box and read the essays that I've already linked to you.
Edit: It’s not that these things don’t have to be proven. It’s that they already have been — decidedly. They don’t have to be proven to YOU, to your satisfaction, particularly given the fact that you seem to be lacking sufficient understanding of the social dynamics in play. Back to Dunning-Kruger.
And I didn't say all the negative things men face are an outcropping of patriarchy, I said nearly all, which is an important distinction. And, since you can't accurately characterize what I said, can't seem to wrap your brain around concepts any social scientist ought to be able to grasp, don't actually know enough about what patriarchy means, and don't seem to have the capacity for any sort of flexible or dynamic thinking, I'm going to have to call it a day here, for real.
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