The word demonize means to portray as evil, and that’s not something I’ve ever done, which is why you can’t find any quotes of my words to support your baseless, broad aspersions. The only one doing any demonizing is you — labeling as radical any woman who wants to talk about the actual harms that have been done to women at the hands of this society. If she doesn’t also talk about the harms that have been done to men (and even sometimes when she does talk about those, as I have), then she is out of line because in your zero-sum patriarchally poisoned mind, it’s a giant contest where someone has to win and someone has to lose. And don’t say that isn’t what you want because I’ve never once heard you say anything sympathetic to the lives of women in this culture beyond the most cursory lip-service. If you want balance, try being balanced. If you don’t actually have internalized misogyny than stop speaking like someone who hates women. You don’t have to pick a side. It’s possible to want a better world for everyone — something that I also say in everything that I write about society/sociology.
I have two beloved male partners and a son I adore. In every thing that I write that is about society I talk about the ways that patriarchy harms both men and women and never lump all men into one amorphous category. Why would I? That would be simplistic, unnuanced, and unfair. But because you are incapable of separating out individuals from a social system, you think that criticizing patriarchy is criticizing men. Meanwhile, patriarchy isn’t about individual men at all.
“In the end, patriarchy gives only a few men access to power in society, and most men some small access to power in relation to women, robbing all men of core aspects of their humanity. This is a raw deal of monumental proportions. I see this as the core source of violence: the physical, emotional, and spiritual brutalization of boys and men.”
The good news is, this system of enforced brutilization and constant vying for dominance at the expense of those around us is not inevitable. We can move towards a society that is much more fully based in partnership and gender equality, and although progress is somewhat slow, we are making some progress in that direction.”
