Mirrors, Agency and Victimhood; The Problem with the Patriarchy

When it comes to the concept of patriarchy as a diagnosis of (western) culture, going by who makes the majority of the rules and who decides, it's often true. This doesn't need to be demonstrated. What does is that this is set up primarily for the interests of men. (While it's commonly pointed out that patriarchy "hurts men too", it is also commonly asserted that it's the attempt by men to control the narrative in order to benefit men.)
There are so many things wrong with jumping to this conclusion, it's hard to know where to begin. What about "women and children first!"? What about feminist allies? What about the lessons we've derived from evolutionary biology and psychology regarding the self-evident biological bottleneck of pregnancy?
That's not to say that people don't come together around causes. It's not to say that people don't want to protect their ingroup (though it may be seen as a suggestion that distinguishing between men and women in discussions of ingroup/outgroup may be a flawed perspective). It is to suggest that people can be wrong about their interests even when they come together in groups. Before we assume that men always act in the interest of men (or for that matter, that people always act in their own best interests), we should probably consult the relevant scientific literature. After all, that we like to believe something, that it seems right, doesn't make that belief true.

Consider this: if men control or have controlled the western narrative mostly to pull men up and push women down, how did Feminism ever accomplish anything? Did feminists find a loophole, or did they just benefit from the apparent fact that men have evolutionary reasons to instinctively care more about women than men?

Mind you, this doesn't mean that women weren't widely denied access to certain areas, nor does it mean that it wasn't widely accepted in previous eras that women were inferior or "further from heaven" than men (as is wonderfully exemplified in works by several writers of old). You'd have to be a fool to deny that historical fact. All it means is that men treated women as they did because of something akin to the "soft bigotry of low expectations", and wanted to protect them from danger and risks, often going so far as to put social barriers in the way of ambitious women. In some ways, that is tyrannical.
However, it should be noted that history is full of examples of women that transcended these social barriers. Examples like Jeanne D'Arc were admired by their people (after winning their favor, just like men had to) and hated by their enemies, as one would expect. A more recent example could be Margaret Thatcher, or many others. I still think you can see some expressions of this soft bigotry of low expectations (which, by the way, may well have been shared sentiments between men and women- both sexes seem to generally agree in works such as "The Adolescent" by Dostoevsky) in feminist solutions to the problems they tend to point to, that at least I find to often be easily interpreted as "women can't do things on their own". This was brought to my attention by the women of @HoneyBadgerRadio, whose "leader"/founder, Allison Tiemann, has said that she wants to challenge the notion that women are victims, which she thinks has been embraced implicitly by feminism. If we ignore the agency of women, we may miss a lot. I would rather see us recognize that both women and men are fallible humans, all of whom are prone to malevolence, error and capable of doing great things, with a unique set of desires and goals that overlaps significantly with the rest of us. As a species that has since the beginning of time venerated altruism (towards the ingroup), the boons of always being seen as the underdog are not to be underestimated, and people don't give this up lightly.

Perception is based in reality, and is rarely completely wrong, but it's limited and filtered by the evolutionary constrain that is the need to act, as such we are simply incapable of seeing (or considering) everything at once. We are all victims, but we're also so much more. Undeniably, some forms of victimization are more serious than others (presumably, microaggressions are minor, hence the name), but what generates admiration is how you handle it, not what has happened to you. You can externalize all blame for anything that happens to you. Unfortunately (or fortunately, if you think about it) that's rarely entirely true. You made choices that led you to the situation where you could be victimized, and identifying them can save you down the line. If you neglect to identify the part you played in bringing you to an undesired situation, chances are you'll play that part again, leading to more undesired results. Even then, you still *can* blame things outside of your control. This does not mean that you should.

 Chaos theory suggests that every action can lead to things down the line with ever greater ramifications (the famous example being that a stroke from the wings of a butterfly can be the determining factor in the formation of a hurricane on the opposite side of the earth). For all we know, we're all partially to blame for everything. It's a matter of degree, and in no way a binary distinction. If you want to see examples of mass denial of own contributions to undesirable results, I can point to the nazis and various attempts at communism, all of whom turned genocidal towards their favourite scapegoat, as if getting rid of it would right all the wrongs in the world.

If you break the mirror it brings you bad luck, or so the superstition goes. If you look in the mirror and see something you don't like, you don't solve much of anything by breaking the mirror. It's still there, and will cause you suffering in some way.

It doesn't matter much how much of your situation is your fault. If any part of it is your fault, you'll want to know about it so you can deal with it. What you can fix is largely limited to what is your fault. You'll at least want to fix that (sometimes it just might be enough, as Dr. Jordan Peterson often suggests). Imagine the mental breakdown that follows being convinced that none of what happens to you is your fault. That's the kind of belief that truly tears a person apart, and according to our textbook (Aasgaard, Trygve (Red.) (2006). Musikk og helse. Oslo: J. W. Cappelen. Page 211, in a citation to Nelson & Prilleltensky, 2005: 27), it's the a suggested core for community psychology. It's about redirecting the victimized individuals' actions towards social change.

By saying "it's not your fault" to someone who has experienced something terrible, we're potentially contributing to this mentality in the victim (Obviously saying that it's all their fault can be similarly disastrous). Today, one could make a reasonable case that we're doing this on a societal level when it comes to women.

To wrap this up: People gather around goals they see as good. People are fallible and can be wrong. Denying accepted science -the attempts at describing what is independently of us and how it works- does not seem conducive to successful pursuit of the good. We need to look in the mirror and recognize our nature. While Patriarchy in the sense that men make up the majority of leaders and elected officials is a self-evident reality, it is in no way self-evident that it was made so by men for men, and there's plenty of reason to challenge this claim whenever it comes up. One could even argue that it was established by men for women. That at least would explain why feminism hasn't been shot down by western authorities, but is rather being held up to the point where there is a UN-Women, and still no UN-Men to this day, which one would expect if it was established by men for men. It could also serve to explain why international women's day is over 50 years older than international men's day.
It is at least something to be considered, though there is a risk inherent to it. When we become aware of biases, we're prone to making adjustments. However, it's very hard to determine exactly how biased we are individually, so we're all at risk of making overadjustments. This is not a call to overadjust so much as a call to stop pretending that we have every reason in the world to think that the patriarchy of the modern world doesn't at all serve women's interests, and to recognize that thinking poorly of someone based on a characteristic isn't tantamount to hatred, and can in fact motivate to trying to help (which is good) even where no help is needed (which is probably bad). This is merely a call to honesty. Then may the rest come as it will.