That's a whole article right there.
Basically, it's the dichotomy at play, right?
And it's a Catch-22.
We'd be better off, I think, decentering 'men' from the conversation. But you can't because men aren't going to not exist anytime soon and it IS men, they're the guards. Plus, men keep working their way to the forefront anyway by making it be about them and their "feelings". Feelings in quotes because it's an emotional manipulation to deflect that there's a choice being made to control about those feelings.
Dave makes a good point. Most feminists actually learn about patriarchy at their mother's knee and they learn it the hard way.
There's a reason why most teenage girls butt heads with their mothers the way they do. Look at me and Urchling. Do you have any idea how rare that is? Or the sort of shade, from mostly other women and girls, that we both have gotten for having a healthy and loving mother/daughter relationship rather than a contentious one?
The trope of the teenage girl is truly the ballad of a dumb ass society.
The problem is less men or women but we can't get around the ways that men and women play into these dynamics of authoritarian minded people constantly trying to make us all be the same, fit and stay in our space, lined up like little ducks in a row, holding up our burden while playacting about how great it is, how happy and fulfilled we are, and how we're fulfilling our mandated purposes.
It's hard to have these conversations without making it be about men and women because it is. It's really not. But it also kinda sorta is. Except where and how it's not. And round and round we go. You know? Welcome to complexity. HooRah.
There's a danger to women's progress to be overly focused on men and how men churn in the dynamic. We need to lead other women away from our own parts of the dynamic and get more women on solid footing in all the ways. We need to not allow ourselves to be stuck in man muck at the expense of the rest of the herd, so to speak (referrincing a prior analogy Simon will be familiar with - heh heh).
