Cosplay for the Aggrieved

If patriarchy is so efficient and so evil, why does it produce such dismal outcomes for so many men?

“My love language is receiving gifts,” she purred. Her voice matched her eyes and it was compelling as if designed to be.

A friend of a friend introduced us. She seemed, in the initial viewing, to be someone dressed for Halloween as Sexy School Administrator. We both sat at the far end of the long bar, sipping beers, and doing that awkward dance of figuring out if the other was somehow better than sitting and drinking alone.

“If your love language,” a term I find to be both silly and obnoxious simultaneously, “is receiving gifts, then what do you provide in reciprocation?”

“That question practically screams insecurity.”

“Insecurity? Nah. That’s just experience raising his wise ol’ head above the foxhole.”

“Hmmm.” She sipped her lager and looked around the bar as if she sought her friend to save her.

We sat together/alone for a beat. She set her glass down.

“I think you need to evolve some. Your male, white privilege is just so obvious. You’re stuck in the ways of the patriarchy, like someone convinced his masculinity will get him something he didn’t earn.”

“Patriarchy?”

“Yeah.”

“Is that the name of a Liam Neeson film or something? Because I’m about 90% certain it isn’t anything substantial.”

“C’mon. You know what I mean.”

“I know what you think you mean but, like Scientology and astrology, I’m not a believer.”

“You don’t believe there’s a patriarchy? What’s wrong with you?”

“I think there used to be something called the patriarchy but it’s now an umbrella term for lazy thinkers.”

I paid my tab, finished my beer, and split. Some conversations are just not worth the effort.

In the age of hashtags, grievance economies, and victimhood as currency, “the patriarchy” has been resurrected like a Marxist Frankenstein with a sociology degree and a TikTok account. It is invoked like a spell with religious fervor and little specificity to explain everything from wage gaps to mansplaining, from corporate hierarchies to how often someone interrupts you on a podcast. But if we care about truth—or even just intellectual honesty—we must ask: is the patriarchy real, or is it a politically convenient myth that serves more to polarize than to illuminate?

Yeah. The concept of an oppressive regime of men dominating women exists in non-Western countries. If you’re a woman in Afghanistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, or North Korea there is without argument a patriarchy in place. Try protesting to “Free the Nipple” in Yemen and end up beheaded. In Western Culture, not so much.

In America, Europe, and almost every single country that practices Western cultural norms, the patriarchy is a myth—not in the sense that gender-based power disparities have never existed, but in the sense that the modern, monolithic, and oppressively coordinated male-dominated system that’s often cited today is less sociological reality than ideological specter. It’s a construct. A narrative. A meme that outgrew its original function. Like a Cold War-era duck-and-cover video still being used to explain global thermonuclear diplomacy.

Contrary to my belief that the term The Patriarchy sounds more like a hair band from 1983, the term was originally an anthropological descriptor—a term used to refer to male-dominated kinship structures in traditional societies. Over time, second-wave feminists of the 1960s and 1970s repurposed it as a kind of all-encompassing explainer for systemic male dominance. And in that context with legal disenfranchisement, unequal property rights, lack of educational opportunities, it had real teeth.

But like so many ideological frameworks birthed in legitimate grievance, it didn’t evolve so much as metastasize.

By the time we get to 21st-century Western culture where women vote in equal or greater numbers than men, dominate higher education, live longer, and control a majority of consumer spending we’re no longer talking about a rigid hierarchy of oppression. We’re talking about a cultural relic still being used as if Gloria Steinem never got her Ms. magazine and RBG didn’t exist.

The patriarchy as invoked today is not the same beast it once was. Today, it’s not a system. It’s a vibe. A feeling. A vaguely defined but emotionally potent conspiracy theory that can never be disproven because it shifts shape with every conversation.

Let’s demolish one pillar of the myth with a basic, brutal question: Which men are running the world?

Is it the men working 12-hour shifts driving Amazon trucks for $16/hour with herniated discs and no dental insurance? Is it the men who comprise 93% of workplace deaths, who dominate homelessness statistics, who make up the majority of suicides, who are failing in school, losing in family court, and being told that their masculinity is “toxic” by HR PowerPoint slides?

Are those the patriarchs?

Or is the “patriarchy” really code for rich men — in which case we’re having a class conversation, not a gendered one, and the lexicon of oppression needs a total rewrite. Jeff Bezos is not the same as a father of three working nights in a toll plaza. To claim otherwise is a rhetorical bait-and-switch designed to justify outrage and absolve the comfortable of complexity.

We’re sold the narrative of men in suits in smoky boardrooms—straight out of a 1980s Oliver Stone film—while ignoring the legion of invisible, unromanticized men who suffer from the paradigms of modern life far more than they benefit. For every man in the C-suite, there are hundreds of thousands digging trenches, serving drinks, or dying young and unnoticed.

If patriarchy is so efficient and so evil, why does it produce such dismal outcomes for so many men?

This narrative presumes that power is distributed primarily, and unfairly, through gender. But here’s the truth-that-shall-not-be-named: power follows utility, not identity. Those who can best exploit a resource—money, sex, influence, attention—will gain power in any society. And that’s not inherently gendered.

Take modern culture. The most influential TikTok creators are overwhelmingly young women. Book publishing skews female. Human resources departments—the de facto moral police of the workplace—are predominantly female. Schools and colleges are run and taught by women in numbers that would provoke outrage were the genders reversed.

Is that matriarchy? No one dares say so because the term doesn’t carry the same narrative fuel. We only invoke “systemic” forces when the outcomes are bad and the villains are pre-typed. The entire trope of systemic -isms is rooted in the simplistic desire for a good vs evil binary—if I am good by my own estimation or marginalization then the the person on the other side of the fence must be evil, right?

Meanwhile, the power dynamics of romance, the one domain most people spend the majority of their lives navigating, show that women still initiate 70% of divorces and overwhelmingly dictate the terms of child custody. That’s not patriarchy. That’s something else entirely. That’s female agency—a concept that feminists once fought for, only to watch it later get subsumed beneath a deluge of victim narratives.

No conversation about this fifth wave feminist mythology is complete without dragging the bloated corpse of the 77 cents on the dollar stat into the light. It’s the most cited, least understood piece of data in modern discourse.

That figure doesn’t compare men and women doing the same job for the same hours and the same responsibilities. It’s a gross average that doesn’t adjust for profession, experience, risk tolerance, or time spent in the workforce. When those factors are controlled, the wage gap all but disappears. And in some cities and industries, particularly among the under-30s, women now out-earn men.

But the myth lingers because it’s useful. It allows for indignation, fundraising, and headline fodder. It allows one to point to a villain without the burden of specificity. It sustains the illusion of systemic male conspiracy when in reality, the only thing systemically persistent is a failure to read beyond the first line of a report.

Modern progressivism has attempted to resolve the collapsing “patriarchy” narrative by layering it with intersectionality, the idea that one’s oppression compounds based on the number of marginalized identities one carries. This might seem sophisticated, but it quickly becomes a hall of mirrors.

Are white women oppressed by black men? Are gay men part of the patriarchy if they run media companies? What about women who lead Fortune 500 firms? Do their positions of authority dissolve in the acid of intersectional theory?

The patriarchy myth doesn’t scale well in a society where identities are fluid, power is multidimensional, and victimhood can be gamified for clout. It tries to map a 19th-century structure onto a 21st-century ecosystem. It’s like diagnosing an autoimmune disorder with a leech and a Bible verse.

Walk through any American bookstore, scroll through any streaming platform, or browse the curriculum of any liberal arts college, and ask yourself: who’s defining the culture?

The idea that we live in a culture designed, perpetuated, and dominated by male values is risible. Popular culture doesn’t reflect stoicism, competition, or emotional restraint—classic “male” virtues, if we’re playing that game. It reflects emotional transparency, vulnerability, social connectivity, all values that our current culture lionizes, and which women tend to display more frequently.

Even masculinity itself has become a diagnostic category. It’s not just questioned, it’s pathologized. “Toxic masculinity” is now so culturally embedded that a boy demonstrating confidence and aggression is more likely to be punished than praised.

If we’re living under a patriarchy, it’s doing a shitty job of branding itself.

Here’s a quiet truth that topples the patriarchy myth faster than a stack of unread Ms. Magazine back issues: Women prefer men who are successful, confident, and dominant.

Study after study, from Tinder to psychology journals, confirms that women, even feminist-identifying ones, are more attracted to men who exhibit traits of power and authority. They date up, not down. They select partners based on ambition and status more than men do.

This is not internalized misogyny. This is human nature. Evolutionary biology. And it completely undermines the idea that male success is oppressive—when that very success is what women so often reward, both socially and sexually.

You can’t vilify the very traits you biologically select for and then call it oppression when those traits appear at scale.

The ultimate irony of the patriarchy fabrication is that it infantilizes women far more than it empowers them. It casts them as perpetual victims, stripped of agency, constantly manipulated by shadowy male overlords.

But women are not weak. They are not passive. They are not incapable of shaping their own destinies.

In fact, the most insidious form of misogyny today is the one cloaked in allyship—the notion that women need constant protection, can’t handle dissent, and must be shielded from uncomfortable truths. That is not liberation. That is condescension in a pussy hat.

This doesn’t just limit men. It reduces women to spectators in their own lives.

Sure, sexism still exists. Head to Salt Lake City, Birmingham, or El Paso and the sexism is rampant. Sexism is alive and well, as is racism, ageism, and every other -ism you can conjure on a slow news day. But confusing the presence of bias with the existence of a grand, invisible operating system is the thinking of the intellectally stunted.

We should be fighting for a culture where no one is boxed in by gender expectations — not where outdated feminist frameworks are used to justify modern power grabs or to silence legitimate male struggles.

The truth is, modern society is complex, contradictory, and chaotic. It defies simple hierarchies. The idea of a singular, male-dominated “system” pulling the strings is as outdated as dial-up internet and shoulder pads. It’s comforting, perhaps, to imagine that there’s a culprit and that injustice has a return address.

But sometimes, the problem isn’t a cabal. Sometimes, it’s entropy. Sometimes, it’s human nature. And sometimes, it’s the stories we keep telling ourselves because they’re easier than looking in the mirror and asking harder questions.

So no, the patriarchy is not real—not in the way it’s described by talking heads, gender studies departments, or Twitter activists. It’s a comforting lie that allows for tribalism, outrage, and moral certainty in an otherwise complicated world.

It once described a real system. Now it’s cosplay for the aggrieved.

If we want progress, we must retire this bullshit. We must stop chasing ghosts and start dealing with people in all their nuance, their contradictions, their capacity for harm and healing alike.

And above all, we must accept this hard truth:

We are not ruled by men. We are ruled by narrative. That narrative is written by those with money.

And whoever controls the narrative… well, they are the new patriarchy.