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I think your list is too anachronistic. In general, the role of men is to produce, refine, distribute and protect resources. All of these roles are still held by large majority of men, ranging from mining, farming, construction, infrastructure maintenance, police, army, manufacturing and virtually all the actually important things in the meat space. All of these things rely heavily on men with the participation ranging from 80% to 99%. And even then, the actual numbers are heavily obfuscated by specific support roles women do in these fields anyway. The same goes for STEM fields except medicine, especially engineering and other tasks. Despite all the feminist progress, the general gender roles did not change - men still do construction and police work, women are still nurses and care for children as teachers and nannies and they deliver nice sandwiches to men with a forced smile as waiters and so on. They perform similar jobs as they performed in 18th century, only with some modern systems muddling the waters.
In fact it is a very common argument around in manospohere: if tomorrow all the women disappeared, remaining men would do just fine until they die of old age. If it was the other way around, women would starve and die en masse within weeks or months. The society is still one huge resource transfer from men toward women and children - if women decide to have them that is - as it was centuries ago. But it is now hidden under jargon of rights and political process and largess created by cushy positions in government bureaucracy and similar jobs.
As an example - it is "easy" to be a divorced mother, if government forces men to still do their part of the marriage contract of supporting the family financially in form of alimony and child support, while women have no duties toward their ex husbands. In one sense seeing women in such a power seems like matriarchy, but she still relies on men for everything - be it her ex husband, or overwhelmingly male police force for protection of her person and her legal entitlements. I heard quite a convincing argument that this is still a patriarchy - women appeal to men to provide and protect them as usual, it is just that the modern patriarchy is benevolent enough to grant them their illusion of power and laughable notion of "equality".
But it is still an illusion - just because the patriarchy is benevolent toward women and oppresses fellow men, it does not mean it is not one such. Men always oppressed other men under patriarchy. Heck men oppressed other men in favor of women such as in Sparta, where women formed their own hugely powerful class of magnates called heiresses by inheriting wealth of their deceased husbands, or many other nations, where men risked their lives in war of conquest and subjugation only to bring slaves and jewels to entertain their mothers, wives and daughters. That is nothing new.
The thing is that if men collectively, or even in majority minority refuse to participate anymore, the illusion dissolves within days. We saw it recently after Afghanistan withdrawal, when Taliban warriors just leisurely waltzed in and subjugated women without any fuss, literally laughing at the notion of women's political rights.
Women are collectively incapable of putting up any resistance if men refuse to do so for them. There was never any female Spartacus waging war of liberation with her fellow Amazonians against oppression. All women can do is whine and appeal the patriarchy to entertain doing something about their position.
The key point there is the revolution. While law exists, social power controls physical power due to the police force. It does not especially matter if the ruling class has no physical power; they have social power, codified in laws, with which they can direct those with physical power to oppress on pain of that oppression turning upon them. This does, in fact, allow classes with social power to dominate classes with physical power nigh-indefinitely. Revolutions are the exception because revolution voids all laws - the pre-existing police force is literally defeated and can no longer enforce anything.
"Men are in charge, because the police force is essentially male" is an equivalent argument to "the proletariat was in charge in the 18th century, because the police force were essentially proles".
I agree with you. In the past we saw successful revolts, coups or revolutions. We saw peasant revolts, slave revolts, race revolts, class revolts or religious revolts. There never was a single violent feminist revolt in the history of mankind.
This is actually an internal critique of feminism with their obsession with power dynamics. Specifically that the notion of gender equality is laughable. Women simply do not have access to force, which is the purest application of power there is. Therefore ipso facto women are simply never going to be equal to men, because they rely on men to provide them with rights. Again, this is not negation of women having access to other forms of power such as persuasion, sexuality etc. It is also not an ought claim, that women ought not to have rights or anything like that. It is just a statement that as a class, as a collective, women simply lack this ability to enforce their own rights and thus they can never be equal.
I think this is a no-brainer. For instance if a parent shares his credit card with his child and he grants the child ability to spend on anything he wishes as he himself can, then the child is still not going to be equal, even if it seems that he has the same autonomy. Because parent can cut off the access to the credit, while the child can never do the same. The child can be a very good manipulator, he can be very vicious, but it does not change the fundamental truth of ontological inequality of the child being dependent on his parent for his perceived autonomy.
Again, it is feminists who created the gender dichotomy of men vs women, with men being the oppressors and equality as the end state. My main point is that sex based dichotomy is very, very different from other types of arbitrary dichotomies such as class, race, religion etc. Women are inferior when it comes to application of force, so they are never going to be equal using their own logic - which is preoccupied with power dynamics. In fact, many people are perplexed by this very narrow feminist view of history as battle of sexes. There are other views even discarding intersectional analysis of race, class etc. For instance a view, that men and women are not in opposition for power, but that they cooperated to overcome hurdles of nature, developing division of labor for common flourishing based on their different ontologies. The whole notion of sex being one of the intersectional axis of oppression is also very strange, as it has a completely different dynamics - every man has a mother and every women has a father. The experience is different from other dichotomies and differentiations, where the segregation can be much more pronounced.
Personally, it is not in my nature to wage some useless gender war. But if such a war comes to my doorstep by misguided people, I know how it will end.
My point is that while men as a whole could in theory do this, a man for the most part cannot actually do this because enslaving women is illegal. You are eliding a large co-ordination problem; for this to occur without massive bloodshed, all the men would have to agree on this and have common knowledge of their agreement, despite the various societal measures deployed in many nations to prevent that agreement and that common knowledge. Furthermore, they would then have to directly commit a lawless act by chucking out their women's rights laws (and in many cases women's rights constitutional provisions) outside the constitutionally-prescribed mechanisms, and yet still maintain enough regard for those constitutions and the rest of their laws to not immediately degenerate into civil war over what other laws should be chucked out (or dictatorship, as "the military is supposed to uphold popular sovereignty, not do whatever the guy in the big chair says" is also part of respect for constitutions).
Thought experiment: group A and group B live on an island together. Every member of group A has a big red button; no member of group B has such a button. If a day goes by with less than 10% of the buttons pushed, everyone who pushed a button has a heart attack. If a day goes by with between 10% and 95% of the buttons pushed, the island's volcano goes Krakatoa and everybody dies. If a day goes by with over 95% of the buttons pushed, group B are enslaved by group A. Does group A have any practical capability to use the buttons to enslave group B? No, not without some form of explicit co-ordination to make sure they all push the buttons on the same day. Even threats to push the button are empty without the ability to explicitly co-ordinate over 10% of group A.
Yes, if there were a civil war that boiled down to Men vs. Women, the men would win. But this does not mean that "men" can, in practice in a Western country that's not undergoing civil war, revoke women's rights. Orcus will stay on his throne, one bony hand clutching his terrible rod.
It has happened in the past, it will happen in the future and it is happening now. That is why I used the example of Taliban. They were able to put all women behind veils, remove them from political power and bar them from education without any fuss. It is impossible for women to do it the other way around - there never was such an occurrence.
Men can change laws, so that lawless action becomes lawful. It happened in the USA at least twice - the revolutionary war as well as the civil war, and there were many close calls. It is not impossible that this will happen again in some shape or form, especially if the society seems to be keen on pissing off young men of fighting age. As for other western countries such as in Europe, to me this seems almost inevitable. The changes in population composition will almost inevitably lead to some conflict and political reshaping in upcoming decades. Then it will become apparent where the actual power lies.
It is not necessary to coordinate on such a scale. Taliban only has maybe around 50-100 thousand of warriors with upper limit of around 200 thousand - if various local militias are counted. That is around 0.5% of total population of Afghanistan at best, and they were able to push that button. There were many such cases in the past, where key men were able to completely change the course of history: be it coups by pretorians in Roman Empire, Mamluk slave soldiers overthrowing their Arab slavers in Egypt etc. All it takes is a minority of men willing to apply violence, while the rest of the men are just looking on and abstaining from the fight. And again - there was never such a case in history, where couple of thousand of female warriors were ever able to do anything close to that.
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But the parent CAN cut off access to the credit. Who is to say that men can take power back from women? It's true that they could do so if they mobilised collectively. But we don't know that they can do that, any more than dogs or birds, say, could all at once attack humanity. Peasant revolts don't prove anything because (as you note) women are integrated into every part of society.
Men did that in the past, they are doing it right now and they will do it in the future. I literally used the Taliban example just from couple of years ago - just 0.5% of population of motivated men were able to do as they please. They are no weak dogs or birds. If anything, it is women who are powerless like that unless protected by other men.
Yes, women are integrated into society in manner that men allow them to, in the same way men are integrated into society in a manner other men allow them. But it is always men and not women. That is the point.
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That video was funnier than I expected. The laugh at 0:14s or so could serve as a great reaction gif.
The initial defeated, hangdog look of the interpreter/first Taliban character adds to the hilarity. Before the question cracked him up, it could have fit right into the Dick Flattening meme:
Then he and the squad realized the absurdity of the situation and corpsed the interview.
There's the classic trope that makes an appearance, where a Western girlboss obediently throws on a headscarf and covers herself up to appease Muslim men.
I'd watch the shit out of one of those cinephile YouTube channels breaking down the first 16 seconds or so of that video as a short film. So much subtext and worldbuilding in just a few seconds.
Funny how this could also be used to summarise the men without women vs. women without men Thanos-snapping thought experiment you described. The outcome of the first would be depressing but life otherwise goes on. The outcome of the latter would be a mass extinction event. Women's collective capability lies in their ability to get men to voluntarily or not-so-voluntarily do stuff for them.
The feminist counterargument would be that women are just as capable of surviving without men as men are without women, but if women aren't it's only due to subjugation and internalised misogyny from the patriarchy making them dependent on men.
Yep, I remember one such a case, when the first all feminist cabinet in the world from Sweden dutifully donned hijabs while visiting Iran.
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I remain convinced that the probability of a minority of women managing to sustain themselves through existing agriculture and sperm banks is higher than men inventing artificial wombs in one generation. Even if men cooperate on that, as opposed to going Lord of the Flies on each other.
That's because stealing sperm from a bank is ridiculously easy while inventing artificial wombs is ridiculously hard. They are just two completely different problems, and solving one versus the other doesn't tell you much about the respective genders.
It does tell you which gender, should the other vanish, would be more likely to actually survive past a single generation.
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You had to do it. You had to make me link to The Crime and Glory of Commander Suzdal.
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