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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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