It occurs to me that these claims that Feminism has run out of ideas might be a little bit early. There is some major work yet to do that I don't think has occurred to the grifter set yet.
Let me set a little background for you first and you will get there.
Consider if you will the movie "Year 1" with Jack Black. Absolutely wonderful movie. Ok, now go back even further. Back to some mythological time... the garden of eden! Ok, not that far... bump forward to some mythical time when everyone was just wandering around and eating and ... procreating... and doing it all pretty solo. Think of it like some nature documentary but with opposable thumbs.
So, at some point emergent behavior or social stuff started happening. Familial groups formed. Competition for mates started to be selected for. (If you are an evolutionary type) or one or more gods told people to get their shit together and society started. But really rudimentary! Think pre-alpha version. The sort of really basic stuff you see when a bunch of 4 year olds a just hanging out. None of them has an agenda or wants any responsibility. They just want snacks and entertainment. Ok, got that picture in your heads?
Now how did this simple idyll turn into the patriarchy? Well they figured out that there were some downsides to life. There were lots of unsuccessful life choices and if they wanted their playmates to be around for a while... there were some monsters under the bed that needed to get handled. Or some other narrative that involves a lot of people trying to figure out successful life stuff and pass it on to their kids so they stop annoying them.
Anyway... society evolved through trial and error. Sooo much error. The point is that we arrived at something that we would recognize today... in different countries and different cultures we still have similar collective knowledge that we collectively call "Society". Some people call it the patriarchy. I honestly don't care as its actually fairly descriptive... lots of dudes organizing stuff and trying to keep their kids alive. At the same time there are lots of women organizing stuff and trying to keep their kids alive... so yep, patriarchy for want of a better word to argue over.
The thing that needs to be destroyed and all that....
We can tussle over who did what and how much housework and where babies come from and who hurt who. At the end of the day the patriarchy is as good a name as "Society" for the thing that "progressives" are trying to deconstruct. And that deconstruction has clearly happened in areas of the west that are more "progressive".
But here's where it gets interesting. Now what?
Lets take a little step back for a bit. What is "the patriarchy"? Once you strip away all the anger and shitty life experiences that get tangled up in the conversation... and lets be honest... people having shitty life experiences has been a thing since day 1. The point is that society/patriarchy was a set of rule and enforcement mechanisms. Right or wrong, no matter which side of the fence you ended up on, there were rules. Plenty of which have been modified over time to suit different environments and technologies... but the point is that it was rules + enforcement mechanism, generally agreed on by the people playing the "Society" game.
So once you try to strip away the "male" bit. You still have rules + enforcement mechanism... but run by women.
Now we could go down a huge rabbit hole here about why historically there was a patriarchy of men running the show... but that's not actually relevant except as a contextual fact. I think that it is plausible that it could have gone the other way and been a matriarchy historically, as has happened in some cultures. I think its just a factor of the environment and probably the inequity in the deathrate of adults that forced a patriarchy to form. The horrific death rate of women in childbirth simply left more men alive and running households at some point and so the patriarchy was established.
The point is not that the patriarchy happened... the point is that something was going to happen. It could have been a matriarchy, it could have been balanced, it could have been based on the people who had green fucking eyes got to be the rule makers. Someone was going to get selected, in some fashion and it was going to be them who decided good and bad in society. It was going to be something.
The point is, what do you do when society trys to change who makes the rules. Is this easy? Are there vested interests? Does it look easy or hard? Who cares! We are past the hypothetical and we can see that change is upon us. The question is:
"What is the replacement rules system?"
Cause at the moment, there is a whole lot of folk still trying to pull down the patriarchy or whatever authority figures they personally hate because of their shitty childhood's.
The key point I want to raise is that it took a lot of thousands of years of trial and error to get where we are. Its going to take a lot to evolve a matriarchy as a viable replacement for the patriarchy and there is no sign of it happening at the moment. But if any of us don't want society to fall back to the stoneage, it needs to start happening ASAP because we have a very very very complex society at the moment. No matter if you like it or loathe it, a complete change of management in any large group of people causes a lot of chaos. Now extend that chaos over many generations....
So my question is:
Where the fuck in the Matriarchy ready to take over setting the rules?
Just parachuting women into leadership roles in the existing structure is not going to enact any fundamental change. Because authority is still authority and that's what most of these "progressives" are trying to demolish. Society without authority is just chaos with screaming in the same language. It will be interesting when the social expectations, rules of polite society, legal frameworks and tax systems have all been completely overhauled by the new "Matriarchy". The American experiment with the progressive Democratic party is a tiny nod in that direction, but I still think its based on 99% existing patriarchy.
We have not even touched on the second half of the equation yet. The "Enforcement" mechanism for the rules.
Historically, "might is right" was the mechanism. The patriarchy's authority was backed up by its ability physically impose their authority. I assume any matriarchy will try something different because... deconstruction and rejection and all that. So it should be really interesting to see what happens in a society where the mechanisms of control are not based on physical power.
Here's hoping it will be less dystopian than all the writers imagine.
The interesting aspects of this is that there is no "matriarchy" stepping forward to set the rules for women's behavior online. At the moment its just a screaming mob that is encouraged by the software and the social media networks to engender attention and eyeballs to sell advertising. There is so little attempt to "correct" because this is the first generation to really grow up with this technology, so they are going to be the ones best placed to figure out how to live with it in a sustainable way without going even more insane. I suspect its going to take a couple of generations to really sort out because of how slowly humans actually evolve their social behaviour. It will need social media that includes multiple generations occupying the same network, which we have not managed to achieve yet.
