I just lost all will to respond to someone and had to share their comment. Here is the relevant part:
The oligarchy itself is patriarchal. Just count the number of female world leaders.
If we live in a patriarchy, it’s a very gynocentric patriarchy. There are lots of programs to help women. No one is stopping women from being leaders.
You heard it here first: patriarchy is all about women!
yeah female wasn’t the best choice of word in my original comment
This reminds me of how annoyingly difficult it is to combat “benevolent sexism”.
“Benevolent sexism includes valuing feminine-stereotyped attributes in females (e.g., nurturance) and a belief that traditional gender roles are necessary to complement one another. Benevolent sexism also includes the view known as paternalism that females need to be protected by males. Benevolent sexism contributes to gender inequality by limiting women’s roles.” (Copied from Gender Issues (2011), because I’m too tired to paraphrase)
It’s harder to call out someone who does benevolent sexism. Like if a male supervisor only gives me easier, more straight forward tasks because his intention is to help me get by in a field that’s pretty hostile to women, that’s not actually helping me because it limits my ability to challenge myself in my career and harms promotion prospects.
I feel like the person talking about gynocentric patriarchy is so close to actually hitting some nugget of truth, in that many programs to help women are part of the self reinforcing cycles of patriarchy