It occurs to me that I really should have tested the content of mod posts before signing off on them. Not just doing an empty one with a title.

Adrian Chen, Rebecca Watson, and MittRomneysCampaign walk into a bar.

Chen says to the bartender, "I'm a journalist, I try to find order in chaos and bring chaos to order. So I'll have an Irish Car Bomb, and fuck reddit, it's full of pedos."

Watson says to the bartender, "I'm a skeptic, a feminist, and a blogger. I'm trying to make the world a better place. So I'll have an Old Fashioned, because fuck the patriarchy."

MRC says to the bartender, "If variance from perfect 50-50 distribution was always indicative of oppression, this would mean that all instances of such variance were cultural, and there weren’t other factors (biology or chance) influencing decisions. This is not even close to true.

But suppose you modify your claim and just say “most” variance from 50-50 is oppression. That’s better, but still weak, and a number of alternate explanations exist. For example, the gender distribution of violent prisoners is overwhelmingly male. Is this because the patriarchy constructs gender roles that hurt men and cause them to act out in aggressive ways? Possibly. But then why do some men act more aggressively than others? Are they just more patriarchy-affected? There is already an explanation for this, and it holds a lot of water: testosterone plus stupidity. Very high or very low levels of testosterone are associated with risk tolerance, and stupidity is associated with violent crime; more men are at the lower end of the intellectual curve due to greater variance, and more men will be more likely to have high testosterone.

This is one particular disparity that can be explained by a number of factors. But patriarchy theory, as it’s usually applied, attempts to be an umbrella explanation for all such disparities. Not only is this ridiculous, but evidence doesn’t support it.

The evidence, after all, is what proves a theory true or false. Evolution is demonstrably true due to the titanic weight of its evidence. What is the evidence for Patriarchy, then? When I’m on blogs and ask someone “how do you prove the existence of patriarchy?”, the most usual answer is something utterly disappointing like “look around you.” But occasionally you’ll get replies like this one from askphilosophers.org which attempt to demonstrate patriarchy via measurement of the number of women in power positions.

The measurement of women in power positions may be a measurement of inequality, but it is not, standalone, a measurement of patriarchy nor even always a measurement of oppression. This is because for it to be a measure of patriarchy, you have to connect the power positions beyond a reasonable doubt to some oppressive force preventing women from obtaining those power positions. Without doing that, the departure from the perfect 50:50 ratio can be caused by other factors, and you don’t have oppression."