Hello everyone, I'm a first time poster around here and I have a question for you...

There's nothing wrong with saying a patriarchy exists, since it does. But I've always wondered why the state of academic/radfem theory favors the concept of patriarchy over kyriarchy in its literature.

I suspect that since kyriarchy was coined recently, and patriarchy is rather old by comparison, the main kind of reply will concern the history of feminism, namely the fact that radfem is the child of second wave feminism and is a reaction to the patriarchal curtailing of women's rights in the western world, and as a result, the traditional nomenclature of second wave feminism has been carried along by its children through these 50 or so years, and continues to be used as it was.

Now that's fine and all; it's not terribly hard to make the argument that most forms of oppression can be traced back to patriarchy, but kyriarchy has a nice side benefit in that all oppression (be it in the west or on the moon) can, by definition, be traced back to kyriarchy.

And the tendency of kyriarchy to tie everything together in a very obvious manner leads me to ask a natural question: why is the concept of patriarchy favored over kyriarchy? Or is it? Do you think radfem will ever see a change in language to focus on kyriarchy rather than patriarchy? I anticipate seeing more discussion of kyriarchy in the future, but how much should be expected?

Do you prefer the concept of patriarchy, or kyriarchy? I'm interested in your thoughts.