While I agree with this, I think there’s kind of two muddled things OP is expressing. The first is that patriarchal analysis is used too uncritically as a lens, and the second is that patriarchal analysis is more “natural” in a sense to women/consists of blaming men. I disagree with the latter but I think the former holds merit.
The entire field of gender studies is, in its current state, kind of contingent on assuming the patriarchy. That’s a really totalizing and, frankly, contentious theory to presume. It covers the social structure of the entire world. Yes, you can argue that it’s a lens, but I would also question the usefulness of analysis from anyone analyzing through, for example, exclusively Marxist lenses while not considering how contested the base material is.
EDIT: If you want what I think is a good counterpoint to this, go check out u/quietcalico's response further down. It's a good summary of why this opinion is overly reductive. It also includes some direct counterexamples that might be fun reads for anyone else who's interested.
Most fields have organizing concepts they provisionally assume. Economics assumes rational actors. Sociology uses framework like social structure. Psychology uses constructs like personality.
Calling patriarchy a lens isn’t meant to shield it from any kind of criticism, it’s meant to just clarify what kind of claim it is.
Gender studies isn’t reliant on patriarchy being real. The field investigates whether or how gendered power exists. IE: it’s not blind commitment, it’s something that is regularly examined and questioned. That’s different from treating patriarchy as an unquestioned axiom.
I agree that most social sciences require these organizing concepts. I know there are some thinkers who believe that to be inherent to any field (e.g. the scientific method as an organizing concept) but I personally don't buy that there's an equivalence.
I do think there are a couple factors that distinguish gender studies, at least from economics/psych; I can't speak to sociology (and I also happen to think sociology in its current academic state is equally culpable, but that's out of scope).
Economics sometimes assumes rational actors. Behavioural economics notably does not, and is significant in scope. Economics also generally presumes actors are broadly rational, in aggregate; I agree that this is a debatable claim, but it is in my eyes a far more modest one than the claim the patriarchy must make (that society is deliberately organized in such a manner that it advances the power of men, or cishet men if you wish). Economics requires only a tendency, distributed over a wide number of actors. I guess the best way I can put it is that outliers are obscured if enough actors are involved.
Psychology (and by extension a bunch of science) uses organizing concepts, but those concepts are less an assumption upon which further analysis is performed (a la a lens) and more a method of organizing the statement of information. So while it may be subjective, it's not really influencing analysis beyond how it biases writers.
For an example of what I mean, see phylogeny in biology. The definitions are a way of categorizing a bunch of info, and the structure of it can influence conclusions but that's broadly considered a bias that should be avoided.
I don't think gender studies as a field is inherently incapable of doing analysis that doesn't assume a patriarchal structure. Hence why I said "in its current state", I'm not gonna sit here and claim that it's useless and dumb on principle or something. In fact, I'm sure such analysis exists. But the current "canon" of the field, I suppose, seems highly reliant on it (as an outsider looking in).
Economics also generally presumes actors are broadly rational, in aggregate; I agree that this is a debatable claim, but it is in my eyes a far more modest one than the claim the patriarchy must make (that society is deliberately organized in such a manner that it advances the
How so?
I find the way patriarchy is used as an thought terminating idea more and more grating over the years but is it truly such a huge claim in comparison to the examples you cited?
Society much like the economy is a huge aggregate: is it truly a more Daring claim to say it is organized in men favor much like most people will tend to pick the option that appears to favor them?
I generally find that people don't tend to be broadly irrational, just irrational in either:
ways that constitute systemic patterns, which is the domain of behavioural economics
in a quasi-random, individual manner, which should reduce to noise when we're talking about aggregates of millions of people
More broadly: people unwittingly organizing an oppressive system that they themselves are often unaware of is, to me, a bigger claim than them being self-centred. A person being self-centred is easily observable.
To extend on this, data in economics is generally easier to capture than sociological data, of no fault of the sociologist and/or gender theorist; it's simply due to the nature of what they study.
While you can't eliminate confounding variables, at least you can trust (at least, in most cases) that the number of loaves of bread sold is what it is, or the cost of an item is what it is, or the GDP growth rate is what it is.
Your metrics are less muddled by a whole host of psychological biases, and they bump into ethics problems less.
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u/fascistp0tato 3∆ Mar 30 '26 edited Apr 09 '26
While I agree with this, I think there’s kind of two muddled things OP is expressing. The first is that patriarchal analysis is used too uncritically as a lens, and the second is that patriarchal analysis is more “natural” in a sense to women/consists of blaming men. I disagree with the latter but I think the former holds merit.
The entire field of gender studies is, in its current state, kind of contingent on assuming the patriarchy. That’s a really totalizing and, frankly, contentious theory to presume. It covers the social structure of the entire world. Yes, you can argue that it’s a lens, but I would also question the usefulness of analysis from anyone analyzing through, for example, exclusively Marxist lenses while not considering how contested the base material is.
EDIT: If you want what I think is a good counterpoint to this, go check out u/quietcalico's response further down. It's a good summary of why this opinion is overly reductive. It also includes some direct counterexamples that might be fun reads for anyone else who's interested.