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Comment by thenmar | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious about how controversial this post seems. It has been bouncing back and forth from light gray to black. Is it that people disagree with educating others? That they have a knee-jerk reaction to the word "patriarchy" and dismiss anyone who uses it? That they idea of "allies training" is somehow repulsive and unfair?

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>That they have a knee-jerk reaction to the word "patriarchy" and dismiss anyone who uses it? That they idea of "allies training" is somehow repulsive and unfair?

When ideological lingo is used to communicate, it's going to, right or wrong, cause some folks to stop reading.

What ideologically neutral lingo do you propose?

What name would you suggest for the system that oppressed women for millennia?

I generally agree with the parent and I upvoted it, but I did so in spite of having a visceral negative reaction to buzzwords like "allies" (implies that I'm somehow taking a risk/taking sides in a war) and "patriarchy" (vague and ill-defined to the point of meaninglessness).

mostly that shanley (the blogger linked in the first post) tends to be a polarising figure

I'm replying to this because I can't reply to ForHackernews's comment, but this really needs to be said: "patriarchy" is most certainly NOT "vague and ill-defined to the point of meaninglessness". To say that is to dismiss decades of feminist work. If you are genuinely curious about this, the book Feminism is for Everybody (by bell hooks) is a great, accessible introduction to feminism and the (admittedly esoteric and ivory-towery) language you need to talk about it.

Well said. Just like "dynamic typing" and "object-oriented" these are terms of art. And great suggestion on Feminism is for Everybody.

I apologize if I wasn't clear, I think the issue is that "patriarchy" means many things to many people. Maybe you have some clear definition in mind, but that may or may not be what anyone else is talking about when they say "patriarchy"

I've read bell hooks, and I consider myself a feminist. But the problem is that there's no universally agreed-upon definition. How will we know when patriarchy is dead? What metrics are we judging this by?

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