On Patriarchy

There is no reasoning with patriarchy, because the range and quality of experiences of a patriarch are necessarily totally different from one’s own. A patriarch is, as Nietzsche would say, imprisoned in his own good conscience, and can’t even understand the games he is inclined to play. For instance, there was a recent thread of facebook which began with my status update telling people I would not stand to be called “dear” as it was a diminutive term.

From this there followed three patriarchs — two of them telling me, either directly or indirectly, that there was a lot of emotion in my text, which invalidated my simple request.

After I told the first one that the emotions he was detecting were assuredly his own, since all he had to go on were some written words, he retreated somewhat, but this was not enough to prevent a more robust patriarch from emerging on the scene to insist, three times, that the words on the page were heavily laden with emotion.

Finally a third patriarch appeared to state that people were simply requesting an explanation from me — this was after I had already very clearly given my explanation concerning the diminutive connotations of the term, AND after I had been through the whole rigmarole of explaining how all of the objections to my request were merely based upon the emotional projections of the reader, which had distorted my meaning and intentions.

Patriarchy.