The Fear of Undoing
The central problem with Are You Ready for a World Without Patriarchy? is not that it asks hard questions. It is that it asks them from inside a frame that has already decided the answers. The essay presents itself as sober realism pushing back against naive idealism, but much of its force comes from exaggerating harms on one side while naturalizing, and at times aestheticizing, harms on the other.
This imbalance begins early, in the move from a single anecdote to a civilizational thesis.
The dinner-date story is treated as a philosophical stress test, but it does not bear the weight the author places on it. A woman expecting a man to check a noise is read not as inconsistency or ambivalence, but as proof that feminist critique collapses under pressure. The conclusion follows too quickly. Human beings routinely hold mixed commitments. They accept some norms while rejecting others. That fact alone does not invalidate the critique of the system those norms come from. It merely shows that disentangling oneself from inherited arrangements is gradual, uneven, and often contradictory. To frame this as philosophical vertigo rather than moral transition is already to overstate the case.
This pattern repeats throughout the essay.
When the author turns to history, patriarchy is described as an adaptive arrangement that “served survival,” with costs distributed across sexes in different forms. This is partly true, but it is also selectively framed. The harms borne by men are described as tragic but structural, while the harms borne by women are described as regrettable but instrumental. Men “died young in war.” Women “lacked autonomy.” The first is rendered as sacrifice; the second as an unfortunate constraint. The asymmetry here matters. One set of harms is granted moral nobility, the other sociological inevitability. This framing does not deny women’s suffering outright, but it quietly demotes it.
The essay insists that patriarchy was not a conspiracy by average men against average women, which is correct. But it then slides from “not a conspiracy” to “largely functional,” and from “functional” to “load-bearing.” This is where exaggeration sets in. To say a system once solved coordination problems is not to say its dismantling risks civilizational collapse. Slavery also solved coordination problems. Colonial administration did too. The fact that a system once organized social life does not mean it remains indispensable, nor that its removal must leave a vacuum. That assumption smuggles in a false dilemma: either patriarchy or chaos.
The “infrastructure” metaphor does much of the essay’s persuasive work, and it is also one of its weakest points. Calling gender norms “load-bearing” implies that critics are reckless demolitionists, while defenders are cautious engineers. But this presumes that patriarchy is a single, coherent structure rather than a bundle of norms, incentives, and power relations that have already been radically altered. Marriage, fatherhood, labor, and social enforcement no longer operate as they did even fifty years ago. The infrastructure has already been rebuilt in stages. To suggest that further reform risks sudden collapse exaggerates both the stability of the past and the fragility of the present.
The essay’s treatment of violence follows a similar pattern of inflation and narrowing.
The claim that women “adapt peacefully” while men “respond with violence” is rightly criticized as a crude generalization. But the rebuttal overshoots in the opposite direction. By expanding violence to include social manipulation, emotional harm, and institutional leverage, the essay collapses important distinctions. Harm exists on a spectrum, but not all harms are interchangeable. Physical violence carries an immediacy and irreversibility that social coercion, however damaging, does not replicate. When every form of harm is rhetorically leveled, the most severe forms lose specificity, and the argument begins to feel defensive rather than corrective.
The same exaggeration appears in the discussion of safety. The essay suggests that critiques of patriarchy fail to account for the ways patriarchal norms constrained male violence and made public life safer for women. There is a kernel of truth here. Norms do matter. But the leap from “norms contributed to order” to “removing them risks widespread vulnerability” is speculative, not evidentiary. It treats the current moment as a fragile equilibrium rather than the result of layered reforms, legal enforcement, and institutional change.
The implication that women’s safety rests primarily on patriarchal restraint misunderstands how order actually functions. Patriarchy is not unique in its capacity to generate protective norms. Every enduring social system develops mechanisms to limit violence, regulate behavior, and make life predictable enough to continue. Law, moral sanction, social accountability, and institutional enforcement are not patriarchal inventions. They are responses to a basic problem shared by all societies: how to curb human violence regardless of its source. That these mechanisms historically operated within patriarchal arrangements does not mean they derive their effectiveness from patriarchy itself. It means patriarchy was one of several structures through which they were once expressed.
What the article overstates, then, is not only the protective power of patriarchy, but also the fragility of social order in its absence. It imagines a scenario in which feminists possess the extraordinary capacity to dismantle a civilizational structure wholesale, quickly, and with broad social compliance, while somehow lacking the far more mundane capacity to participate in reconstruction. This is an odd asymmetry. If feminists are powerful enough to erase deeply embedded norms across cultures, institutions, and generations, it strains credibility to assume they are simultaneously incapable of contributing to alternative forms of coordination, restraint, and care. The argument grants critics of patriarchy an almost mythic destructive power, while denying them any constructive competence at all.
More plausibly, what is at stake is not the sudden disappearance of order, but the gradual renegotiation of which norms do what work. Societies do not move from structure to vacuum. They move from one configuration of safeguards to another. Violence does not suddenly run free because a single tradition is questioned. It is managed through overlapping constraints, many of which already operate independently of patriarchal authority. To treat patriarchy as the sole dam holding back chaos is not realism. It is a failure of imagination dressed up as caution.
A similar exaggeration appears in the way feminist critique itself is characterized. The essay presents feminism as unusually coherent and dangerously dogmatic. Feminism is described as unable to self-correct, dismissing all objections as patriarchal reflex. This may be true of some voices, particularly online, but it is not true of the tradition as a whole. Feminist thought has been defined by internal disagreement: over equality versus difference, over protection versus autonomy, over family, labor, and care. To treat it as monolithic is to grant it a unity it does not possess, and then criticize it for that unity.
Perhaps the clearest exaggeration appears in the essay’s repeated appeal to unknown consequences. We are told that dismantling patriarchy is a civilizational experiment with no control group and no reversibility. This framing relies on a sleight of hand. Patriarchy is treated as a single switch that can be flipped off overnight. In reality, what is being contested are specific expectations: who provides, who protects, who owes whom what by default. These expectations are already unevenly applied, inconsistently enforced, and actively renegotiated. The experiment is not hypothetical. It has been running, imperfectly, for decades. To describe it as sudden and total is to exaggerate both the novelty and the risk.
In the end, the essay’s most persistent exaggeration is not about harm, but about necessity. Patriarchy is presented as the hidden scaffolding without which order dissolves. Its critics are framed as children pulling at threads they do not understand. But this rests on an unexamined premise: that social coordination requires fixed gender hierarchy rather than deliberate institutional design. That premise is asserted, not argued. It substitutes historical familiarity for inevitability.
One can acknowledge that patriarchy once organized social life, that its dissolution carries risks, and that not all alternatives are clear, without concluding that critique itself is reckless. The danger is not that we underestimate what patriarchy did. It is that we overestimate what must remain untouched in order for society to continue at all.
That overestimation is where the essay’s realism quietly becomes romanticism.