Anarchism, not feminism (or, is the problem of domination its subject or its existence?)
Feminism is wrong about patriarchy, for the same reason that all identity politics is wrong about the nature of oppression. The issue is not gender but power. The alternative is not matriarchy but anarchy. Further, patriarchal and matriarchal forms of domination, both of which exist in traditional societies even if the former is greater, are forms of familial domination, of social authority articulated in terms of figures of the family.
The real issue with patriarchy has to do with fact that it is an -arche (principle or origin, and authority) and not the qualification of that as that of a pater. The problem with patriarchy is not gender but domination. True, of course, until very recently, the social power of rule, law, and command was associated with the rule of men and particularly fathers. But what was wrong with it was not that it was a form of masculinity but that it was a form of domination.
Opposition to domination has traditionally been the Oedipal project that is an affair of sons who rebel against fathers, hoping to eliminate and replace them. One could suppose that women rebel or refuse or alter authority relations differently, but it seems to me that they tend to rebel in similar ways, more against fathers than mothers, whom they more often desire not to oppose but to separate from, and to resolve their maternal conflicts by separating in some way while remaining attached in some other, while sons and daughters when rebelling against fathers tend to see them as obstacles to be gotten out of the way. If anything, women who rebel against male authority often just go much further, perhaps sensing that their gender and sexuality place them outside the masculine system. But do they create a true outside of it, and can they? Sometimes this opposition is hysterical, but hysterical revolts against masters tend to result in new masters. The daughter may want to have a new master, the son to be it. But whatever the turns of the logic of this relationship and possible modes of revolt by virtue of gender and sexual difference, it remains the case that the legitimacy of feminist rebellion against masculine power relies on the assumption that that such power is a form of domination and thus, in a world that believes in liberty and equality, of injustice.
Some people think there are privileged social subjects that by nature do not want to or even cannot exercise domination. Most such claims that have been made are nationalist ones, and they have proven historically disastrous as well as being transparently dishonest at a simple moral level, since it amounts to claiming that we are innocent and they are evil. Racism often has this form, as black racism often does, and antisemitism almost always does.
The most successful claimant to a logic of this kind was of course Marxism with its notion that the proletariat would replace the bourgeois as the true universal class whose interest is in a society without class or state power and relationships of domination at all. When Marxism began to seem more and more faulty, other groups were identified with this role, and this produced, particularly in the United States, first black and then feminist, gay, and other identity politics. Interestingly, a Jewish identity politics, born out of the same nationalism in 19th century Europe that led that continent to catastrophe in the 20th, as both a reaction to it and a form of it, was also gaining strength at just the same moment (1967-68), in seemingly unrelated events. But Jewish nationalism is an an ethnic nationalism, while the United States has a multi-ethnic culture and the combined influence of the black Civil Rights movement and our federalist diversity, the clientelist tendencies in our political system, and ethnic particularisms gave rise, in the absence of a politics that would question capitalism, to the identity politics thing. Add to this the characteristic American political and moral intolerance that goes back to the Massachusetts English Puritans and their witch hunts, and you get your social justice warriors.
The same logic as that of the feminist critique of patriarchy applies to all other forms of oppression that are articulated as a hierarchical relationship between two social groups.
Our left-liberal politics assesses negatively, and "critiques," one term in the hierarchical relationship instead of rejecting the hierarchy. It wants to privilege the less powerful and the excluded.
It does not seek to broaden the scope of inclusion, but to make a new set that includes all and only the excluded. Thus, it includes special categories of peoples as excluded, and it justifies this by places the exclusion under the sign of a past in contrast to a present that is departing from it, and under the sign of negation, which makes theoretically possible this departure by trying to create "non-exclusion" without inclusion, through negation of privileged terms in hierarchical pairs that are maintained in the understanding of social relationships. The totality of the excluded that forms the new group of those who are included it it is formed by excluding the formerly privileged group. Thus, for example, former Democratic presidential candidate Jesse Jackson's "Rainbow Coalition" was an alliance that would include as proper subjects represented by the now progressive Democratic Party, all and only those who are oppressed, which is everyone who is excluded in relationship to the privileged set of persons who are white European-Americans and perhaps also male and heterosexual. The question is not what identity names can be added to the list, since clearly the logic here is that American national identity is the open set of social categories a+b+c....+n, with the special twist that in the "leftist" version only those identities that are marked as historically (in the operative narrative; by which I do not of course mean false, only that the relevant and possibly true statements also meet this condition) oppressed and excluded groups. Thus the full formula of this left-liberalism will represent the All minus the Majoritarians, who do not count and are excluded, and the this diverse set of Minoritarians summed up as above. Of course, this way of think needs the Majoritarian group to be against. Thus, not only is black beautiful, but so is brown, pink, and everything else - except white, which is ugly, along with masculine. They are ugly because the project of the left has been defined as the critique of power, and domination has been identified with intensity of appearance. Those in the formerly marginalized minoritarian positions (so put because women count here but are not an actual minority, only functionally one historically because excluded or marginalized in appearance in spaces of importance attributable to power) are not invited to "come out," and show themselves as being as they are, and proudly self-referring (self-identified by virtue of their social group identity name -- and that alone, this is particularity but not singularity; the individual counts as member of a particular group, which counts in turn in the open series of nameable groups that must "now" be included because they had not been). So the real issue is appearance.
The left understands itself as critique of power, and culture and personality (the character of individuals and groups or societies, and also artworks and theories, which represent one or both of these things, and mainly count as such, and not for their own meaningful content; they count for who, as "what," they are, and not for what they are saying, for saying is always expressing, which is a movement outward, beyond what and where one is, towards some open field spatially and temporally).
Since power is wrongly thought of in terms of social subjects who dominate others (in hierarchical pairs that constitute the two terms relationally), critique of power is critique of power relationships and the individuals who belong to a dominant group. Politics is the revenge of the Bottoms against the Tops.
And its logic is carnival, which is one of reversal of power relationships so that the slaves become masters in the game or for the holiday, without the forms of the relationships changing at all.
The real issue with patriarchy has to do with fact that it is an -arche (principle or origin, and authority) and not the qualification of that as that of a pater. The problem with patriarchy is not gender but domination. True, of course, until very recently, the social power of rule, law, and command was associated with the rule of men and particularly fathers. But what was wrong with it was not that it was a form of masculinity but that it was a form of domination.
We are emerging fast as a post-feminist society that encourages everyone to choose the type of person they want to be, invest a great deal of effort in that, proudly affirm and celebrate it, and get very angry every time one imagines theirs is being disrespected.
Feminist and minority politics in America are liberal and not leftist, and that is what is wrong with them. The many poor people in the population groups represented by the identity factions would mostly fare a lot better with a politics that was more egalitarian and libertarian while being less identitarian.
The old joke about meeting God and finding out that "first of all, she's black," reveals a darker meaning: If the boss is from the ghetto or wears a skirt, but is still the boss, than she or he or it or they is still a boss. So the question comes down to, do you want a boss you like (or who is you or like you) or would you rather have no boss? If the latter, then the possibility that someone else might be a much better boss because merely of who they are or where they come from, is true enough, but beside the point.