The Onion

I take your point, but look at the way power is arranged in our society from the makeup of the ownership class to the way unpaid labor usually falls to women.

Try not limiting your look to the very top. Because much like the top, the bottom is heavily weighted towards men.

I do like the framing, but I see it as evidence of the patriarchy and how it damages men too and I don’t think it’s a difficult argument to make.

"The Patriarchy hurts men too" is an apologetic. The religious equivalent is "God works in mysterious ways." The whole and entire point is so that when reality does not align with what is predicted by the model (whether that model is Patriarchy or an all knowing, all powerful, all good monotheistic God) to dismiss reality without thinking about it further. The whole point is to make Patriarchy unfalsifiable, which is not a positive thing for any model you expect to be able to predict anything because it can explain literally anything a posteriori and so has no predictive power. The whole point here is that malagency makes predictions that align with reality more consistently than Patriarchy.

Look at say criminal justice. Under a model based on Marxist class conflict, you would expect criminal justice to be wielded primary against the oppressed class while the oppressor class is given a lighter touch if at all. This neatly aligns with what we see with economic class (which is what Marxist class conflict is meant for) and also for race (because race in the US in a lot of ways is tied to and behaves like economic class), so for sex you'd expect to continue to see the same, right? Except you don't. By most measures you might use to demonstrate how criminal justice racially oppresses black folk and is easier on white folk if you break it down by sex instead of race the numbers look an awful lot like the criminal justice system oppresses men and is easier on women.

Which is what you would expect under malagency - men being perceived as higher agency for good or for ill means men are seen as more responsible for their actions and thus effectively more responsible for their crimes. I was actually surprised that the recent black child slavery case out of WV (practically in my backyard) had the woman get a longer sentence than her husband, though I have yet to find an article that details who was charged with what (beyond "several charges" and which charges were found guilty (beyond "most of them").

Women have only recently, within my mother’s lifetime, been able to get their own credit lines separately from their husband.

The fallout of coverture (which I am almost certainly spelling wrong), wherein a woman's assets and debts (and responsibility for some crimes) belonged to her father or later husband. A single woman no longer under her father could legally hold debts, property, etc (the term used was femme sole), but if she married those things would then be under her husband. The thing is, it's harder to collect on debts the debtor never actually agreed to, so most (but not all) lenders would refuse credit lines to women without a male cosign, because of the additional difficulty in pursuing payment if things went south. This neatly falls under the same umbrella - women were often refused credit lines without a male cosign because they were (first legally and then later due to social inertia seen as) less responsible for their debts, while men were responsible for both their debts (and until coverture ended) and those of their daughters and spouse.

They recently lost their hard-won reproductive freedoms.

Interestingly, being pro-life or pro-choice is not a strongly gendered phenomenon (according to polling from 2024, about 45% of men are pro-choice vs about 60% of women). The abortion issue isn't men oppressing women, it's (mostly religious) conservatives who see abortion as killing babies versus liberals and progressives who see a fetus as an essentially meaningless clump of cells.

They are far more likely to be killed by their long-term partners than are men.

...which is more about efficacy of violence than propensity for it. There have been several studies going back my entire life that suggest that women engage in violence in a relationship as often or more often than men, the difference is largely about size and strength.

It seems in my mind incongruous to suggest that there was not a patriarchy in Roman times, when a paterfamilias could legally kill anyone in his family (including his wife), or during the middle ages or Renaissance when women were kept from political or religious offices (with minimal exceptions),

It seems in my mind incongruous to argue that nearly all cultures (not quite all, as you might point to say the Hopi or the Mosuo (sp?) or a few other exceptions) worldwide for all of history are in any way a single, coherent system of any kind.

Tbh, I think it's the opposite. The focus is - ultimately - on individual outcomes rather than substantial societal changes. I think it's the Zion in Matrix at the moment: the way the status quo has designed its own opposition should look like.