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That's because it's not a specific empirical claim, it's a narrative lens.
Like evolutionary psychology. Like capitalism. Like Gamergate. Like politics. Like a lot of things.
I don't know if this board is comfortable calling it autism or STEM-mindset or whatever, but I have it, a lot of you have it, it has a lot of benefits, and it makes us bad at understanding what people are doing when they use narrative lenses to try to express theories and observations that are too vast and complex to be 'proven' with a single empirical observation.
Saying 'male loneliness is caused by patriarchy' is not the same type of claim as 'gravity causes things to fall towards the ground.'
But it is the same type of claim as 'low consumer confidence causes recessions'.
If you say 'don't be ridiculous, recessions aren't caused by low consumer confidence, they're caused by supply shocks,' then you're kind of missing the point. Recessions are caused by lots of different things all interacting in complex and chaotic ways, and those things are all way more amorphous and varied and random than the terms 'consumer confidence' or 'supply shock' or even 'recession' make them sound like. You can't point your finger at a simple empirical causal relationship for any of this, nor can you measure it in a definitive way that makes one of those theories right and the other wrong forever.
And yet, it's still meaningful to talk about how low consumer confidence causes recessions, how supply shocks cause recessions, etc. Because what you are doing in when you talk about a claim like that is taking the ineffable chaos that is a human economy and using a narrative lens to point out a specific trend or pattern or commonality in that economic process. And in the same way it is useful to talk about a fire as an object even though it's really a process, focusing our attention through that lens lets us explore and notice things, real actual things with real actual causal significance, that we wouldn't have noticed if we were just treating it as undifferentiated chaos.
And of course, we have to look at it through lots of different lenses to illuminate different parts of the chaos, and try to pick out individual empirical pieces we can hold onto and measure, and integrate across different perspectives to try to make a coherent model of the overall process. But that doesn't make any one of those lenses wrong, that type of claim is a category error.
(many lenses may be useless, of course)
So, anyway.
Patriarchy causes male loneliness and suicide?
That lens is to make you notice that boys and men police each other against too much emotional or physical intimacy towards each other, and that causes loneliness and alienation.
It's to make you notice that society pushes men to view all relationships they have with women as potentially sexual and looks skeptically at those who don't, in ways that put strain on those potential friendships and creates loneliness and alienation.
It's to make you notice how society denigrates 'sensitive' men who talk about their emotions or express sadness or seek help, making it harder for them to turn around bad situations they are in.
It's to make you notice that suicide attempts are more common for women but more successful for men, and that's mostly because of gun culture encouraging men to have deadlier tools at their disposal.
Etc.
You can say 'calling that patriarchy when there are more proximate causes is dishonest' or 'that's not what causes it because there's also this other things that causes it' or w/e, but again that's kind of a category error, those claims are not incompatible with what the narrative lens is trying to tell you. If the narrative lens caused you to pay attention and think about the issue in more detail and notice all those specific thigns you're pointing out, it's kind of done it's job already.
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