Er, but I was talking about people on Medium who read what you write. I wasn't intending to print out stuff you wrote and walk into a random diner in Boise and leave a printed-out one of your stories on each of the tables.

Though actually, that might be amusing, and maybe useful, as long as the diner owners didn't get too upset with me.

Regarding chivalry: it's influenced our ideals for a lot longer than a couple centuries.

Also, since I guess the conditional insults thing is supposed to be cool now, "if you think I thought that it prevented what you said, given that I said 'Reality often doesn't match up with our ideals', you are severely deluded."

Maybe we can skip the conditional insult part next time? I don't think it really adds anything, at least not if the caveats are already stated.

Anyway, you just said that patriarchal dominance hierarchies are based around "Might Makes Right", but that means that the United States isn't patriarchal because in civilian life, human rights make right, or law makes right. Power only comes in as a last resort, lest "anarchy makes right" (which is back to "might makes right" again). It is a dominance hierarchy, but it is largely devoted to counteracting might-makes-right as an organizing principle. So I don't think you were trying to give a comprehensive definition here, but this is exactly the kind of thing that I was thinking of when I was complaining about the lack of a precise definition.

Incidentally, you maintain that the U.S. is a patriarchy in this post (apparently whoever you responded to blocked you, so I don't know if I'm missing important context): https://medium.com/@ellebeauworld/im-talking-about-historical-matriarchies-and-the-ones-discussed-in-the-article-i-linked-dfe1cb7186c0

Either you meant that "the society in the United States is patriarchal even though the governmental structure is not", or you were using more criteria than just the might-makes-right one.