Yes, the thought occurred to me. So I went back and looked at surveys of people's attitudes and fractions of women in various occupations, and basically what you see is that attitudes towards women become more and more egalitarian and women have more and more equity and the backlash grows less and less.

And then along comes social media, superimposed on this decades-long trend that hasn't really changed trajectory much and suddenly, boom! Coincident with increased political polarization, we get racial polarization, and gender polarization.

Look at your attitude: "Why exactly should we thank you for oppressing us and abusing us slightly less than you did in the past?"

It's dripping with polarization, instead of rallying everyone to be in it together. It accuses rather than asks for empathy (which means it's there to provoke a fight, not to solve a problem together). And it undervalues what progress there has been made by an absurd degree, simultaneously sapping the will of anyone on the fence about whether they should do more, and also exhibiting immense disrespect to all the women (and men) who devoted major parts of their lives and made huge sacrifices to achieve the gains that have been made.

If you think what's happening now is backlash to progress instead of tribalization and antisocial attitudes (on both sides--the opposite edge is playing the same game), show your work. I've done mine; doesn't look like it to me at all. I'm happy to show my work, too, if you put in some effort to explain why the backlash is happening now, and why the other reasons that could explain the phenomena aren't the real ones. That's the key: why now? You can't just throw the words "patriarchy" and "backlash" around and assume the details will take care of themselves. Why is the nature of the backlash now not like it was before, when greater gains were being made?