The piece is getting some pushback, some of it predictable, some of it genuinely interesting. But there's a pattern worth naming, especially in the comments from men who accuse me of having an agenda while believing they're coming from a purely neutral place.

Here's what I'm noticing structurally.

The neutrality sleight of hand. Several responses invoke client-centered ethics "don't impose your values, meet the client where they are" as if that's a value-free position. It isn't. It's a particular theoretical and political commitment about what therapy is for. Using it as a trump card against a structural critique is itself a move. It's not a retreat to neutral ground. It's a relocation to different ideological terrain that just happens to feel like common sense because it's so embedded in our training.

The conflation of levels. The piece is operating at the level of culture, training, discourse, and the field's relationship to patriarchy as a system. Most of the pushback shifts the conversation to individual clinical work with individual clients. These are different conversations. You can hold that patriarchy shapes the context in which clients arrive and that we don't moralize at clients in session. These aren't in tension, but treating them as if they are is a way of avoiding the structural argument entirely.

The "not inherently harmful" move. This one is doing a lot of unexamined work. The question of what counts as harmful, and to whom, and over what timeframe, and at what level of analysis, is precisely what's at stake in any serious engagement with patriarchy as a concept. Declaring something "not inherently harmful" and using that as grounds for therapeutic neutrality quietly smuggles in a conclusion. It presents as an ethical safeguard. It's actually a prior ideological commitment dressed up as clinical wisdom.

Why men specifically. It's worth noticing that most of the defensive responses are coming from men. That's not incidental. Men who have been well-served by dominant culture, including dominant models of masculinity, tend to experience a structural critique as an "agenda" precisely because the current arrangement feels like the baseline to them. Their frame is already ideological. But because it aligns with how things are, it presents as common sense rather than a position.

None of this means the pushback is coming from bad faith. Much of it isn't. But good faith and ideological positioning aren't mutually exclusive. You can be sincere and still be working from an unexamined frame, which is, frankly, what the piece was arguing about in the first place.