You've probably heard a bunch of bullshit about the patriarchy and how it's the source of all problems for women. The way feminists and their cling-ons talk about the patriarchy, it's a sort of ephemeral ever-present evil.

The reason patriarchy is ephemeral is because it's simply not the real problem. Feminists have made it up.

What a feminist -- a faulty woman -- actually resents is the undeniable power of the walking, talking, opinionated man standing in front of her. She resents that this man is vastly more physically and often mentally powerful than she is. She resents that any freedom she has - to speak, act, or anything else - is because this man implicitly permits her.

At any point, the man may choose to completely dominate her and force her to do whatever he wants. Society has conditioned him to not behave that way yet that latent power remains. The power differential is always there and will remain as long as males exist.

This faulty woman is torn up inside knowing that everything she has is due to the grace and generosity of a man who could, at any moment, take it all away from her.

But this woman cannot speak directly of her resentment of this man's power. She is aware of the risk of retribution, social rejection, or of the man expressing his physical power against her. Speaking truth to power is a dangerous game and so the resentment is not spoken of directly. Instead, feminists use the abstract patriarchy when they really mean the mostly-harmless man standing in front of them.

So when you hear the word patriarchy and wonder who the hell they're talking about, they're talking about you. Their power depends on you not realizing yours.

I'll get it out of the way early: attraction is best viewed a purely physical phenomenon.

Attraction of all forms, whether gravity, magnetic fields, or as social dynamics, is physical. And I don't mean physical in the sense of pretty faces, fit bodies, and whatever we've adorned them with; that's a minor component. When we narrow our view of attraction to the physical, it becomes objective and quantifiable. Opinions, preferences, or judgments come afterward.

Social and sexual attraction is so confusing because about half the time when we say or write the word attractive, we actually mean appealing. Appeal is subjective; it is based on preference, whether learned or innate. Appeal depends upon memory imbued with positive or negative associations. One way to look at the difference between attraction and appeal is that attraction operates at a distance and deals with generalities, while appeal operates up close and personal and delves into the fine details. You don't get the appeal interview until after you've proven the scale of your attractiveness.

A person may be highly attractive at the same time that he or she is unappealing. All else being equal, a chain-smoker is more attractive than a non-smoker, an obese woman more attractive than her slender alternative, and a teenager doused in cologne is more attractive than his more subtle doppleganger. Remember, all else being equal. Shifting those qualities causes those people to have an undeniably greater effect. They attract our eyes and noses, however transiently offensive, and so we're more likely to remember them. They stand out. Normal people mostly blend into the background, completely forgettable. But are chain-smoking, obese, or smelly people appealing? Not really. Certainly not in combination.

Donald Trump may well be the most attractive man in America right now. Still, many find him unappealing. To say that The Donald is highly attractive has no bearing on anyone's sexuality; it's an objective fact that has nothing to do with positive or negative response. Similarly, like her or not, Hillary Clinton may well be the most attractive woman in America right now. That obviously has nothing to do with sexual appeal.

It's helpful to view social attraction the same way as gravitational attraction. With gravity, greater mass leads to greater effect. Gravity induces alignment between remote bodies in the form of orbits. It's clearly influential. We can look at people the same way, recognizing that each of us has a quantifiable "social mass" that is much more than our physical bodies.

We measure the mass of the sun by measuring its effect on the Earth, due to the two-way relationship between mass and its remote effect. In the same way, we can measure the social mass of a person by measuring their aggregate effect on other people. A person constantly having televised rallies, interviewing on TV, featuring in advertisements (whether positive or negative), analyzed in newspaper articles (critical or not), and discussed throughout the Internet is obviously having a huge effect. Not always the desired effect, but an effect nonetheless.

And the effect is purely physical: electromagnetic and air-pressure waves generated by others and (mostly) transmitted via computers are captured by our eyes and ears, transformed into signals for our brains, incorporated into memory, and bounced around as thoughts to become a small slice of our minds. The trajectory of each of our lives is ever-so-slightly altered by these experiences and the probabilities of our future behavior ever-so-slightly shifted. The big difference between now and a hundred years ago is that technology has advanced to the point where a single person can have a nuanced real-time effect on tens or hundreds of millions of others simultaneously. It used to be that you had to stand on a stump and give a speech to a few dozen people at a time. Not any more; we've thoroughly demolished that ceiling.

One's social mass might grow via a transient, shallow effect on hundreds of millions of people over several years (such as a movie star or pop musician). It might rise from a fractional or associative effect (such as a member of a movie or game product team or a corporation), or from a deep impact on millions of people (such as as literary author or renowned scientist). Most likely though, it will be composed of mostly shallow impact on thousands of people over a few decades (a typical adult). There's any number of permutations. To get an idea of a person's lifetime "gravitas" and potential legacy, we can graph their estimated mass over time and integrate under the curve.

The aggregate effects of both Teflon Don and Crooked Hillary are quantifiable to a useful approximation. A countable number of human minds have been influenced by their images and messages. We may not know the exact number of minds, but it's safe to say that tens of millions of minds have been impacted, to some degree, every day for the better part of the last year. That's a serious effect, roughly ten orders of magnitude greater than the average person in the same time period. The average person gets roughly zero minutes of media time and produces relatively little. Ten orders of magnitude may be a conservative estimate.

I say orders of magnitude because that's a useful way of looking at it. James, with a social mass of 1.0 x 10^3 (magnitude 3), dreams of dating the nubile actress Jennifer who is at magnitude 7. The numbers, though made up for the sake of example, make it obvious: James has almost no chance of getting Jennifer's attention. He might be tall, handsome, fit, have game, and drive his Subaru WRX aggressively, but he's a speck of dust to her (or perhaps a useful idiot). He's simply not invited to the same parties or a member of the same clubs; it's as if they don't speak the same language. A man of mass-magnitude 2 or 1 is even less visible to Jennifer. Donald, the man Jennifer is infatuated with, is at magnitude 11 and is old, fat, famous, and extremely wealthy. She has almost no chance with him, other than occasional usefulness. Why is this? Well, why is that even a question?

We need only look to physics for the answer. The sun is 330,000 times more massive than the earth, or 5 orders of magnitude. The sun goes about its business, hurtling through space in its galactic orbit, with no effect from the Earth other than a slight wobble. The Earth is completely dominated and would have to somehow increase its mass by 10,000x or more to produce a noticeably mutual effect. The same pattern applies to people: unless two people are of similar social mass, the attraction is unlikely to be mutual. There may be a temporary utilitarian arrangement, but no meaningful relationship.

The difference between magnitudes 7 and 11 is 10,000x, which is the gap in mass between an elephant and a rat. Magnitude 3 would an ant. These three animals inhabit barely-intersecting worlds. It's the same with people; our meaningful interactions are mostly with others of similar magnitude. Call these magnitudes social circles, castes, classes, clubs, leagues, or whatever you want. A person of magnitude 3 may never meaningfully interact with person of magnitude 8 or above. And that same low-magnitude person may never even encounter someone at level 11 or above; their social realities rarely intersect.

What is the magnitude of your social mass right now? You should know it: it's your relative aggregate effect on other people. Your true mass can be your secret, but know that both the men and women in your life are all working hard to figure it out, whether they're conscious of it or not. Their estimation of your social mass relative to theirs strongly influences how they behave toward you. Your estimation of others' social mass strongly influences your behavior toward them. This is the essence of human interaction; it's much of what our brains do.

Human behavior is confusing when we do not identify and account for social mass. We would each be well served to measure it and include it in our hypotheses and perceptual models.

In later articles I'll delve into the details and relate this attraction-is-physical viewpoint to other areas of common confusion. I think you'll find that this viewpoint fits nicely with TRP theory and may help you tie its concepts together more completely.