> I don't understand what you're referring to.

The swirling mustached man who in western culture symbolize evil and criminality. If men as a group has all the power, why would men as a group allow men to be incarcerated in higher rate than women? We have similar situation with the phrase "women and children first". Why would the group with power sacrifice their life for members of a less powerful group?

> I think it is fairly obvious that men have more power in most cultures.

In the context of dating? Social science looks at outcomes, and women are more discriminative and have more decision of the outcome. Outside of some extreme local situation where some elderly religious male leader decides whom a woman will form a religious bond with, which in my country is highly illegal and carry prison sentence, I can't say there is much signs that men decide the outcome of dating. Looking at proxies for dating culture (ie romantic movies), that impression is further reinforced that women decide the out come of dates and men only have the option to try date enough women until one will accept him.

But any conclusion must come with the consideration that men and women has asymmetrical strategies when it comes to dating.

> Power shapes social norms.

Or social norms shapes power. If men must be bread earners in order to be successful in reproduction rituals, those who are more inclined to do so will reproduce at an evolutionary higher rate than others. Such incentives should, through not guarantied, impact the power balance in the work force. In cultures that do not have such culture should as a result have a distinct different power distribution in the work force. I would guess (since I don't have the data) that Chinese society has a more extreme gender segregation in the work force than countries where income has a lower impact on dating.

> Government is a mechanism that interacts with power

One could easily think that it is the citizens that control the government that votes a party into power. The common phrase, S/He who pays the piper calls the tune, implies a power relation. Naturally, a political party has power, but revolutions general happens to parties that travels too far from the cultural structure. Somewhat ironically, cultural changes often happen in the turmoil.

> Plenty. The French revolution has dramatically changed cultural perception of aristocracy and hereditary power.

I might be mistaken, but it wasn't aristocracy and hereditary power that was in control of the French revolution. It seems that the group in power did not get their way, and the cultural changes came from the less powerful groups working together.

Old style feminism did change cultural norms, and most what I have read and seen was caused by the goal to create change by targeting cultural values. They were not the group with power, and the change was not cause by getting the most powerful group to change culture. Instead culture was changed from within by changing gender norms and expectations. There is plenty of old Swedish movies that illustrated 1980s parents that attempted to eliminate gender identity as a concept, switching or removing gendered clothing and toys.

New feminism, which is a style of feminism I strongly oppose, is the idea that men and women have different strengths, perspectives, and roles in society. Difference feminism success seem to mostly be about pinning groups against groups and causing what people call the gender war. Old feminism advocated that everyone are human and differences in society is caused by a harmful culture, one that they had a good track record in fixing. Since everyone are human, they even managed to make the word feminism to be a synonym to the word equal, which seems quite hijacked by new feminism.

The Civilizing Process sounds interesting and valuable read, but not sure how it links back to the concept that a powerful group shapes society and culture. Going back to racism, the initial proposition was that the group with most power deciding what the culture is. My view is that the culture decide the power balance of groups and culture is formed by everyone in society. In order to fix a bad culture, one need to change society norms and expectations, and you can't do so by only addressing the most powerful group.