What is patriarchy?
We understand patriarchy as a dogma and a system. It organises society into a pyramid scheme of ownership and interpersonal oppression that maintains assets and power at the top, and uses bodies of people classed as women and their lifeforce to bind it. It wages a psych-warfare to make us feel it is unquestionable, inescapable; to ensure we cannot imagine anything else being normal, natural, possible.
Patriarchy is a system of disseminating power in society, in communities, in families, based on the concept there are two distinct “opposite” sexes/genders, men and women, who are in direct hierarchical position. Men being on top by default and by virtue of being classed/assigned as “men” whether they themselves agree or not – and through being men alone holding importance, value, and humanity.
Patriarchy sees children, explicitly or not, as an extension of “legacy” or “property”, fundamentally stripping their autonomy and often humanity by men in their families first. Whilst human children are not oppressed by fathers or patriarchs alone, the primary objectification of children takes place via patriarchal hierarchy, especially in nuclear families, making child liberation tightly bound with women’s liberation.
Patriarchy is a system of relations and interactions between people individually and collectively, through a huge historical build-up of customs, laws, archetypes, traditions, knowledge forms, societal structures, physical environment and methods of social organisation and daily reproduction.
It’s a whole paradigm of understanding reality, of what is true, what is obvious, what is natural, what is transparent and not to be challenged, what we are socialised and raised into feeling, being, thinking, noticing, acknowledging, believing, remembering, valuing, preserving, honouring, caring, paying attention to, revering, protecting.
It organises relationships to bodily experiences, emotions, bonds with others, it materially shapes our brains, whole bodies, and how we show up for our lives.
The power of dogma
The power and maintenance of patriarchal dogma comes from constantly asserting the domination of men over women and children as natural, unquestionable, self-evident order of the world. Given by god(s), tradition, biology, you name it. There is always some indisputable reason why this particular mutation of patriarchy is un-shakable and the only truth about the world.
Therefore, there are many methods of “justified” retaliation on those who speak the truth about it, who question whatever is the current flavour of patriarchal dogma – ie. women not being allowed to study, men being born leaders and warriors, gay sex between men being most masculine because women are for breeding only, heterosexual nuclear family of 2+2 being gods natural creation, women being sex crazed witches, women being naturally pure and monogamous, etc etc.
From social disapproval and emotional pressure, through shame, to physical restraining and removing, collective punishments, and if that doesn’t do the trick there’s interpersonal violence and institutionalisation in asylums or prisons. It’s always disconnection, threat, fear, pain, rejection, ostracism, exclusion, removal from resources, murder, and subsequent erasure from any records and memory.
Patriarchy is systemic
Patriarchy intertwines with and props up other systemic hierarchical dominances, such as feudal exploitation, colonial exploitation, capitalist exploitation, global imperialist exploitation. How these socio-economic systems manifest in time and locality may have differed, but they always add on to or take disturbing twists to the existing sex-based oppression in communities, never replacing the man-woman(child) hierarchies, only fortifying them.
Patriarchy serves to assign and distribute physical and psycho-emotional labour, care, violence, safety. It dictates who can travel and where without much consequence, who can be in public spaces and how, whose bodies are prioritised, welcomed, considered the norm, studied by medicine, included in cultural creation.
Patriarchy serves to assign who exists in public spheres and shapes public life, social progress – and who lives in confinement, privacy, under control and surveillance, indoors or tied to locality.
Patriarchy assigns ownership and power to extract for survival and meeting needs, wants, preferences, frivolities. In families, especially marriages/monogamous partnerships, it infects most intimate and physical realities of our lives.
Patriarchy under feudalism and capitalism assigns who goes to war for land and resources, and who forcibly produces soldiers and then absorbs war trauma into their own bodies both during and after the war through direct and residual violence of the frontline.
Patriarchy under colonialism decides who gets annihilated and brutalised, who is used as breeding cattle to maintain land workforce, who is sold off and who is taken as servants into the house of “owners”.
Patriarchy dictates whose lives are worth valuing, honouring, respecting, preserving, protecting, healing, caring for, sacrificing, using.
Patriarchy sets up society to ensure own reproduction and continuation by forcing breeding, by removing natural mating preferences from women and people with uteruses, by moving power and survival through male bloodlines and surnames, and by relentlessly drawing the limits of every aspect of women’s lives, then calling this state of things “natural”, “life”, and “what did you expect”.
“Rigid binary gender roles are so pernicious as a system because they exploit people’s desire for love, care, intimacy, and affection to sustain inequality” – Soraya Chemaly, All we want is everything
Patriarchy is personal
Patriarchy is fucking creepy. It shapes our lack of adequate hospital care in an emergency or it sinks our heart in a fleeting moment of conversation with someone we know and trusted. It makes us spend years of our lives editing our bodies just to exist in the sunshine outside without mental distress or social attacks. From childhood it chips away at the allocation of time and energy towards female and queer creativity, growth, joy, agency and influence, and trains through coercion or threat to spend our time on narrow-range, rigid expressions of our bodies and activities.
Patriarchy is volatile and the ultimate control tool. It makes using the torture of rape and all sexual violence virtually consequence-free for men around the globe. It makes girls and anyone not “conforming” to assigned gender shrink the literal permiter of geography they spend time in, under discomfort and threat. It so easily can decide against our will that in mere 9 months we stop being masters of our own body, future, and survival, and instead become tied to care and legal & financial responsibility for another being for at least 18 years of our lives if not more, usually when we’re most alive and shaping our own potential for becoming and long-term surviving. It so often makes it impossible to care well for children we did choose to have and want to raise so it is safe, healthy, and free. It creates agents of oppression in mothers who train their daughters into obedience, self-dehumanisation, self-abandonment, objectification and self-editing, compulsive heterosexuality norms, and disassociation from their bodies; a disappointing at best and psyche-breaking at worst betrayal.
It shapes our perceptions of what is possible, it creates the borders of our allowed existence, it dispenses rewards and punishments – it works with shame, control, poverty, silencing, and with praise, proxy power, and performative attention that feels like influence.
Does patriarchy hurt men too?
Perhaps not, unless they are perceived “womanised”, effeminate, in any way aligned with what is considered woman-like. Perhaps yes, if you consider systems of oppression and hierarchy do exploit men and justify it with concepts of masculinity, such as becoming proud war cannon-fodder or working yourself to the bone or early death to be a dutiful “family provider”, dis-abled through brutal masculine conditioning from own mammalian soft tissue form, unable to face and manage own sadness, grief, intimacy, illness, physical weakening, mortality, or a doctor’s diagnosis, before it’s too late.
But what is more poignant to consider – there is arguably no type of man (unless living fully sex-segregated) who does not have a type of woman under him in society to take his own oppression out on – if he so chooses. Some feminist theory proposes that the very function of maintaining systems of dominance of rich over poor requires patriarchy to create this precise scenario of oppression transference and brutality discharge. A working man, otherwise oppressed and exploited by the hoarding capitalist class, often experiencing additional status domination such as racialisation, at least can be the powerful king in his own home, a brothel, in public, or online. That is where his word goes and his physiological and psychological needs or pent-up rage are met, absorbed, and serviced through culturally validated entitlement – or simply violence.
This pecking order of transferring the response & trauma of own domination to women and femmes and feminine people therefore serves to prevent the exploited male peasant or worker from revolting against their overlords. The domination and exploitation can carry on, the system is not threatened by natural human resistance, and the price is paid by a designated atomised layer of society – women – mostly in private, intimate settings of family relationships.
Thus, working women – especially those who entered the social or legal role of long term partner or wife of a man – are allocated the un-consented role of a human shield of the capitalist oppressors, a vent for the pressure cooker of the volatile system of domination we all live in. We can see how rage and emotional destabilisation spills out of men who are not able to inhabit the culturally enforced archetype of “being a man” – essentially forming own status by having someone vulnerable to dominate over in their lives, be it women, “weaker” men, or children. If only such individuals turned to the real source of their frustration and misery, rather than blame women’s liberation and their inability to become a King of his nuclear family.
Successful patriarchal & misogynistic training produces men obsessed with competing with each other for a pecking order position between themselves, at the price of own and others’ safety, health, rights, autonomy, and humanity. Patriarchy dehumanises both of the two genders it assigns, but men trade dehumanisation for power and control over someone if not wider society, whilst women trade own dehumanisation for individual survival or submission rewards mostly confined to private lives and spheres (unless they take on the trophy or celebrity role).
“To say that straight men are heterosexual is only to say that they engage in sex (fucking exclusively with the other sex, i.e., women). All or almost all of that which pertains to love, most straight men reserve exclusively for other men. The people whom they admire, respect, adore, revere, honor, whom they imitate, idolize, and form profound attachments to, whom they are willing to teach and from whom they are willing to learn, and whose respect, admiration, recognition, honor, reverence and love they desire… those are, overwhelmingly, other men. In their relations with women, what passes for respect is kindness, generosity or paternalism; what passes for honor is removal to the pedestal. From women they want devotion, service and sex.
Heterosexual male culture is homoerotic; it is man-loving.”
― Marilyn Frye, The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory
Resistance and liberation must be collective
However you cut it, patriarchy is the air we breathe, the water we drink, the loved ones we live with. We cannot individually buy-self-out of it or decide to opt-out. We cannot choice-feminism ourselves out of being structurally, physically, culturally, legally, psychologically – basically, materially – positioned as disempowered, dominated, subjugated, controlled, just to varied levels.
Personal emotional or financial sense of self-liberation is not the same as material one for our whole sub-class, for all women and gender queers. And often under patriarchal capitalism what can situationally, individually make us feel “empowered” (ie. getting plastic surgery or working jobs that rely on “exploiting men back”), is often not empowering to our sisters in oppression – nor ourselves long-term either. If everybody just makes the survival choice to “help” themselves, nothing can ever change.
Sometimes we interpret some choices as as “empowerment” when we are simply trying to individually avoid the ridicule, social punishment, rejection, being irrelevant, invisible, omitted, hurt, uncared for, unprotected, unloved, unhoused.
We argue therefore that often we are not even feeling individually “powerful” or “liberated”, but temporarily not just so overwhelmingly utterly vulnerable as fuck as individuals. The truth about our choices matters as we either submit and collude with patriarchy or expose it in our choices and narratives. Expression of truth in our bodies, stories, lives, is powerful and influential. Our courage is our solidarity.
We need the re-focus on the collectivism of our actions, snow-balling their effect so they encompass all of us under assaults of patriarchal misogyny. Patriarchy, like capitalism, breeds individualism in both competition for power and survivial; matriarchy, like anarchy, is naturally collectivist, for broad social good – arguably the natural state for tribal mammalian species where song, dance, menopause, and grand-mothering occurs.
“matrix (latin) – womb, source, origin – from mater – mother. by extension it came to mean a place where something grows or is situated, and ultimately a constellation of interrelationships” – Max Dashu, Matricultures and the Matrix of Life
Let’s raise the bar for experiencing our power and autonomy, for all of us! Let’s go and get truly free.
