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 women’s bodies and 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 – ie. women not being allowed to go to university, 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 moving power and survival through male bloodlines and surnames, and relentlessly drawing the limits of every aspect of women’s lives, calling this state of things “natural”, “life”, and “what did you expect”.
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 trust. It makes using the torture of rape and all sexual violence virtually consequence-free for men. It makes us spend years of our lives editing our bodies just to exist in the sunshine outside without mental distress or social attacks. 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 and survival. It so often makes it impossible to care well for children we did choose to have and want to raise in a world so it is safe, healthy, and free.
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, 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 at least 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 therefore serves to prevent the exploited male peasant or worker from revolting against their overlords.
Working women, especially those who entered the social and legal role of long term partner or wife, 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 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 the inability to become a King of his nuclear family.
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 femmes. 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.
Sometimes we interpret it 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 kinda argue therefore that often we are not even feelin “powerful” or “liberated”, but temporarily not just so overwhelmingly utterly vulnerable as fuck as individuals. We need the re-focus on the collectivism of our actions.
Let’s raise the bar for experiencing our power and autonomy, for all of us! Let’s go and get truly free.
