For The Guys: A Simple Guide to Patriarchy

PATRIARCHY. When I was younger, this word seemed so silly to me. It doesn’t help that some people throw it around like a hot potato. But guys, let’s talk about it.

I mean seriously, how many times have you heard a screeching feminist cry, “You’re propagating the patriarchy!” at some guy saying he doesn’t want to buy vegan sausage rolls? For me, it’s twice. Which isn’t that often, but it’s a very specific thing to happen twice.

Of course, we live in the social media age. Unfortunately, whatever your perspective, there is a legion of content ready to stamp you with whatever belief you already hold, time and time again, pressing it in so deep that it can mould our very perceptions of reality. Left or right, it can be very challenging to talk about this topic because there is so much damn noise.

So let’s sit down, and talk about patriarchy, as it is understood in third-wave, intersectional feminism. Whether you agree with me or disagree with me by the end of this article, at least we can hash out the ideas. My goal with this is just to communicate a specific, academic understanding of what patriarchy is (and what many third-wave feminists mean by it), what it is not, and why it matters.

Patriarchy’s name is somewhat deceptive. And, it’s made worse by the fact that we have people throwing around patriarchy whenever a man does anything. And that does nothing to help anyone. The term patriarch isn’t just about being a man. It’s about being a man with power. Patriarchy is meant to refer to an ideology in which men are expected to be patriarchs.

And if we think about the traditional, good ol’ American, nuclear family structure, we see it, right? The man is the breadwinner. He has the money. He has the financial freedom. His wife works around his life to keep the house and children in order. Again, this is the very typical, old-fashioned American family structure. It would be fair to call that breadwinning man the patriarch of the house. And that’s not an insult.

Inherently, being a patriarch isn’t a bad thing, and that’s a really important note that I don’t think is put across clearly enough. A family structure where a good man provided for the home, and his wife stays at home and takes care of everything else? That can be a very happy life that many people have found great happiness and prosperity in. And if a woman wants that kind of relationship, it isn’t feminist to tell her no.

It’s just putting women into another gender role, one that exists entirely in antagonism to the one that came before.

It’s also not about masculinity being bad. Seriously. When the idea of patriarchy first arose, much of it was about women having to deal with unmasculine, weak men abusing the power society afforded them without good reason. And any man can understand why that’s frustrating, right? That women feel like a guy that isn’t worth a rag of her skirt has power over them? Does he deserve it? Should society promote that?

And I’m sure you’re thinking, well, what about toxic masculinity? And you know what, you’re right. This is a very common topic in feminist circles and whilst it isn’t essentially connected to patriarchy, it’s an idea that often comes up. So, let’s make sure we clarify a few things.

Toxic masculinity is not about masculinity. It’s about how it can manifest in toxic ways or have damaging effects in certain areas of life. And this term wasn’t made by feminists. It was made by men, to talk about men’s issues, where society’s expectations hurt men and harm their ability to live fulfilling lives.

But now, when you hear it, it’s slinged about by people who say, loudly, they don’t care about men’s issues. In some ways, you could say that the concept of toxic masculinity was appropriated into toxic forms of feminism as well as positive forms of feminism, but the toxic forms of feminism are so loud that it’s often easy to forget that men made this term, to talk about them, and their needs. And your needs matter!

A simple example of toxic masculinity comes from my childhood. I had a friend, called Ryan, and he was a great kid. Everyone loved him, except his bullies. But he had a really good friend called Maisy, and they were both rough-and-tumble kids. One day, they go absolutely wild on a seesaw. I mean swinging each other like it’s racketball. And then Maisy falls off, and skins her knee.

I knew Maisy and Ryan, and I can tell you, for a fact, Maisy instigated that game. We called her Crazy Maisy. But when our teacher came out into the playground, she barked, “Ryan! Stay away from Maisy!”. That day, the world taught Ryan that, even if he did everything right, the world would see him as a danger to girls and women. Had had no hand in injuring Maisy, and honestly, Maisy didn’t care.

But Ryan had been conditioned into a masculine trait by this experience. I watched him grow up thinking that he couldn’t be friends with girls. That he was on team boys, Maisy was on team girls, and team boys can’t risk playing with team girls. Ryan wasn’t friends with another girl for many, many years, and shut his close female friends out.

I knew Ryan quite well, actually. He was a classmate all the way through secondary school (or high school, for you Americans).

Ryan would have been happier and more stable in his relationships with girls if he hadn’t been blamed for Maisy’s injury. It destroyed his friendship with Maisy, I remember that much. Which sucked, because they were best friends. And this trait in Ryan, a masculine one, to be male-oriented in relationships and friendships, was a toxic one. It hurt him. And it was one he had to overcome when he did find a girlfriend.

That’s toxic masculinity. It’s not a blame game. Or, it shouldn’t be. It’s about what we teach men and boys to be that hurts them. There are plenty of masculine traits that are positive in people of all genders, right? Stoicism. Reliability. Confidence (to a limited extent, of course).

And if we wanted to talk about toxic femininity, we could. In fact, there is a lot of literature about women looking inwards at the aspects of femininity that hurt them. But feminists didn’t make the term toxic masculinity, so toxic femininity isn’t part of our jargon. Which can be confusing to men wanting to know feminism better.

And so, back to patriarchy. The expectation that men should be the ones with power in some dynamics is not a rare one. And, it’s not even always an unfair one. And here me out.

A man and a woman you don’t know play tennis. You weigh up the average man and the average woman and, sure, you wouldn’t be absolutely sure who would win, but if you had to bet your life on it, you’d probably bet on the man. The expectation is that men are physically superior.

That makes sense to me. So, what consequences does that expectation have? Sure, a lot of men will be comfortable being beaten by a woman at tennis. But some guys will see it as a mark that they are a below average man. They will feel insecure, right? And don’t know if we can blame them for that emotion, because that’s patriarchy. Men have physical power over women. That’s the idea.

To be clear — a man should not expect to dominate a woman in many other areas.

And insecurity never leads to anything good, and it’s actually antithetical to masculinity. Because confidence and self-assuredness is a trait any sane heterosexual woman likes to see in a man. And patriarchy doesn’t just insist on more power, but it insists on masculinity. This causes men to put up a front of confidence where there is, in fact, insecurity.

To be clear, women can do this, too. It’s just that our society grooms men into thinking this way, on a systemic level. And this is talking about a guy whose intentions are 100% pure. He doesn’t look down on women. He doesn’t actually think he should be stronger than every woman, or that women should be paid less. He’s just got some insecurities that he needs to talk through.

That’s still a product of patriarchy. That sort of intersection where he believes he needs to be both masculine and more powerful than the women around him. And you’ll meet guys who break free of this in many everyday ways. Men who find their masculinity in supporting their partner. Embracing the role of a stay-at-home father, for example. Or men who embrace their femininity, and find themselves more powerful than ever. Of course, to break free of it entirely, is to no longer essentialise these things. To stop demanding them of yourself. Which is a lot harder. Social conditioning is a bitch.

But guys, you need to think about what this does to guys with bad intentions, or with a weak moral spine, or very serious insecurities. Power over women can be used for a great deal of harm, right? And that’s not conjecture. And let’s go back to the extreme example of the 1940s, where a woman couldn’t divorce her husband. A bad guy will have loved the fact that he can beat his wife without consequence.

Power over someone is a big deal. And if you willingly submit to someone, with the ability to get out of it, that’s a very different thing to if that power is forced on you, right? And this is the position women are put in. Because whilst we aren’t in the 1940s, so long as plenty of men expect the nuclear family or expect dominance over women on a base level, then that will contribute to things like violence against women, right?

And it’s not just about men. I’ve hammered away at the issues it can cause in men, but I’ll point out — the teacher who yelled at Ryan and possibly damaged his ability to have relationships with women long into adulthood? That teacher was a woman! And I saved talking about Maisy until this point. Maisy didn’t feel safe having friends who were boys after that, because one of her very best friends had gotten in trouble because of her. And that’s not okay, either. For her, or the boys in her life.

That’s not to even mention what can happen if women expect men to be the ones with power. I mean, c’mon! What happens if you’re a disabled or autistic guy looking for love? What if you come from a low income background and the gal you like is middle class? If she expects you to be a breadwinner, when she has a higher income than you, that can foil any chance of love based solely on the fact that you’re a man not born with a big enough silver spoon in your mouth.

We all see this all the time in personal interactions. In how expectations of what men need to be and do, from men and women alike, do damage to men and women. And when it’s phrased like that, around this idea of expectations, the expectation to be a patriarch, we can see the damage it does. And strangely, even if we lived in a world where being a patriarch is demonstrably better. Even if, which I don’t think it is, the expectations of it cause these harms we see in our everyday lives. You may be struggling with the expectations of being a man right now.

So then we step back. The big picture of this issue is much scarier, and here’s why. When every man is expected to have power over women, it created a two-class system. And even if a guy believes that he himself believes he is completely equal to women and should not have power over them, the society as it stands right now, and a notable portion of the people in it, do think that he should be the patriarch. And from the media he consumed to the things taught in class to the sermons at church, these things will shape him. And women are taught all the same things.

And then we step into the world, and we see a world where men have power over women? Where children sit boy/girl/boy/girl because they’re not meant to be friends? Well, now we’re really cooking, right? ’Cause that warps all kinds of attitudes and perceptions, but here’s the trick with patriarchy. It doesn’t tell you why things are done this way. They are just simply done.

It convinces people that it doesn’t exist, by self-normalising through expectation. Because patriarchy is expectations, it is expected to exist, and therefore unnoticeable to many. And this is not men’s fault. And it’s not productive to scream at men that they are to blame for it. The strongest and starkest example I’ve witnessed of patriarchy changing a boy and forcing some toxic masculinity into him was done by a woman. It assumed he had power over a girl and punished her for it, because that’s what’s expected of him.

And there’s a lot of other stuff, such as how expectations of power cause a desire for control which results in sexual abuse, which combines with the expectations of men to stick with men, and the fear of retribution for hurting women, to culminate in what we call rape culture. Or how it intersects with homophobia or transphobia. But those are a lot, and a bit more complicated, but they all kind of come from this core concept of experiences we’ve all felt every day.

It’s worth recognising that there’s a whole industry in soothing anxieties and one-upping around this topic, on both sides of the political spectrum. But, if you are someone who gets angry at the thought of toxic masculinity and stuff like that, consider a lot of these ideas aren’t the creation of blue-haired college girls, but of men who were struggling with the same shit you’re probably going through, and women who were writing about how we can help men.

Because patriarchy hurts us all. Some men thrive as leaders. Some men thrive in being masculine. And I would never want to take that away from them. But expecting it from them, punishing them for not having it, causing lifelong damage to their internal psyche because of it? I’m not on board with that, and that’s not making mention of the damage it does to women and girls.

And so, even omitting the struggles of girls and women. What bad men will do when ego meets expectation meets the worst inclinations in all of us. Just looking at how men struggle with the way that they are demanded to be patriarchs, regardless of their personal nature, circumstance, or capability, we see why men first created this term toxic masculinity. It’s not just easy, but important, for feminists to recognise the damage patriarchy is doing to men.

If feminists don’t recognise and truly appreciate the hurt and pain men are going through, then their feminism is incomplete.

And the last holdout, when all is made clear and a man truly understands what a feminist, anti-patriarchy perspective has to offer and what it does and does not believe, is tradition. By bringing the flaws of patriarchy into clarity, it can often leave men feeling like they are drifting in space without a tether.

Truthfully, if we discuss the many reasons that teenage boys today might be drawn to complete losers and misogynistic criminals like Andrew Tate, it’s because it’s a box. In a world where we are not sure what the role of men is, many want to climb into the box of their forefathers, with all its issues, with all the grief it causes, for both comfort and also out of romanticisation of the past they never truly experienced.

But I will say to men who are still reading this article, who haven’t already gone into the comments to lecture me about what feminism and patriarchy actually means, I will say that women are also dealing with this. They have been dealing with this since the bygone age of when they were expected to be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen.

And the truth is, above all else, and the thesis of feminism, comes back to the word you will hear a lot. Liberation. Women’s liberation. Queer liberation. And, though I do not think we say it enough, I think that what we are seeing is men’s liberation. And much like an ex-convict who has left prison, the only way to escape it once and for all is to purposefully redefine yourself on your own terms.

It’s about freedom of who you want to be. Masculine or not.