Part 3: How Patriarchy Creates Sexism and Misogyny
Last time, we looked at the origins of patriarchy during the agricultural revolution. We learned how masculinity became attached to dominance because of the need to wage war to protect and accumulate wealth.
This time, we’ll be looking at how patriarchy creates sexism and misogyny by making the domination and the rigid exclusion of anything feminine a requirement for being masculine.
How patriarchy creates misogyny
Being a man is a losing game.
No man can live up to the cruelty that patriarchy requires of them without killing off some part of themselves.
Under patriarchy, men not only have to hate the feminine in women, they also have to hate the feminine in themselves. Indeed, it may be more accurate to say that they hate the feminine in themselves first, and in women second. Beginning in their grade school years, boys in patriarchal societies are socialized to reject and repress the vulnerable aspects of themselves. They are taught that it is shameful to expose their vulnerable emotions. They are taught not to cry.
Misogyny is weaponized grief.
By misogyny we mean an aggressive aversion — if not outright hostility — to anything understood to be feminine.
When patriarchy sets men apart from women it causes anguish because it goes against what each of us know without having to be told — that we’re the same and we need each other. It makes us choose between being men and being human.
We usually resolve that forced choice by becoming less than fully human.
Patriarchy teaches us that it’s “masculine” to avoid emotions like shame and grief. One of the things they must do is suppress their own femininity. In turn, anyone that exhibits what they’re trying to suppress is also suppressed.
At its root, misogyny is about men displacing their grief about what they have to do to be men. It’s impossible to heal from the kind of self-mutilation that patriarchy requires of men without experiencing grief. However, grief is one of the many emotions that men are cut off from and penalized for expressing from a young age. That unexpressed grief can metastasize into hatred for the feminine.
The grief most men suppress in the course of becoming men later manifests as disgust with the feminine. Men who feel disgusted with femininity within themselves hate it wherever they see it. Free-flowing femininity mocks them for their refusal to put down their chains. Instead of colluding with femininity to end patriarchy, this kind of man doubles down and makes demands on how the feminine should behave. He does to others what he does to himself everyday.
Growing out of sexism and misogyny
When it comes to men and sex, patriarchy is always keeping score. Always. And the goal is always the same: to come out on top.
Sex for men under patriarchy is not about sharing. Nor is it about pleasure. Rather, it’s about status. Sex for men under patriarchy is about winning rather than sharing, and about power rather than pleasure. Indeed, in patriarchal societies achieving unrestricted access to sex is one the goals of getting and maintaining power. It’s one of the primary ways men are rewarded for sacrificing themselves in the service of their patriarchal role. Sexism and misogyny naturally follow.
Fortunately, there’s a way out.
Any man interested in breaking free of these patterns, and reducing their sexist and misogynist tendencies, can do so. They need only understand and embrace a different kind of power that they have been taught to reject: the power of grief.
Grief is a powerful mechanism for integrating difficult changes into our lives. We need to get together and grieve the losses we suffered on the way to becoming men. We need to laugh, cry, and share secrets we thought we shouldn’t have as men.
It’s possible to create new ways of being men, but only if we grieve what we’ve been through. When we do so another person’s freedom won’t bother us because we’ll have walked out of cages of our own.
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In Part 4 we’ll look at How patriarchy creates homophobia and transphobia.
More on that next time.
Do you want to talk about this?
Creative Masculinity hosts weekly Drop in Groups for conscious people who identify as men. Go here to see this month’s dates and sign up.