In Patriarchy, Where Are the Good Men?

Sociological Meanderings Towards Collective Well-Being

“What about all the positive attributes of people, of society?” This is a common question that I entertain when teaching Sociology.

Recently I had a guest speaker come to class: a Fulbright scholar from Pakistan who specializes in sociological gender studies. I asked her to speak about the impact of economic changes on family life and gender norms. She shared that as industrialization and globalization shape Pakistani society, gender norms are changing. Slowly, more women — especially in urban areas — are moving into more varied professions and earning more degrees, and more money.

At the same time, patriarchal power still shapes women’s lives, so that, for example, “in many cases women do not have access to their own salary as it is drawn by their husbands from the banks/ATM machines.” As another example, “women’s bargaining power has increased” and they have more control over their children’s lives and their homes, “yet for more important matters such as buying property they rely on their husbands.”

When compared to the United States we can see that even though the cultural context diverges, the general dynamics are the same: as the economy changes, so do gender norms, thus rendering the patriarchy and the gender binary a moveable, changeable social structure.

After class one of my students expressed a concern to me: why did the guest speaker not share anything positive about men? Why was she only talking about the negative things?

It’s a frequent concern and one that is expressed not just in classrooms, but also at the macro level. In some places, this concern is shaping educational policy, and thus it is important and worthy of our consideration and attention.

Here’s what I tried to communicate to my student:

I reminded this student about the socialization process, and how, for example, we are all likely to develop ethnocentric beliefs, not because we are “bad” people, but because the socialization process makes this a likely outcome. Once our brains develop, and we deepen our critical thinking skills, then we have the capacity to interrogate the beliefs we learned as children and make informed decisions about which ones we want to work to unlearn and which ones we’d like to carry forward into adulthood. Here we are talking about a social psychological process not about the inherent quality of our character.

It’s complicated, but part of the ask here is to learn how to hold two conflicting realities simultaneously: “I have some ethnocentric beliefs” is one reality and the other is that I see myself as a “good person.” Being a “good person” doesn’t free me from holding some ethnocentric beliefs (and vice versa). What I do with those beliefs, of course, is the important question.

Likewise, when Layli Long Soldier reminds us, in her gorgeous poem “38,” that Abraham Lincoln ordered the execution of 38 Dakota men the same week that he declared the Emancipation Proclamation, we can hold these two realities simultaneously. Lincoln both contributed to freedom and social justice and engaged in acts of state violence. We could debate whether or not he was a “good” man, also debating which actions make him “good” and which “bad.” Or, we could refrain from the debate altogether and hold the complexity simultaneously.

Rather than blame people, or shame people, we can simply learn about the past — we can learn about anything — for the sake of our capacity to make informed decisions in the present. We don’t have to choose between 1492, 1619, or 1776. We can learn them all and work to make sense of what they all mean in relation to each other, and then explore how that knowledge can be deployed by us, in the present, so as to build a more equitable society.

This means that speaking of the ways in which women are disempowered in any society, whether in the United States or Pakistan, does not mean that we are saying negative things about men. To say that patriarchy is a system of male dominance does not mean that each individual man is “bad.” Nor does it mean that each individual man experiences power and privilege in the same way (or, at all). Nor does it mean that when individual men do experience power and privilege that it is good for them, healthy for them, or that they like it. We aren’t, in fact, talking about individual men, but rather, a system that benefits “men” as a group. At the same time, we are talking about a system that is unhealthy — at both the micro and the macro levels — for everyone, no matter our gender identity.

The economic power that “men” have experienced in Industrial Capitalism, in both the United States and Pakistan, isn’t rooted in men’s bodies, nor their character, but in the ways in which technology shapes the size of the labor force and how productivity and efficiency are organized in the context of mass production. Religious ideology has also shaped patriarchy in both contexts, though in divergent ways given the nuances of the monotheistic religions that dominate in each country. Patriarchy doesn’t exist or persist because of “bad actors” but because of the hegemonic cultures and social policies (structure) in a society that function to reinforce and perpetuate the system.

The quality of our character — each of us — is an entirely separate conversation.

At the same time, we are the people who are socialized into these hegemonic cultures and voting for these social policies. In some cases, we are cynically disengaged and thus reinforcing said cultures and policies through inaction. Doing nothing is still doing something.

Importantly: this need not be a conversation about whether or not we are “good” or “bad” people. It can just be a question of what we are doing in the present with what we have inherited.

I didn’t create the patriarchy that I was born into, and thus, I cannot be blamed for it nor made to feel bad about its existence as if it’s my fault. But I am responsible for my role in its continuation. I do not want to live inside a system that harms so many of us with unequal resource distribution, with dehumanization, with violence. And so I choose to use the information that I have learned (and continue to learn) about patriarchy and attempt to live my life every day in ways that align with my values and goals. Ideologically I strive for compassion, for health, for equity, for justice and I do my best to ensure that my daily actions do the same.

I agree with Audre Lorde, who says, “you do not have to be me in order for us to fight alongside each other. I do not have to be you to recognize that our wars are the same.”

To discuss the hurts and harms of our current structural arrangements — what or who we think is bad — is not to erase the good in ourselves or in our society. Rather, it is to use the knowledge of these harms so that we can strive closer and closer to something that truly is transformative.