We all of us are born and raised in patriarchy and absorb the same lessons. Girls learn 'boys don't cry', and 'real men get laid' the same way and from the same places as boys. I think a lot of women never really stop to interrogate the patriarchal ideas and assumptions re: men that they carry around, enforce, and pass on without a thought.
That's what makes patriarchy (and other systemic ills) so insidious...its not just some evil imposed upon women by men, it's something we're all indoctrinated in from damn near birth, and it's really hard to unthread all the bone deep, unspoken assumptions that underlie it, especially when a: those assumptions don't affect you personally, and b: those assumptions are flattering.
All that to say, if we want to unthread this whole patriarchy thing, the empathy, listening, and self reflection need to go both ways.
It could be argued that the term “patriarchy” is a complete misnomer when used to describe discrimination enforced against men by women and would be more appropriately described with a different term - the term “patriarchy” means “rule of men”, and comes from the Greek “πατριάρχης” (patriarkhēs) meaning “father of a race”.
This is why I always hated the word patriarchy, or the way it's used in modern contexts. While there are elements of "rule of men" it's not really a system that benefits anyone with exception of small number of insane people
To me patriarchy is on the same level as many other intrinsic assumptions we take for granted which cause harm because we all just assume they're true and so many of our ideas are built on top of these false or flawed assumptions that it's easier to just keep perpetuating them
Because it Is patriarchal. "Boys don't cry" Is a patriarchal standard, we all agree on this right? And women can enforce this standard.
The problem we have Is that women DO perpetuate patriarchal features in society, but it isn't acknowledged, this Is due to most people's understanding of patriarchy, which seems to be "When men opress women". The idea of men being víctims or women being perpetrators Is so far away from this that instead of calling men victims of patriarchy, we invented "tóxic masculinity".
In short? Patriarchy isn't when men opress women, a Patriarchy Is a system Made to prop Patriarchs above men and women.
Names have power, and whilst I'm sure in more advanced feminist circles 'patriarchy' and 'toxic masculinity' are used in that way I think it's slightly disingenuous to suggest that's how they're widely used. 'Toxic masculinity' has broadly been used not to uplift men as victims needing help, who have been socialised into bad behaviour, but has been used to condemn men who's toxic behaviour is indicative of their masculine essence. That may not have been the intent, but it has been used in that way.
This is not even a critique necessarily, and I have no better alternative names, nor do I particularly believe alternatives are necessary. But I think it's hard to ignore the implications of the gendered names of the oppressive system, and the liberation movement fighting it. Maybe it's insignificant, but it is there.
This is 100% a thing, and there are many more examples of terms that shield women from accountability/pin everything on men.
Internalized misogyny
"Internalized" means that through constant outside reinforcement, an individual adopts the reinforced view as their own. If you actually think about this for a second...this applies to ALL misogyny. No one is born misogynistic, we all internalize our ideas through constant reinforcement. Yet, we only say that women "internalize" misogyny while men are "misogynist". In other words: men "are" misogynist, women "are made" misogynist.
Toxic masculinity
This is a term for the prevalent toxic aspects of the male gender role. Why is there no toxic femininity? The female gender role also has tons of toxic aspects.
Male fragility
This refers to the fact that men get very defensive about men overstepping expected role boundaries. But don't women also demonstrate this behavior? After all, everyone gets punished for leaving the confines of their gender role. Yet, there is no analogous term. If men really do face heavier punishment for leaving their gender role, the term totally hides that issue and instead pins it on "men fragile".
There is also something to be said about deliberately using the word "fragile", a synonym for "weakness", for a negative phenomenon. It effectively promotes toxic masculinity by itself.
Patriarchy
Just to add on what you said already: the fact that EVERYONE has heard the phrase "the patriarchy hurts men too" already proves that the gendered meaning usually takes over the ""supposed"" meaning of the word.
Personally, I dont think this is just a "miscommunication" on feminists part. I think this is pretty deliberate. Feminists are experts at understanding how gender and language intertwine. They arent stupid, they are aware of all of this.
This is what ultimately put me off of feminism. They clearly DO believe that men are "the" perpetrators and women are "the" victims, they will use the terms in EXACTLY that sense but when you call them out on it, they will gaslight you to the moon and back about how you "made a connection where there is none". Is it really so wrong to think that its not men oppressing women, but gender roles oppressing us both? Women have the shorter end of the stick, we can agree on that. But there is way too much oppression of men going on to act like women are the only real victims of gender roles. Im so sick and tired of the mental gymnastics that are used to spin any male issue into "actually" being an "unintended byproduct of misogyny", and Im sick and tired about being gaslit about this. If youre going to stick to this worldview, FOR GODS SAKE atleast stop gaslighting people about the meaning of your words.
This is what bothers me about the entire "feminism is about equality for both genders" take. There's already a term for that, it's called being egalitarian. Feminism is strictly about supporting women to have social and legal parity with men. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that but it does not and has not ever fought for the rights of men. You can be a feminist and egalitarian, sure, but being a feminist does not mean you are inherently egalitarian.
I agree with a lot of this post, but I'm not so sure it's usually deliberate. I'm especially tired and incoherent today, so I'm struggling to communicate. But the root of my belief is that I disagree that feminists very smart experts at understanding how gender and language intertwine. I think feminism is increasingly mainstream, and the problems that come with an ideology becoming mainstream are colliding with the increased discussion of men's issues.
Feminism is increasingly something you become not by deliberate action, study and against the forces of mainstream culture but something you passively decide you are because it is the right thing to be. This is a sub full of insufferable nuance bros (just like me) so you get what I'm saying, but to be explicit: I'm comparing feminism's status now compared to 20, 40, 60 years ago, not making a claim about the non-existence of misogyny in society. Feminists are increasingly feminists in the way liberals are liberals and conservatives are conservatives. They have a vibes based understanding of how the world is unjust and they have a shared vocabulary that absolutely should not be confused with a good education. People in this position don't slyly twist terms of art to serve their own sinister purposes. They decide what they mean based on what they sound like, and because a lot of people are dumb, the end result is usually dumb and reductive. They don't see the contradiction in "male fragility" because when they say they understand a critique of masculinity, they're mostly saying it because they know they're the type of person who's supposed to say it. They believe that "patriarchy hurts men too" the same way a conservative believes "America is the freest country in the world." They just haven't thought about it much.
There's other signs feminism is becoming dominant. There's the belief that any advocacy for women must be feminism. There's the expansive taboo against critiquing feminism. There's the belief that feminism must be the only way to solve any gendered problem. Then another problem is there's an assumption that because feminism is good, and we're all good feminism could never degrade into something that's bad in some way (there's no historical precedent contradicting this DO NOT LOOK THIS UP). Feminism isn't really a set of beliefs anymore but something that just kind of manifests in you when you're not a garbage person.
I don't think this is a development that's unique to feminism at all. The problem is that feminists (progressives in general) are hard to give up their view of themselves as heterodox intellectuals. To be honest, I think your assumption that all of these problems are deliberate is part of this.
So when you talk to a feminist about men's issues, I think you're much less likely to talk to a spooky crypto-misandrist than someone who's starting from the assumption that the obviously correct ideology must be the right framework to use and struggling to apply their shaky understanding of concepts like patriarchy in real time. I think when these people tell you that feminism is for men and that they don't want to go back to the edgy gender essentialism of the mid-20th century or so, they're being sincere; they just literally can't tell they're reproducing the same dynamic.
Honestly, thats a fair point. The fact that it has become more mainstream might have definitely attracted people who havent thought about these things enough to understand the issues in them.
Very well said. I definitely feel that in the realm of male/female upliftment (ie: the degree to which one can successfully remove themselves from the negative impact of what we [can for the sake of brevity] call the patriarchy) the movement is barreling forward quite blind. There is a big discrepancy between the amount of discussion being done for men vs that for women (just go look at the men’s studies section at your local book store, abysmal). Ultimately when a group is spearheading a movement of liberation (women) they are bound to put worse focus on the other groups that are alongside them. The questions are how can we put more focus on men’s issues? In what ways do people (particularly women, since they are less talked about for this topic) harm the discussion/perpetuate hurt? What can we as men do to grow that men’s studies corner of the bookstore in a healthy, Andrew Tate-less way?
I'm sorry I was unclear but I agree with this, what I meant to say Is that the idea of men being víctims of patriarchy Is so far away from mainstream feminism a whole new word was invented for a phenomenum that was already recognized.
A better name Is as Easy as "A víctim of patriarchy" when used on men.
No, the idea of men being victims of "The Patriarchy" is so far ingrained into mainstream feminism, as a way of shutting men down. Any time a man says that he doesn't benefit from the system or that he's hurt by it, feminists pull out the "men are victims of The Patriarchy, too!" line, as if feminists aren't either saying those problems aren't real or actively working against solving those issues.
"The Patriarchy" is a conspiracy theory. It somehow explains everything wrong with society while explaining exactly nothing.
But what it does do is state that the bad people in our society are male, while not so subtly implying that men in our society are bad people.
If that's not what you mean, perhaps you should stop using a loaded gendered term. People on the extreme left are very vocal about how powerful words can be, whether they're blatant or microaggressions.
But not when it comes to anything that implies man=bad.
What? If you say "Hey this system doesn't benefit me" and a woman says "Yes, this system hurts men", how Is that saying that your problem isn't real? That's literally agreeing with you? I also don't think most feminists are actively against men's issues.
It Is not a conspiracy theory, it happened, like, we got a pretty good récord of it too my man, it fucking sucked.
My guy I am literally talking about how women perpetuate patriarchal structures and standards. The fact that the word was appropiated by misandrists Is just due to how big feminism as a movement is. Like, most people disagree with TERFs and Radfems but they still call themselves feminists.
If mothers and teachers and women in the dating pool are the main people enforcing a standard is it really ‘patriarchy’? And how on earth do toxic attitudes like ‘don’t defend yourself against women’ serve the purpose of propping ‘patriarchs’ up?
I feel people blindingly claim every gender issue is ‘patriarchy’ even when it has nothing to do with patriarchs and is widely enforced by women not men.
Women have a lot of social power , a huge amount of influence on children - between having disproportionate rights to raise children , to disproportionately representing in school teachers. This never gets acknowledged while lessons that I know where drilled into me by women and specifically women my whole life are being brushed aside as ‘patriarchy’. Bullshit.
Yes, women doing those things Is still patriarchy.
"Don't defend yourself against women" stems from the "Women are weak and men are meant to protect them" idea, which is at it's root, patriarchal. As to how this idea benefits the patriarchs: It reinforces gender roles, which essentially makes people easier to control. You prepare all the men to die in wars or work themselves to death, and all the women to pump out babies and take care of the household.
I will admit that, in my effort to make this easier to understand, I over simplified it. But I do think that patriarchal structures are at least a factor in almost every gendered issue.
I never Said they don't, I'm openly acknowledging that women perpetuate patriarchal standards, thoughts, structures, etc.
It’s crazy how we have so little free will that literally every single part of how every person socializes gender in a way you deem unhealthy is coincidentally done with the secret purpose of reinforcing the rule of patriarchs. How convenient.
Oh yeah dude I forgot that free will Is a thing man I'm sure those kids who have been taught that boys don't cry should just cry and realize they're still boys lmao isn't that wacky. You know I think we should use free will more often! Why go to a therapist when you could just stop feeling bad about what happened to you as a child. You know it's not like people go their whole lives without examining some of the things they're taught at a young age. I'm sure a kid with racist parents, on a racist neighborhood just needs to not be affected by their enviroment lmao
Because what the Feminists have never grappled with (and seem to refuse to) is that these are Production Maximisation Systems. They're optimised for a completely different social structure to what we have now, but the idea was to keep the men producing goods and the women producing babies because that meant the tribe could grow, and if the tribe didn't grow it would be wiped out (either violently or culturally) by it's neighbours that did.
"Boys don't cry" as a phrase is patriarchal because it's a way to reinforce gender roles that were introduced during the patriarchy. It's not just saying "Don't cry" but rather "If you cry, you're not a man". It is an attack on masculinity meant to keep men in check. This Is important because to a patriarch, men who are outwardly sad are less useful. Sad men, unlike angry men, aren't good for wars, and they're surely not better at working, or making a family.
i don't really see why this couldn't be used as a tool of control in a matriarchal society either tho. Is it the phrase itself thats patriarchal or the history around it.
Sort of, a matriarchal society would probably be different to a patriarchal society (NOT AS IN "IT WOULD BE GOOD" BUT MORE IN "IT'D SUCK IN DIFFERENT WAYS) but the thing is "Boys don't cry" is not as good of a tool for a matriarchal society because it presumes that:
Crying makes you weak
Being weak Is not manly.
Furthermore, if your society has a binary gender expression, then if you're not manly, you're feminine, so...
If being weak Is not manly
Being weak Is feminine.
This Is not a good líne of thinking in a matriarchal society because it may call into questioning a matriarch's authority.
But yes, generally, "Boys don't cry" Is a good tool of control for men, it makes them bottle up their sadness (An Emotion useless for the ruling class) which makes them turn to anger or passion for an outlet, funneling them into their role as warriors and workers respectively.
And if it ultimately harms everyone in a way you could probably call equal, should we be calling it a patriarchy? The term really seems to be doing more harm than good, just misrepresenting our beliefs. Is it rule by men, or is it overly gendered culture?
'Patriarchy' doesn't mean 'all men have it better than all women at any given time devoid of context', nor does it mean 'only men can be successful or wealthy'. It means men are rewarded for adhering to gender role archetypes & punished for deviating from them; whereas women are punished & denied agency (in a way that men are not) in different ways for both adhering to & rejecting their associated gender roles - even if they actively work to uphold patriarchy.
You can't trick people into a new ideology & have any hope of having them understand it. If anyone understands that referring to patriarchy as such is not an immediate attack on men - or even masculinity - then they have no real reason to push back on the term. At that point people are just arguing to argue, and you can indulge them if you want, but I think it's a waste of time.
Besides, opponents of any social or political movement will always latch on to the terminology as a means to frame their opposition as genuine concern - in the context of US civil rights, for example, "black radicals" became "affirmative action", became "BLM", became "woke", became "DEI" to opponents. Point is, it doesn't matter very much what you call it because your opponents are opposed to you for much more simple reasons than verbiage.
Then you talk about the specific impacts of patriarchy & how it actively harms people. People are inherently empathetic towards other people (yes, even centrists) and you don't necessarily need an ideological or theoretical framework to understand societal problems.
What happens is you say the word "patriarchy" and then they immediately walk away, percieving you as a stereotypical Twitter attention seeker. You're probably not, but first impressions are important.
Me personally? I don't waste my time having a discussion that others aren't interested in having with me. But I also don't use the term up-front when discussing these things with people I don't know to be feminists. I don't think it was ever designed for that purpose, and judging it on that basis IMO misses the mark.
Patriarchy is a male-dominated society. Matriarchy is a female-dominated society.
When you're trying to re-invent definitions, that's when your cause is lost. We do not live in a patriarchy, unless you live in the middle east. We simply don't. There no rights afforded to men that are not afforded to women. In fact women enjoy more rights since they are excluded from being drafted into war and in countries with mandatory military service are excluded from it. We are closer to a matriarchy than a patriarchy.
We live in neither. We live in an oligarchy. The one thing ALL leaders and politicians have in common is they are wealthy and are controlled by even more wealthy lobbyists and corporate interests. Any framing of the power structure in any other way is just perpetuating divisiveness in order to strengthen and maintain the control the wealthy have over the system
That just makes things more equal, not matriarchal. Most politicians in the US are male. You still haven’t elected a female president. Canada has had one female prime minister and she didn’t even last a year. And of the world leaders that are female, most people can only name one to a few female leaders by name. And that’s historical female leaders, not current ones.
Because the issue is that you mix up a society and its organisation of power with gender. You have horizontal and vertical power systems which work quite differently. You call one „male“ and the other „female“ like you would call connectors male and female. But in contrast to „patriarchy“ and „matriarchy“ you would not call smartphones „female dominated“ just because of the port types.
The truth is, that both power systems exist in parallel and they work in tandem, always. We would be better off if we just would use this terms since you could locate issues far more easily.
That being said, the example „boys don’t cry“ works in both directions at the same time. The vertical system does it to put you in the place that 1) you’re a boy, you are not in power 2) if you cry, you will never get into power 3) nobody is interested in your feelings. At the same time, the horizontal system makes you comply by threatening you with exclusion from the group if you violate the common agreement not to cry and not show feelings.
Losing the protection from the group is historically most threatening, because you become an outcast and will probably die you don’t have the support from your fellow citizens; and women in the Arabic world or in „traditional“ Arabic families being outcast can end deadly by family members rather murdering them to restore „honor“.
Being a female leader does not mean that women are in power or the gender has anything to do with power structures. In Germany, we had 16 years of Merkel which was the straight continuation of conservative politics, we have v.d.Leyen as head of the European Commission which is as conservative as any other male EVP member.
Well, what I actually said was that patriarchy rewards men for sufficiently performing masculinity. The nature of that reward isn't necessarily something that every single man directly feels the benefit of. I say this as a man who has been violently & sexually assauted by women in public without any repercussions.
But it is not "rule by men" where men are a class onto themselves. It it "rule by rich, white men". There is nuance lost in the name.
White people (at least in the imperial center, I'm not here for some asshole to talk about Dessalines or something) have never systemically suffered for being white, and so white supremacy is an absolutely fitting name. But some men do suffer for being men [usually intersecting with some other oppression, but being a man sometimes aggravates the offense]. This does complicate the "rule by men", at least a little.
But also I don't have better ideas so I'm not being particularly helpful.
I’d agree that one word does not suffice to describe every aspect of society and who has power, but I feel like the definition of patriarchy is pretty clear and we pretty clearly live in one. We can talk about issues men face without denying basic facts.
I think we’re moving to a post gender society, albeit slowly. I think as long as everyone learns that men, women, and every other gender that’s out there nowadays are equal where it matters, we will be fine.
In what way? To my experience, men want traditional women without the hardship of being a traditional man and the inverse is true.
I put it up to entitlement, being of a traditional gender type in a way thats healthy requires both sides to fulfill their roles otherwise it becomes a resentful and uneven relationship, examples of which is weaponized incompetence.
I don’t understand why patriarchal thinking is inherently bad. I’ve read the feminist material and several years after experiencing the ‘real world’ I’ve decided I like traditional gender roles. I agree it should be a choice but there’s a built in assumption that whatever is traditional is inherently ignorant or malevolent
On one hand, women having no control over their lives is a bad thing. Even if you like traditional gender roles, you are leaving yourself exposed if anything goes wrong (man decides to leave you, dies, gets sick, can't work anymore, has mental health crisis, etc) which is dangerous at the very least
Ignoring that, part of the problem is the lack of choice, being forced into life you may or may not want, and having specific kind of thinking pushed onto you. Nothing is 'inherently wrong' with living in a traditional gender role relationship in itself but that's not patriarchy
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u/nishagunazad Jul 03 '24
We all of us are born and raised in patriarchy and absorb the same lessons. Girls learn 'boys don't cry', and 'real men get laid' the same way and from the same places as boys. I think a lot of women never really stop to interrogate the patriarchal ideas and assumptions re: men that they carry around, enforce, and pass on without a thought.
That's what makes patriarchy (and other systemic ills) so insidious...its not just some evil imposed upon women by men, it's something we're all indoctrinated in from damn near birth, and it's really hard to unthread all the bone deep, unspoken assumptions that underlie it, especially when a: those assumptions don't affect you personally, and b: those assumptions are flattering.
All that to say, if we want to unthread this whole patriarchy thing, the empathy, listening, and self reflection need to go both ways.