Ending ‘Gender Wars’: Why Dismantling Patriarchy isn’t Anti-Male
Photo from Next Gen Men’s youth program. The boys built the rape culture pyramid, and are learning what can happen if we interrupt behaviours at the bottom of the pyramid (i.e. if you remove one of those boxes at the bottom, what happens to the boxes at the top?)
From the Future of Masculinity weekly newsletter, where our community’s hearts and minds come together each week to do the work, tell the stories, and build the blueprint for a future where men and boys experience less pain and cause less harm.
Growing up, telling the heroes apart from the villains was easy.
The good guys were good, and the bad guys were bad. The odds were stacked against them, but the good guys always won, and the bad guys went away.
Everything was enviably clear.
The villains and the monsters, the Voldemorts, Saurons, and evil Emperors, they were all concrete, consistent, and always separate from ourselves.
We could see them, point them out, and defeat them—overwhelming odds and all.
At Next Gen Men, in our work toward culture change and gender equality, the cause we’re fighting for is just as good, the obstacles are just as steep, but nothing is quite so clear as it was in those old stories we grew up on.
I think what people find most challenging about discussions around feminism and injustice, is they think we are telling a classic good-versus-evil story, of masculinity-bad-femininity-good, where men are the villains and people of other genders are the good guys.
We aren't.
We start by defining its impact on society and our relationships.
Almost everyone on earth lives in patriarchal societies, and most have for millennia. But patriarchy is seamlessly woven into the fabric of our societies, leaving many folks unaware it’s even there.
Patriarchy is a system that confers disproportionate status and power to a specific definition of masculinity, and enforces a gender binary: there are men, there are women, they are not equal and there is nothing in between.
It is the sum of social pressures intended to defend this status quo, and attack anything, or anyone, that challenges it—from people who are trans or gay or just embody masculinity differently, and all the attacks they endure, to the ubiquitous presence of misogynistic violence in the form of rape, domestic violence, child brides, sex trafficking, and more.
Patriarchy is an invisible force for policing the norm. It looks like boys inflicting violence on each other, it looks like the mental health struggles that result, and it looks like the loneliness and isolation faced by people afraid of asking for help.
For boys targeted for not being ‘man enough,’ it is the insults and attacks drenched in language designed to distance, separate, and diminish them from the masculine ideal.
Relying on words like ‘b*tch’ or ‘p*ssy’ or ‘f*g,’ the choices of language are revealing: they show that, in a patriarchal world, the worst thing a boy could be is female, feminine, or queer.
So, patriarchy is clearly the monster that needs to be slayed. Simple, right? Not so much.
Patriarchy is not your typical monster. It doesn't exist out there, separate from us, stomping on our heads like Godzilla. If only it was: everything would be so much simpler.
We then understand where patriarchy comes from.
Patriarchy is the monster inside us—that’s what makes fighting it so hard.
Irrespective of gender identity or expression, we have all been, at different points in our lives, complicit in recreating patriarchy, misogyny, and sexism. We’ve been raised with these beliefs, and we have absorbed their insidious influences all our lives.
In other words, because we have internalized patriarchy and misogyny, we've unwittingly reproduced it. We give it life every time we remain silent in the face of a rape joke, or insist that ‘boys don’t cry.’
We give it life when we don’t stand up for the classmate who was harassed and called ‘gay,’ or when we didn’t challenge ourselves for thinking that a domestic violence survivor must have done something to ‘deserve it.’
Patriarchy also lives in the people that we love, our friends and family. It lives in our co-workers, the people in our governments, and in every other social institution. It shows itself in small moments of conversation, jokes, our favourite TV shows and the music we love.
It appears in the policies we write, the sermons we preach, the households we run, and the rules we make. It can be hard to see, because it cloaks itself in ‘the way things have always been’ or ‘traditional values.’ It can hide as ‘just a joke,’ ‘free speech’ or even as the denial of gender stereotypes or existing inequities.
It’s overwhelming. The spectre of patriarchy has a grip on each of us, and is entrenched in all of our institutions. It's a master of disguise, and requires daily battles.
I can see why many folks don't see it, choose to ignore, minimize, deny, or simply accept it.
I can also understand how some may find it reassuring, because they’ve lived within the confines of patriarchy forever, whereas change is frightening, unknown, and uncertain.
And we take responsibility for gender inequality and use a feminist approach.
How can we ever defeat it, if the implication is defeating ourselves?
The truth is that we are the monsters, but we are also the heroes.
If this monster is within us, and we give it life by feeding it, then we can also kill it by starving it.
This is why the narrative around feminism and gender equality shouldn't be one of 'good guys versus bad guys'.
Culture is made up of individuals. We are all culture. We are all, to lesser and greater degrees, complicit in recreating and upholding patriarchy. Which means we also hold the power to defeating it.
Feminism is a movement to confront our own biases and privilege, and those of the people we love—our own heroes. It’s much harder to honestly and openly work on these than it is to slay any external enemy.
The best news is that even living within a patriarchal society, we have a choice. We choose our beliefs, our actions, our media, our community, our governments. And we can choose messages of equality, of love, and of change.
We’re going to continue on the path we've started down, and you are welcome to join us.
Join The Conversation.
We're working to create a world where boys and men feel less pain, and do less harm. Interested in learning more? Our weekly Future of Masculinity newsletter serves up tools, events, and news for people who are passionate about engaging, educating, and empowering boys and men around gender and masculinity.