Recently I read three related Feminist Substack essays, which inspired me to try to explain something about Patriarchy to the men, young and old, closest to me in my own life.
What I discovered in explaining how this problematic system affected others was that I suddenly had a much clearer picture of how it affects me, as a woman. Perhaps it will help you too.
Narration of Gender at the Expense of Race in Romance Novels
Kelly Diels – House of Cultural Influence
It’s the architecture of control dressed up as the architecture of care.
The way women — the way all of us — are recruited into being agents enforcing our own compliance. How the coercion gets internalized so thoroughly that explicit force becomes unnecessary. We do the work ourselves. We police our own skin, our own hunger, our own ambition.
Not because anyone is holding a gun. Because the system has been designed so that it doing it feels like duty or desire.
Because a win for one woman — a woman who meets all the criteria for what a woman is supposed to be: thin, beautiful, young, white — is just an exception that proves the rule.
Romance
it takes seriously women’s real frustrations and desires which romance alone can address and in some measure satisfy
What makes men rape
Celeste Davis – Matriarchal Blessing
“Evidence suggests that it is not innate aggression that makes men violent, but the internalized belief that they fall short of society’s perceived standards for masculinity. Psychologists call this phenomenon, “masculine discrepancy stress” and research shows that the more acutely a man suffers from this, the more likely he is to commit almost every type of violence, including sexual assault, intimate partner violence and assault with a weapon.” – Ruth Whippman
And what is this system called that perpetuates gender inequality, and dominance and entitlement among men?
The word for that system is called patriarchy.
Where being emasculated is far more embarrassing and destabilizing than being immoral.
We can’t expect the husband to go to therapy, just have his wife and kids carefully curate his environment to avoid his triggers, bad moods and outbursts for the rest of their lives instead.
The most costly allergy
Celeste Davis – Matriarchal Blessing
I’m going to go hard on patriarchal masculinity today, so before we proceed we need to make the distinction between men and patriarchal masculinity crystal clear.
Maleness = being male.
Masculinity= attributes, behaviors and roles regarded as characteristic of men or boys such as strength, leadership, assertiveness, independence and courage.
Patriarchal Masculinity= the social pressure for men and boys to only perform behaviors, attitudes and roles considered masculine and to avoid and shun any behavior, attitude or role considered feminine. This pressure does not let up regardless of how many masculinity metrics you meet.
The UN reports that 140 women and girls die every day at the hands of their sexual partner or close male relative. One every 10 minutes. Men are four times more likely to die by suicide than women—often citing reasons directly caused by patriarchal masculinity like not feeling like they could ask for help, failing to ‘be a man,’ and trying to toughen up instead of addressing grief.
Discord chat thread
#deep-thought-precursor-to-earth (Hitch-hiker’s guide to the galaxy anybody?)
I am less interested in establishing who’s to blame for enforcing problems than in figuring out ways to escape them I shared this article because the definitions at the beginning seemed helpful. You’re a man all the time. No matter what you think or do
(yes some people dispute that and that’s for them)
Sometimes you behave in “masculine” coded ways. Sometimes so do I. Sometimes you behave in “feminine” coded ways. This is only a problem if you feel bound by “patriarchal masculinity” to never act like a girl.
The pain lies in the patriarchal coded social pressure, to limit yourself, as a man, to performing only masculinity.
Imho
The pressure is real
Everybody has to figure out how to navigate it
Basically, the challenge. And it is a real one, is to figure out how to make space for more of yourself in a world that has scripted and socially enforces a gender role. (working space, consciousness)
The more time we spend blaming other people, of any gender, for what we can’t do, the less time we are figuring out what we can and dare (date/schedule) to do.
And how to do it, without harming the people we care for And who care for you
Also, not escape, because there is no escape – can’t get out of the game – but subvert and disrupt, with a long view to changing the game
And, one last thought from the end of my walk, the harmless behaviours (including thoughts and feelings) we suppress to conform, then get muddled up with genuinely immoral and dangerous behaviours, until we can no longer distinguish the two. So the work is to carefully uncover and unravel what is suppressed. Slowly, over time. And recover, integrate what we have denied ourselves to survive socially. Not everything is welcome in daily life Some behaviours we might never need in our sheltered existence.
Good to know they are available in an extreme situation of genuine crisis.
Also, no need to pull them out and practice.
Romance notes
a feeling of excitement and mystery associated with love.
“I had a thirst for romance”
a quality or feeling of mystery, excitement, and remoteness from everyday life.
“the romance of the sea”
Similar:
mystery. glamour. excitement
colourfulness. colour. exoticism. mystique. appeal. allure. fascination. charm
- 1300, romaunce, “a story, written or recited, in verse, telling of the adventures of a knight, hero, etc.,”
This shift in Morgan le Fay’s character happened, among other reasons, because of increasingly complicated beliefs about what it meant to be a witch in medieval Europe.
Finally, the nature of chivalric romance also had some influence.
This type of storytelling operated by strict rules in which a knight and his lover faced various obstacles in their attempt to be together.
Morgan, as a very independent figure even when she is married, helps fill the role of the obstacle for the knight – the bad guy.
Integration
J. Mike Fields
Integration is staying.
Staying with anger without turning it into harm.
Staying with grief without collapsing.
Staying with desire without apology.
Staying with your Self when old exits appear.
That’s the work.
To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.
Oscar Wilde
“Ultimately boys and men save themselves when they learn the art of loving.“
