Patriarchy and The Soul
By: Karin Swann
Tags: Soul, Feminism, Spirituality, Patriarchy, Men

Patriarchy and The Soul

An Introduction For Our Times

Thomas Breher — Pixabay

On January 21st, 2017, over 5 million American women and their allies took to the streets across America, joined by parallel protests in almost two hundred other countries around the world. It was the largest protest in support of the rights and interests of women the world had ever seen and the largest single-day protest in the United States. The march happened a day after the inauguration of a President that Steve Bannon recognized as the greatest villain an “anti-patriarchy” movement could wish for. Two years later, Brett Kavanaugh was sworn in as a Supreme Court Justice, 27 years after Anita Hill spoke in vain before Congress about the inappropriate sexual conduct of Clarence Thomas. Whether Trump is the “last gasp of Patriarchy,” as some suggested on his election, or a sign of its stalwart resilience, is yet to be seen, but there is little doubt that during our lifetimes, the forces resisting patriarchy and those defending it have reached unprecedented levels of impasse.

The fulcrum of societal tension and upheaval surrounding Trump’s election came after nearly two hundred years of societal challenge to a tradition that is, arguably, over five-thousand years old. That, in case you missed it, reflects a breakneck speed of change in the grand sweep of history. The feminist and LGBTQI movements — the ideas informing them and the practices arising from them — reflect a journey that has neither been easy or simple. These movements have been born from seedbeds of pain, abuse, confusion, self-doubt, alienation, depression and outrage. As the decades have passed, the journey has surfaced greater and greater complexity, now including theories of intersectionality, the LGBTQI population, and, alongside the hard-won “he/she” pronoun use, now the inclusion of a genderqueer “they and them”. Taking about these topics today can feel like it requires learning three-dimensional chess. Given the scope of change in such a short time, and a level of complexity, it is hard to make seen of these changes, not only in theory, but in our daily lives.

This article aims to overview the territory of patriarchy/feminism and LGBTQ politics as simply as possible. It is academic flavor, but we should remember that the real story resonates not in our heads, but most deeply in our precious bodies and hearts. No one reading this article — male, female or anywhere on the gender spectrum — is untouched by patriarchal conditioning, and the role it plays separating us from ourselves and each other. Furthermore, as feminists have touted, not only does the personal remain political, but in recent years, the political has, itself, become personal. As we move more deeply into these currents, to the places where they touch our souls in inquiry — into the psychological and emotional issues they surface — we may also begin to see how this territory is, also, deeply spiritual.

WHAT IS PATRIARCHY?

Concepts can sometimes function “like a pair of spectacles that allow otherwise invisible or inexplicable things to be seen with sudden sharpness: ‘patriarchy’ is one of them.” (Charlotte Higgins)

So, what is it? We might start by recognizing that the definition, itself, has evolved in tandem with the emergence of our consciousness around it. This discerning process was started by white Western women almost 150 years ago. Though more voices of color and from women around the world are included now, I should clarify that my account, here, is limited to the unfolding of gender politics and activism in the West.



The word literally means “rule of the father,” from the ancient Greek, and in its most neutral, anthropological definition refers to a system of society or government in which the father, or eldest male, is the head of the family and descent is traced through the male line. Moving slightly closer to the quick, it is a system of society or government in which men hold the power and women are largely excluded from it. Closer, still, and we would add the notion that in the patriarchal worldview, male supremacy is viewed as “natural” and “masculine traits,” according to its prescription, are seen as superior. This evaluation within the world view creates an imbalance in culture, society and politics at every level, both subtle and gross.

All three of these definitions work together to contribute to patriarchy’s masterful ability to create and re-create itself. With men in authority, patriarchy has existed as a “self-fulfilling outcome over thousands of years.” Men have “been the ones who wrote the laws, the poems, the religious books, the philosophy, the history, the medical treatises and the scientific texts largely for the benefit of men.” (Higgins) The world created by these men has been the measure, in turn, against which humanity is evaluated over thousands of years and came to be the water we swim in — including all those who are not-men.

This worldview impacts us in the most personal areas of our lives. While great and visible strides have been made to illuminate patriarchy’s impacts — in education, society and law — it’s important to recognize that only in the last fifty years has the universal use of the male pronoun, “he/him” in publishing changed to include he/she.

Just as with racism and white privilege, the appearance of progress can belie the underlying presence in our consciousness of deep traditions of division and inequity enacted and transmuted in subtle, insidious ways, intergenerationally over centuries. Patriarchy’s greatest capacity, Higgins writes, maybe “its capacity to make itself as invisible as possible.” (Higgins)

Before going further, I want to point to what patriarchy is not. Many men think the use of the word automatically positions the user against all men. While Mary Wollstonecraft, (thought to be the first feminist in modern times), described it in Vindication of the Rights of Women as the “tyranny of men,” patriarchy does not refer to “all men,” nor does it mean that all men are bad. “Because patriarchy [speaks to a structure] of power relations, rather than a series of specific sexist acts [committed by men], [it doesn’t imply that] all men enthusiastically uphold it or benefit equally from it; and some women may do a great deal towards supporting it. It allows for the fact that however much we might loathe it, we all, perforce, participate in it.” (Higgins)

…Which is one place where the 3- dimensional chess begins to creep in. While a simpler interpretation may reduce the topic of patriarchy to men vs. women, it’s just not as simple as a binary us vs. them.

sharon mc-cutcheon — unsplash

THE GENDER BINARY

The binary, “us vs. them” orientation in much of feminism, has existed, however, largely because there is a gender binary in patriarchy that has been exquisitely hard to escape. Patriarchy’s “gender binary” was first explored in early second-wave feminism but was crystallized by the genderqueer movement in the early 90s. This binary makes up the armed forces of patriarchy and proscribes the attributes for two “natural” and diametrically opposed genders based on one’s genital sex.

Children are raised in a patriarchal culture by parents, who were themselves raised within a patriarchal culture. That culture carries norms and expectations that are projected onto children based on their sex. While these expectations may have resonance with some differences we may, in fact, see between some women and men, patriarchal culture rigidifies specific differences into scripts we learn to comply with over time …for fear of shame.

Experientially, this point about shame is important. The hallmark indicator experience for any deviation from patriarchy’s gender scripts is, first and foremost, some form of self-doubt and/or shame.

It’s not that all shame is linked to gender conditioning, but that when we move closer to working with this conditioning, shame is often the first thing we meet. If we get there, vulnerability is the second encounter.

Patriarchal Girls/Women

According to the scripts of patriarchal femininity, girls and women embody the following pole of human functioning: relationality, nurturance, fragility, needs, compassion, vulnerability, emotionality, empathy, kindness, fickleness, airiness, impracticality, and a dependence on men. They are associated with the less intelligent body, over the superior mind, and their sexuality is seen to depend on the desire for, and pleasure of, men.

Empathy, compliance, and “getting along” become internalized norms for the vast majority of girls and women, effectively making it challenging to access or trust their anger and set boundaries. Patriarchal femininity is also reflected in ideals about women’s bodies and how they should look according to the pleasure of the male gaze (somehow that fact that they are responsible for the gestation of men in utero gets missed here!) so that women learn to evaluate or devalue their bodies from the outside looking in.

In The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan pointed to the culminating impact of this set of expectations in her chronicling of the “problem without a name” that (white), middle-class housewives were experiencing across America in the 1950s. Feeling an anxious, dis-ease, and exhibiting strange, somatic complaints, they fretfully wondered what was wrong with them for not having orgasms over their new washing machine.

Friedan’s book spelled out in non-fiction what writers like Virginia Woolf and Charlotte Perkins Gilman had written about a half-century earlier — that when risking finding more authenticity, connecting more with their essential value, women found themselves feeling mad, crazy, like they were losing their mind, pathologized by the medical professions, and often, shamed by the men and other women, in their lives. Working through this shame and supported by the growing second wave of feminism, women have recalled more of themselves from the shadows of culture and their unconscious making it evident — in thought and action — that they are more than capable of functioning in ways patriarchally considered “masculine”.

Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex — more philosophical in nature than Friedan’s book — pointed to the ways that women were the auxiliary afterthoughts of men, and by extension, in our culture. They did not exist in their own right, but rather as an extension of, and default off, men’s imagination. De Beauvoir's writing leveraged awareness about how women’s self-images were entwined with men’s needs and projections in insidious ways. Extracting themselves from their enmeshment with patriarchy and their psychological dependence on men — finding their essential value — has proven an on-going task in self-realization that continues for women to this day.

Patriarchal Boys/Men

Enlisting men in diametrically opposed ways to women, patriarchal masculinity sees men as naturally autonomous and stoic. Men are associated with rational intelligence, linear thought, and rapid movement to action (vs. being). They are self-reliant, agentic, they “make things happen,” their bodies are strong and useful. Most critically of all, men and boys must not exhibit vulnerability including emotions like fear, grief, tenderness, and compassion.

The patriarchal conditioning of boys, until VERY recently, and only in certain areas of the world, has been reinforced with physical punishment. The negative implication of this punitive control of behavior, not only for men’s/boy’s relationship to their bodies and feelings but also for society, is one of the single most under-addressed harms of patriarchy. Amply evident in the tragedy of our penal system, violent punishment is sanctioned, then internalized, and repeated as the means for policing “bad behavior.” Men must be strong, tough, and never be the “loser,” a mandate interwoven in men’s egos that is a primary cause of violence against women, on our city streets, in our police forces, and in escalating violence and war. Rather than “getting along,” then, dominance is valued and admired and is to be achieved often with force or anger. Lastly, (though there is much more that could be said about this), in our modern culture, rather than being viewed in the context of their value to community, patriarchal men are expected to identify with their work — with what they do — and are evaluated according to their success, wealth, social power, and the women, or other inferiors, who depend on them.

This whole framing of masculinity, of course, fails to recognize that men do, in fact, cry. They have feelings, needs, sometimes daydream, depend on others, including women, have widely varying temperaments, and sometimes even write poetry and join spiritually oriented mystery schools! (-; However, such men often have a hard go of it our culture and the overall condition of patriarchal masculinity leads most men towards a hollowed-out experience of life, beyond bringing home a paycheck and watching sports, there is a sense of meaninglessness many experiences, devoid of purpose, depth, lacking in many of the tools to make deep connections, and communicate, (especially about their vulnerabilities). (Steve Biddulph) Often, men are not in touch with their bodies thinking of them only as instruments of action, or they are only in touch sexually. Missing is any sense of their real value and what a meaningful, connected noble life as a man in community might look like. Just as we speak of a white fragility, then, we might speak of a fragility at the core of patriarchal masculinity, one that is defined around projecting onto women and “others” the very inner life they need to access in order to deepen and grow.

Reflecting on this gender binary, we can see how the mutually exclusive arrangement in patriarchy’s two categories of being human is what causes the greatest harm on our souls. Differences related to the categories of male and female may, in fact, exist between most men and women. And certainly, there are many archetypes that organize this way. However, the proscriptions that rigidify these differences and police them with shame or violence into one sex or the other, and that then privilege one gender over the other, separate us not only from our more authentic selves but also, tragically, from each other.

john hain — pixabay

THE CO-DEPENDENCE IN PATRIARCHAL SCRIPTS

One of the hardest things for heterosexual couples raised with patriarchal conditioning is the ways the binary binds heterosexual couples together in codependence. According to Carol Gilligan, author, most recently of Why Patriarchy Persists, when women learn to “get along,” they also become men’s emotional caretakers, doing the emotional labor of the relationships and, in so doing, arresting the emotional development of the men in their lives.

Taught not to be angry, (or to feel guilty when they are angry), women codependently abdicate their ability to set real limits and walk away with strength. Meanwhile, men, so many of them shamed out of their emotional, inner lives and taught to be self-reliant and not communicate, are locked in a silent and prideful patriarchal straightjacket that makes self-reflection dangerous and communicating shameful. This limits their ability to accept their own, and other’s vulnerability — something that is essential to effectively resolving conflict.

What this means is that the tools for resolving conflict between men and women, tools that would allow us to move beyond patriarchy, become a culture with greater mutual recognition that can function beyond binary thinking, and that could support greater partnership are locked up in the safe of Patriarchy’s own creation.

The predicament begs a question — what would need to change in us as men and women, in the way we raise our children, to help coming generations learn how to un-do this Gordian knot?

christian sterk — unsplash

QUEERYING PATRIARCHY

So, what happens to the individuals who express just one too many qualities belonging to the script for the “opposite” sex?Viewed as ‘un-natural’ and ‘deviant,’ subject to painful ridicule and societal shaming, these were the “lesbians, queers and faggots” mocked by conservative mainstream culture in the 1950s — and still today in segments of society. Here, over the last fifty years, perhaps the greatest challenge ever to patriarchy has exposed its implicit heteronormativity. This term was coined by LGBTQI theorists who knew, through direct experience, that heterosexuality was not a universal, “natural” reality.

In the last fifty years, and especially in the last fifteen, the genderqueer movement has turned patriarchy’s shame on its head, moving through the vulnerability of a coming out process and claiming “queerness” with pride. Today, the pronoun usage of “they, them” adopted by gender-queer/trans individuals, is forcing all of us when we are asked to address someone this way (and there are more and more young people doing this) to conceptualize human gender as a more complex, dynamic mix of masculine and feminine characteristics.

In many ways, this layer of complexity has parallels to another challenge, not of patriarchy, but feminism, itself. Pointing to oversights around diversity and class, Kimberly Crenshaw developed the concept of intersectionality to highlight critical distinctions around power and privileged between, for instance, a white, heterosexual, middle-class woman and an immigrant, biracial, single mother. Simple binaries and the systems that replicate them, are being exposed as insufficient means for evaluating different experiences of power and powerlessness. The challenge to binaries is forcing us into a more complex way of processing difference — less by seeing others in categories, and more by seeing them in their life experience and with curiosity, openness and empathy.

Brenan burling — pixabay

WHAT NEXT?

It would be easy to read this overview as an account of history, things that have developed over the last 200 years leading to a more just society today. We see things with our own eyes — like female CEO’s and transgender bathrooms — that leave us with the impression that change has come. However, not only does discrimination, sexual assault and the micro-aggressions of patriarchal conditioning still have great impact, but the internalized norms of patriarchy still live deeply in our psyches. Historical change in the public sphere often moves faster than our consciousness can change age-old traditions we have inherited. Even though feminism’s first victories happened over two hundred years ago, each stage of its unfolding remains a stage that many girls and women need to experience in their lives today.

What is also true, however, is that this history has within it what we might call “a man-shaped hole.” If boys and men are also harmed by patriarchy, something not only I, but many more authors and speakers are talking about, why has there been no parallel movement from men challenging patriarchy? Over the last fifty years, a men’s rights movement (MRA), a “back to manhood” movement and a small pro-feminist movement have developed. , Some may also be familiar with the Mankind Project and Good Man Project where participation in recent years has increased. These movements, however, have struggled to gain anything like the kind of traction parallel movements have.

A clear and obvious answer would be to say that straight men are the beneficiaries of patriarchy, so certainly less likely to protest against it. As the recipients of its spoils, they may also be the most unconscious of it …. but they also may be some of the most insidiously harmed by it. While the following is admittedly a caricature, it is based on many observations reporting on, and accumulating in our times. We may be helped, then, by reflecting on this parallel for men of Friedan’s “problem without a name”:

“Men with this mysterious ‘problem without a name’ have been increasingly prone to suicide, drug addiction, and violence in recent years. Raised to be ashamed of vulnerability and to believe that talking about the challenges they experience around being a man is anathema -to being a man — isolate. They are unable to find comfort and support with each other, or to form movements to better their condition because the only forms of gathering that they feel safe enough with are ballgames and political rallies for their favorite male candidate. They are caught in a trap of relative silence, unable to identify their feelings; they depend on the women in their lives to sustain their relationships with others. They live to acquire gadgets and watch seasonal games on TV, resorting when lonely to alcohol, drugs, porn, and computers to numb their somatic ailments and depression. Those men more severely and dangerously afflicted, those who carry so much built-up frustration, anger, and impermissible confusion, are compelled to compulsively attack others they construe as more vulnerable than they are, compensate for their insecurity by taking center stage, talk of grabbing women’s genitals and become needlessly violent, murdering innocent men, women, and children on streets and in schools.”

This account provides a tragic and poignant picture of what is happening for men today and how much, as a society, the gender revolution of our times must include a concern with men. If not because their healing and partnership are essential to a safe, sustainable, and functional future, but also because the gender spectrum, that so many have worked so hard to liberate, applies to heterosexual men too.

So, some questions:

- If the antidote for women’s “problem without a name” was for them to express more of the masculine capacities forbidden under patriarchal femininity, what as we reflect on today’s “problem without a name” for men, might be required for them?

— What role might feminism itself play in extending its critique of patriarchy to include its impact on men — something that hurts us all?

— What would need to happen in our culture, in our mainstream media, in our schools and homes in order to support the change so greatly needed to bring men closer to themselves and into greater partnership with the newly found more authentic voices surrounding them?

-What if in addition to women, LGBTQ’s, feminists speaking out to what we can no longer accept from men, we begin to imagine and name a post-patriarchal alternative, advocating for the support necessary to help boys and men get there. “Raise the bar,” as patriarchy-conscious couples therapist Terry Real says, “we all benefit from it.”

-And, yes, what if men need to up their game — this time showing up not only more often as allies, but to turn more earnestly towards themselves, to become aware of their role as both complicit in, and victim to, a system that deeply harms both them and the world.

In the end, whatever happens on a larger scale in society and politics, our experience of gender and sexuality remains deeply personal. Not, irrelevant to the world as the feminist rally cry “the personal is political” says, but first and foremost, personal. The gender and sexuality movements of the last two generations have been born out of experiences as close as our bodies, our sexuality, our relationships and marriages, our feelings, our most intimate sense of self-sovereignty and security, they have risen forward to significance on the political stage, meeting laws and courtrooms, abortion clinics, and, more recently, changing the signs on bathrooms and the pronouns we used to describe ourselves. But it is out of personal experiences of distress, hurt, rage, isolation, and depression that the seedbed for these movements grew, linked to feelings of powerlessness, sexual violation, shame, self-doubt, and trauma. Those of us working through these experiences are offered the gift of finding a far deeper sense of our value, far beyond the imaginings of the patriarchal gender we were raised with. From here, we can envision the world in a different way, equipped to step forward in our more essential being to change it.

Whatever change happens, then, it will require a deepening relationship with our personal experience. That journey, from the beginning of feminism, has always been a journey towards the unknown (at least unknown for 5,000 years of human history). As with the examination of white-privilege, it requires a commitment to “intentional suffering,” a willingness at the front gate, to tolerate one’s shame, to sit with it when useful, and to throw it aside, when not. Then, with the support of others — because this is so central to this work — we can open with curiosity to our experience, often finding ourselves surprised by what’s there on the other side of what we knew. It often hurts along the way to see how much we have hurt others and been hurt, ourselves, by social conditioning. The path forward is often the place where we have the greatest trigger, feel the most empty, or feel our heart most broken. It is mysterious. Unpredictable. Essential. For love of the world, may we find the courage to take it.

“For me, forgiveness and compassion are always linked: how do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?” ― bell hooks