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Title: Understanding Patriarchy Author: bell hooks Date: December 2004 Language: en Topics: patriarchy, feminism, masculinity, not-anarchist Source: Retrieved 26 June 2022 from https://imaginenoborders.org/pdf/zines/UnderstandingPatriarchy.pdf Notes: Originally published by Washington Square Press. This version was published by Louisville Radical Lending Library (2010) on https://imaginenoborders.org/.
Patriarchy is the single most life-threatening social disease assaulting
the male body and spirit in our nation. Yet most men do not use the word
“patriarchy” in everyday life. Most men never think about
patriarchy—what it means, how it is created and sustained. Many men in
our nation would not be able to spell the word or pronounce it
correctly. The word “patriarchy” just is not a part of their normal
everyday thought or speech. Men who have heard and know the word usually
associate it with women’s liberation, with feminism, and therefore
dismiss it as irrelevant to their own experiences. I have been standing
at podiums talking about patriarchy for more than thirty years. It is a
word I use daily, and men who hear me use it often ask me what I mean by
it.
Nothing discounts the old antifeminist projection of men as all-powerful
more than their basic ignorance of a major facet of the political system
that shapes and informs male identity and sense of self from birth until
death. I often use the phrase “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist
patriarchy” to describe the interlocking political systems that are the
foundation of our nation’s politics. Of these systems the one that we
all learn the most about growing up is the system of patriarchy, even if
we never know the word, because patriarchal gender roles are assigned to
us as children and we are given continual guidance about the ways we can
best fulfill these roles.
At church they had learned that God created man to rule the world and
everything in it and that it was the work of women to help men perform
these tasks, to obey, and to always assume a subordinate role in
relation to a powerful man. They were taught that God was male. These
teachings were reinforced in every institution they encountered—
schools, courthouses, clubs, sports arenas, as well as churches.
Embracing patriarchal thinking, like everyone else around them, they
taught it to their children because it seemed like a “natural” way to
organize life.
As their daughter I was taught that it was my role to serve, to be weak,
to be free from the burden of thinking, to caretake and nurture others.
My brother was taught that it was his role to be served; to provide; to
be strong; to think, strategize, and plan; and to refuse to caretake or
nurture others. I was taught that it was not proper for a female to be
violent, that it was “unnatural.” My brother was taught hat his value
would be determined by his will to do violence (albeit in appropriate
settings). He was taught that for a boy, enjoying violence was a good
thing (albeit in appropriate settings). He was taught that a boy should
not express feelings. I was taught that girls could and should express
feelings, or at least some of them. When I responded with rage at being
denied a toy, I was taught as a girl in a patriarchal household that
rage was not an appropriate feminine feeling, that it should be not only
not be expressed but be eradicated. When my brother responded with rage
at being denied a toy, he was taught as a boy in a patriarchal household
that his ability to express rage was good but that he had to learn the
best setting to unleash his hostility. It was not good for him to use
his rage to oppose the wishes of his parents, but later, when he grew
up, he was taught that rage was permitted and that allowing rage to
provoke him to violence would help him protect home and nation.
We lived in farm country, isolated from other people. Our sense of
gender roles was learned from our parents, from the ways we saw them
behave. My brother and I remember our confusion about gender. In reality
I was stronger and more violent than my brother, which we learned
quickly was bad. And he was a gentle, peaceful boy, which we learned was
really bad. Although we were often confused, we knew one fact for
certain: we could not be and act the way we wanted to, doing what we
felt like. It was clear to us that our behavior had to follow a
predetermined, gendered script. We both learned the word “patriarchy” in
our adult life, when we learned that the script that had determined what
we should be, the identities we should make, was based on patriarchal
values and beliefs about gender.
I was always more interested in challenging patriarchy than my brother
was because it was the system that was always leaving me out of things
that I wanted to be part of. In our family life of the fifties, marbles
were a boy’s game. My brother had inherited his marbles from men in the
family; he had a tin box to keep them in. All sizes and shapes,
marvelously colored, they were to my eye the most beautiful objects. We
played together with them, often with me aggressively clinging to the
marble I liked best, refusing to share. When Dad was at work, our
stay-athome mom was quite content to see us playing marbles together.
Yet Dad, looking at our play from a patriarchal perspective, was
disturbed by what he saw. His daughter, aggressive and competitive, was
a better player than his son. His son was passive; the boy did not
really seem to care who won and was willing to give over marbles on
demand. Dad decided that this play had to end, that both my brother and
I needed to learn a lesson about appropriate gender roles.
One evening my brother was given permission by Dad to bring out the tin
of marbles. I announced my desire to play and was told by my brother
that “girls did not play with marbles,” that it was a boy’s game. This
made no sense to my four- or five-year-old mind, and I insisted on my
right to play by picking up marbles and shooting them. Dad intervened to
tell me to stop. I did not listen. His voice grew louder and louder.
Then suddenly he snatched me up, broke a board from our screen door, and
began to beat me with it, telling me, “You’re just a little girl. When I
tell you to do something, I mean for you to do it.” He beat me and he
beat me, wanting me to acknowledge that I understood what I had done.
His rage, his violence captured everyone’s attention. Our family sat
spellbound, rapt before the pornography of patriarchal violence. After
this beating I was banished—forced to stay alone in the dark. Mama came
into the bedroom to soothe the pain, telling me in her soft southern
voice, “I tried to warn you. You need to accept that you are just a
little girl and girls can’t do what boys do.” In service to patriarchy
her task was to reinforce that Dad had done the right thing by, putting
me in my place, by restoring the natural social order.
I remember this traumatic event so well because it was a story told
again and again within our family. No one cared that the constant
retelling might trigger post-traumatic stress; the retelling was
necessary to reinforce both the message and the remembered state of
absolute powerlessness. The recollection of this brutal whipping of a
little-girl daughter by a big strong man, served as more than just a
reminder to me of my gendered place, it was a reminder to everyone
watching/remembering, to all my siblings, male and female, and to our
grownwoman mother that our patriarchal father was the ruler in our
household. We were to remember that if we did not obey his rules, we
would be punished, punished even unto death. This is the way we were
experientially schooled in the art of patriarchy.
There is nothing unique or even exceptional about this experience.
Listen to the voices of wounded grown children raised in patriarchal
homes and you will hear different versions with the same underlying
theme, the use of violence to reinforce our indoctrination and
acceptance of patriarchy. In How Can I Get Through to You? family
therapist Terrence Real tells how his sons were initiated into
patriarchal thinking even as their parents worked to create a loving
home in which antipatriarchal values prevailed. He tells of how his
young son Alexander enjoyed dressing as Barbie until boys playing with
his older brother witnessed his Barbie persona and let him know by their
gaze and their shocked, disapproving silence that his behavior was
unacceptable:There is nothing unique or even exceptional about this
experience. Listen to the voices of wounded grown children raised in
patriarchal homes and you will hear different versions with the same
underlying theme, the use of violence to reinforce our indoctrination
and acceptance of patriarchy. In How Can I Get Through to You? family
therapist Terrence Real tells how his sons were initiated into
patriarchal thinking even as their parents worked to create a loving
home in which antipatriarchal values prevailed. He tells of how his
young son Alexander enjoyed dressing as Barbie until boys playing with
his older brother witnessed his Barbie persona and let him know by their
gaze and their shocked, disapproving silence that his behavior was
unacceptable:
Without a shred of malevolence, the stare my son received transmitted a
message. You are not to do this. And the medium that message was
broadcast in was a potent emotion: shame. At three, Alexander was
learning the rules. A ten second wordless transaction was powerful
enough to dissuade my son from that instant forward from what had been a
favorite activity. I call such moments of induction the “normal
traumatization” of boys.
To indoctrinate boys into the rules of patriarchy, we force them to feel
pain and to deny their feelings.
My stories took place in the fifties; the stories Real tells are recent.
They all underscore the tyranny of patriarchal thinking, the power of
patriarchal culture to hold us captive. Real is one of the most
enlightened thinkers on the subject of patriarchal masculinity in our
nation, and yet he lets readers know that he is not able to keep his
boys out of patriarchy’s reach. They suffer its assaults, as do all boys
and girls, to a greater or lesser degree. No doubt by creating a loving
home that is not patriarchal, Real at least offers his boys a choice:
they can choose to be themselves or they can choose conformity with
patriarchal roles. Real uses the phrase “psychological patriarchy” to
describe the patriarchal thinking common to females and males. Despite
the contemporary visionary feminist thinking that makes clear that a
patriarchal thinker need not be a male, most folks continue to see men
as the problem of patriarchy. This is simply not the case. Women can be
as wedded to patriarchal thinking and action as men.
Psychotherapist John Bradshaw’s clearsighted definition of patriarchy in
Creating Love is a useful one: “The dictionary defines ‘patriarchy’ as a
‘social organization marked by the supremacy of the father in the clan
or family in both domestic and religious functions’.” Patriarchy is
characterized by male domination and power. He states further that
“patriarchal rules still govern most of the world’s religious, school
systems, and family systems.” Describing the most damaging of these
rules, Bradshaw lists “blind obedience—the foundation upon which
patriarchy stands; the repression of all emotions except fear; the
destruction of individual willpower; and the repression of thinking
whenever it departs from the authority figure’s way of thinking.”
Patriarchal thinking shapes the values of our culture. We are socialized
into this system, females as well as males. Most of us learned
patriarchal attitudes in our family of origin, and they were usually
taught to us by our mothers. These attitudes were reinforced in schools
and religious institutions.
The contemporary presence of female-headed house holds has led many
people to assume that children in these households are not learning
patriarchal values because no male is present. They assume that men are
the sole teachers of patriarchal thinking. Yet many female-headed
households endorse and promote patriarchal thinking with far greater
passion than two-parent households. Because they do not have an
experiential reality to challenge false fantasies of gender roles, women
in such households are far more likely to idealize the patriarchal male
role and patriarchal men than are women who live with patriarchal men
every day. We need to highlight the role women play in perpetuating and
sustaining patriarchal culture so that we will recognize patriarchy as a
system women and men support equally, even if men receive more rewards
from that system. Dismantling and changing patriarchal culture is work
that men and women must do together.
Clearly we cannot dismantle a system as long as we engage in collective
denial about its impact on our lives. Patriarchy requires male dominance
by any means necessary, hence it supports, promotes, and condones sexist
violence. We hear the most about sexist violence in public discourses
about rape and abuse by domestic partners. But the most common forms of
patriarchal violence are those that take place in the home between
patriarchal parents and children. The point of such violence is usually
to reinforce a dominator model, in which the authority figure is deemed
ruler over those without power and given the right to maintain that rule
through practices of subjugation, subordination, and submission.
Keeping males and females from telling the truth about what happens to
them in families is one way patriarchal culture is maintained. A great
majority of individuals enforce an unspoken rule in the culture as a
whole that demands we keep the secrets of patriarchy, thereby protecting
the rule of the father. This rule of silence is upheld when the culture
refuses everyone easy access even to the word “patriarchy.” Most
children do not learn what to call this system of institutionalized
gender roles, so rarely do we name it in everyday speech. This silence
promotes denial. And how can we organize to challenge and change a
system that cannot be named?
It is no accident that feminists began to use the word “patriarchy” to
replace the more commonly used “male chauvanism” and “sexism.” These
courageous voices wanted men and women to become more aware of the way
patriarchy affects us all. In popular culture the word itself was hardly
used during the heyday of contemporary feminism. Antimale activists were
no more eager than their sexist male counterparts to emphasize the
system of patriarchy and the way it works. For to do so would have
automatically exposed the notion that men were all-powerful and women
powerless, that all men were oppressive and women always and only
victims. By placing the blame for the perpetuation of sexism solely on
men, these women could maintain their own allegiance to patriarchy,
their own lust for power. They masked their longing to be dominators by
taking on the mantle of victimhood.
Like many visionary radical feminists I challenged the misguided notion,
put forward by women who were simply fed up with male exploitation and
oppression, that men were “the enemy.” As early as 1984 I included a
chapter with the title “Men: Comrades in Struggle” in my book Feminist
Theory: From Margin to Center urging advocates of feminist politics to
challenge any rhetoric which placed the sole blame for perpetuating
patriarchy and male domination onto men:
Separatist ideology encourages women to ignore the negative impact of
sexism on male personhood. It stresses polarization between the sexes.
According to Joy Justice, separatists believe that there are “two basic
perspectives” on the issue of naming the victims of sexism: “There is
the perspective that men oppress women. And there is the perspective
that people are people, and we are all hurt by rigid sex roles.”…Both
perspectives accurately describe our predica ment. Men do oppress women.
People are hurt by rigid sexist role patterns, These two realities
coexist. Male oppression of women cannot be excused by the recognition
that there are ways men are hurt by rigid sexist roles. Feminist
activists should acknowledge that hurt, and work to change it—it exists.
It does not erase or lessen male responsibility for supporting and
perpetuating their power under patriarchy to exploit and oppress women
in a manner far more grievous than the serious psychological stress and
emotional pain caused by male conformity to rigid sexist role patterns.
Throughout this essay I stressed that feminist advocates collude in the
pain of men wounded by patriarchy when they falsely represent men as
always and only powerful, as always and only gaining privileges from
their blind obedience to patriarchy. I emphasized that patriarchal
ideology brainwashes men to believe that their domination of women is
beneficial when it is not:
Often feminist activists affirm this logic when we should be constantly
naming these acts as expressions of perverted power relations, general
lack of control of one’s actions, emotional powerlessness, extreme
irrationality, and in many cases, outright insanity. Passive male
absorption of sexist ideology enables men to falsely interpret this
disturbed behavior positively. As long as men are brainwashed to equate
violent domination and abuse of women with privilege, they will have no
understanding of the damage done to themselves or to others, and no
motivation to change.
Patriarchy demands of men that they become and remain emotional
cripples. Since it is a system that denies men full access to their
freedom of will, it is difficult for any man of any class to rebel
against patriarchy, to be disloyal to the patriarchal parent, be that
parent female or male.
The man who has been my primary bond for more than twelve years was
traumatized by the patriarchal dynamics in his family of origin. When I
met him he was in his twenties. While his formative years had been spent
in the company of a violent, alcoholic dad, his circumstances changed
when he was twelve and he began to live alone with his mother. In the
early years of our relationship he talked openly about his hostility and
rage toward his abusing dad. He was not interested in forgiving him or
understanding the circumstances that had shaped and influenced his dad’s
life, either in his childhood or in his working life as a military man.
In the early years of our relationship he was extremely critical of male
domination of women and children. Although he did not use the word
“patriarchy,” he understood its meaning and he opposed it. His gentle,
quiet manner often led folks to ignore him, counting him among the weak
and the powerless. By the age of thirty he began to assume a more macho
persona, embracing the dominator model that he had once critiqued.
Donning the mantle of patriarch, he gained greater respect and
visibility. More women were drawn to him. He was noticed more in public
spheres. His criticism of male domination ceased. And indeed he begin to
mouth patriarchal rhetoric, saying the kind of sexist stuff that would
have appalled him in the past.
These changes in his thinking and behavior were triggered by his desire
to be accepted and affirmed in a patriarchal workplace and rationalized
by his desire to get ahead. His story is not unusual. Boys brutalized
and victimized by patriarchy more often than not become patriarchal,
embodying the abusive patriarchal masculinity that they once clearly
recognized as evil. Few men brutally abused as boys in the name of
patriarchal maleness courageously resist the brainwashing and remain
true to themselves. Most males conform to patriarchy in one way or
another
Indeed, radical feminist critique of patriarchy has practically been
silenced in our culture. It has become a subcultural discourse available
only to well-educated elites. Even in those circles, using the word
“patriarchy” is regarded as passé. Often in my lectures when I use the
phrase “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy” to describe
our nation’s political system, audiences laugh. No one has ever
explained why accurately naming this system is funny. The laughter is
itself a weapon of patriarchal terrorism. It functions as a disclaimer,
discounting the significance of what is being named. It suggests that
the words themselves are problematic and not the system they describe. I
interpret this laughter as the audience’s way of showing discomfort with
being asked to ally themselves with an antipatriarchal disobedient
critique. This laughter reminds me that if I dare to challenge
patriarchy openly, I risk not being taken seriously
Citizens in this nation fear challenging patriarchy even as they lack
overt awareness that they are fearful, so deeply embedded in our
collective unconscious are the rules of patriarchy. I often tell
audiences that if we were to go doorto-door asking if we should end male
violence against women, most people would give their unequivocal
support. Then if you told them we can only stop male violence against
women by ending male domination, by eradicating patriarchy, they would
begin to hesitate, to change their position. Despite the many gains of
contemporary feminist movement—greater equality for women in the
workforce, more tolerance for the relinquishing of rigid gender
roles—patriarchy as a system remains intact, and many people continue to
believe that it is needed if humans are to survive as a species. This
belief seems ironic, given that patriarchal methods of organizing
nations, especially the insistence on violence as a means of social
control, has actually led to the slaughter of millions of people on the
planet.
Until we can collectively acknowledge the damage patriarchy causes and
the suffering it creates, we cannot address male pain. We cannot demand
for men the right to be whole, to be givers and sustainers of life.
Obviously some patriarchal men are reliable and even benevolent
caretakers and providers, but still they are imprisoned by a system that
undermines their mental health.
Patriarchy promotes insanity. It is at the root of the psychological
ills troubling men in our nation. Nevertheless there is no mass concern
for the plight of men. In Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man,
Susan Faludi includes very little discussion of patriarchy:
Ask feminists to diagnose men’s problems and you will often get a very
clear explanation: men are in crisis because women are properly
challenging male dominance. Women are asking men to share the public
reins and men can’t bear it. Ask antifeminists and you will get a
diagnosis that is, in one respect, similar. Men are troubled, many
conservative pundits say, because women have gone far beyond their
demands for equal treatment and are now trying to take power and control
away from men…The underlying message: men cannot be men, only eunuchs,
if they are not in control. Both the feminist and antifeminist views are
rooted in a peculiarly modern American perception that to be a man means
to be at the controls and at all times to feel yourself in control.
Faludi never interrogates the notion of control. She never considers
that the notion that men were somehow in control, in power, and
satisfied with their lives before contemporary feminist movement is
false.
Patriarchy as a system has denied males access to full emotional
well-being, which is not the same as feeling rewarded, successful, or
powerful because of one’s capacity to assert control over others. To
truly address male pain and male crisis we must as a nation be willing
to expose the harsh reality that patriarchy has damaged men in the past
and continues to damage them in the present. If patriarchy were truly
rewarding to men, the violence and addiction in family life that is so
all-pervasive would not exist. This violence was not created by
feminism. If patriarchy were rewarding, the overwhelming dissatisfaction
most men feel in their work lives—a dissatisfaction extensively
documented in the work of Studs Terkel and echoed in Faludi’s
treatise—would not exist.
In many ways Stiffed was yet another betrayal of American men because
Faludi spends so much time trying not to challenge patriarchy that she
fails to highlight the necessity of ending patriarchy if we are to
liberate men. Rather she writes:
Instead of wondering why men resist women’s struggle for a freer and
healthier life, I began to wonder why men refrain from engaging in their
own struggle. Why, despite a crescendo of random tantrums, have they
offered no methodical, reasoned response to their predicament: Given the
untenable and insulting nature of the demands placed on men to prove
themselves in our culture, why don’t men revolt?…Why haven’t men
responded to the series of betrayals in their own lives—to the failures
of their fathers to make good on their promises–with some thing coequal
to feminism?
Note that Faludi does not dare risk either the ire of feminist females
by suggesting that men can find salvation in feminist movement or
rejection by potential male readers who are solidly antifeminist by
suggesting that they have something to gain from engaging feminism.
So far in our nation visionary feminist movement is the only struggle
for justice that emphasizes the need to end patriarchy. No mass body of
women has challenged patriarchy and neither has any group of men come
together to lead the struggle. The crisis facing men is not the crisis
of masculinity, it is the crisis of patriarchal masculinity. Until we
make this distinction clear, men will continue to fear that any critique
of patriarchy represents a threat. Distinguishing political patriarchy,
which he sees as largely committed to ending sexism, therapist Terrence
Real makes clear that the patriarchy damaging us all is embedded in our
psyches:
Psychological patriarchy is the dynamic between those qualities deemed
“masculine” and “feminine” in which half of our human traits are exalted
while the other half is devalued. Both men and women participate in this
tortured value system. Psychological patriarchy is a “dance of
contempt,” a perverse form of connection that replaces true intimacy
with complex, covert layers of dominance and submission, collusion and
manipulation. It is the unacknowledged paradigm of relationships that
has suffused Western civilization generation after generation, deforming
both sexes, and destroying the passionate bond between them.
By highlighting psychological patriarchy, we see that everyone is
implicated and we are freed from the misperception that men are the
enemy. To end patriarchy we must challenge both its psychological and
its concrete manifestations in daily life. There are folks who are able
to critique patriarchy but unable to act in an antipatriarchal manner.
To end male pain, to respond effectively to male crisis, we have to name
the problem. We have to both acknowledge that the problem is patriarchy
and work to end patriarchy. Terrence Real offers this valuable insight:
“The reclamation of wholeness is a process even more fraught for men
than it has been for women, more difficult and more profoundly
threatening to the culture at large.” If men are to reclaim the
essential goodness of male being, if they are to regain the space of
openheartedness and emotional expressiveness that is the foundation of
well-being, we must envision alternatives to patriarchal masculinity. We
must all change.