Not patriarchy but surrender
(Nimue)
Most of the good things in life require surrender. You have to let go and fall into them – it’s true of laughter, love, pleasure and joy. True spirituality is about surrender too. Meanwhile patriarchy is all about control or submission.
Patriarchal systems encourage men not to surrender to their feelings. Anger is permissible, but there’s a general pressure to be in control both of yourself and those around you. There’s so much around love and relationships, and around sex, that you just can’t experience if you have to be in control. Fear of female sexuality is a big driver in patriarchal systems, and I think that’s very much about fears of male surrender. There’s real joy in that surrender, and when we surrender together it can be a deeply beautiful experience.
Women in patriarchal systems are taught to submit and endure. There’s nothing beautiful about this – in being obliged to put up with the male control, there’s very little room for joy. Submission on these terms of joyless, and female joy is seen as intrinsically suspect anyway.
Proper laughter is a loss of control. It’s a very bodily thing that overtakes you, melting away all resistance. This kind of laughter is the enemy of power and control, it dissolves barriers, pomposity, and rigidity and is deeply good for us. It’s a long way from the brief, cold laughter of cruelty. The man who is willing to be laughed at isn’t playing along with the rules. I think genuine laughter has a lot of power in face of patriarchal society. Comedy often demonstrates who wants to laugh warmly with others and who want to punch down.
Spiritual teachings often focus on surrender. For some people that’s surrender to the will of God. For others, it’s about surrendering to the living moment, or is about radical acceptance and being in the flow of life. Spirituality shows us the release and sweetness of surrender, when we stop fighting life and learn to go easily with what is. This of course is entirely at odds with systems of hierarchy and control. This is why those systems try to co-opt religions and turn them into systems of hierarchy and control, too. The heart of any religion is surrender, and when what you see is control you know there’s something else entirely going on.
Practicing different forms of surrender is a good way to protect yourself from the malice of hierarchical systems. It is – perhaps ironically – a way of not submitting to those systems. When you know how to let go and how to give yourself wholly in these ways then power structures and control will never hold any real appeal for you. Oppression is what people do when they are too afraid to let go, and in that fear, are unable to experience what is best in life.
