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In patriarchal culture males are not allowed simply to be who they are and to glory in their unique identity. Their value is always determined by what they do. In an antipatriarchal culture males do not have to prove their value and worth. They know from birth that simply being gives them value, the right to be cherished and loved.
Patriarchy is a political-social system that insists that males are inherently dominating,
he was taught that rage was permitted and that allowing rage to provoke him to violence would help him protect home and nation.
Patriarchy demands of men that they become and remain emotional cripples.
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.
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.
The crisis facing men is not the crisis of masculinity, it is the crisis of patriarchal masculinity.
Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson, authors of Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys, stress that their research shows that boys are free to be more emotional in early childhood because they have not yet learned to fear and despise expressing dependence:
Despite these powerful insights they do not talk about the impact of patriarchy. They do not tell readers that to truly protect the emotional life of boys, we must tell the truth about the power of patriarchy.
Frankly, it is difficult to understand why these men who know so much about the way patriarchal thinking damages boys are unable to call the problem by its true name and by so doing free themselves to envision a world where the feelings of boys can really matter. Perhaps they are silent because any critique of patriarchy necessarily leads to a discussion of whether conversion to feminist thinking and practice is the answer.
Just recently her son told her how much he likes the way she smells. She shared with him that he could smell the same. He let her know that there was no way he could go to school smelling sweet. He had gotten the message that “boys don’t smell good.” Instead of urging him to rise to the latest challenge, she now allows him to choose and does not judge his choice. Yet she feels sad for him, sad that conformity to patriarchal standards interfered with his longings.
Many antipatriarchal parents find that the alternative masculinities they support for their boy children are shattered not by grown-ups but by sexist male peers. Progressive parents who strive to be vigilant about the mass media their boys have access to must constantly intervene and offer teachings to counter the patriarchal pedagogy that is deemed “normal.”
Again and again the same assumption appears, which suggests that there exists a masculine ideal that young males are not sure how to attain and that undermines their self-esteem.
Being able to mourn the loss of emotional connection with his father would be a healthy way to cope with disappointment. But boys have no space to mourn.
As much as grown-ups complain about adolescent male anger, most adults are more comfortable confronting a raging teenager than one who is overwhelmed by sorrow and cannot stop weeping.
Patriarchy both creates the rage in boys and then contains it for later use, making it a resource to exploit later on as boys become men. As a national product, this rage can be garnered to further imperialism, hatred, and oppression of women and men globally. This rage is needed if boys are to become men willing to travel around the world to fight wars without ever demanding that other ways of solving conflict be found.
Books that do not reinscribe patriarchal masculinity do not get the approval the Harry Potter books have received. And children rarely have an opportunity to know that any books exist which offer an alternative to patriarchal masculinist visions. The phenomenal financial success of Harry Potter means that boys will henceforth have an array of literary clones to choose from.
The books I have written are aimed at offering boys ways to cope with their emotional selves. The point is to stimulate in boys emotional awareness and to affirm that awareness.
To truly protect and honor the emotional lives of boys we must challenge patriarchal culture. And until that culture changes, we must create the subcultures, the sanctuaries where boys can learn to be who they are uniquely, without being forced to conform to patriarchal masculine visions.
Whenever women thinkers, especially advocates of feminism, speak about the widespread problem of male violence, folks are eager to stand up and make the point that most men are not violent. They refuse to acknowledge that masses of boys and men have been programmed from birth on to believe that at some point they must be violent, whether psychologically or physically, to prove that they are men.
As it is for many men today, it was much easier for him to accept equal pay for equal work, sharing housework, and reproductive rights than it was for him to accept the need for shared emotional development.
Men of feeling often find themselves isolated from other men.
Again and again children hear the message from mass media that when it comes to sex, “he’s gotta have it.” Adults may know better, from their own experience, but children become true believers. They think that men will go mad if they cannot act sexually. This is the logic that produces what feminist thinkers call “a rape culture.”
In patriarchal culture everyone is encouraged to see the penis, even the penis of a small boy, as a potential weapon. This is the psychology of a rape culture. Boys learn that they should identify with the penis and the potential pleasure erections will bring, while simultaneously learning to fear the penis as though it were a weapon that could backfire, rendering them powerless, destroying them.
male slang term for sexual intercourse—“fuck”—is instructive. To fuck a woman is to have sex with her. To fuck someone in another context…means to hurt or cheat a person. And when hurled as a simple insult (“fuck you”) the intent is denigration and the remark is often a prelude to violence or the threat of violence. Sex in patriarchy is fucking.
That we live in a world in which people continue to use the same word for sex and violence, and then resist the notion that sex is routinely violent and claim to be outraged when sex becomes overtly violent, is testament to the power of patriarchy.
“no matter how much sex you encounter, it will not be enough to fill your enormous need to love and be close and express your passion and delight in your senses and feel life forces coursing through your muscles and skin.”
To recover the power and passion of male sexuality unsullied by patriarchal assault, males of all ages must be allowed to speak openly of their sexual longing.
The conflict between finding time for work and finding time for love and loved ones is rarely talked about in our nation. It is simply assumed in patriarchal culture that men should be willing to sacrifice meaningful emotional connections to get the job done.
Most women work because they want to leave the house and because their families need the income to survive, not because they are feminists who believe that their working is a sign of liberation.
Women with class privilege have been the only group who have perpetuated the notion that men are all-powerful, because often the men in their families were powerful. When Faludi critiques the popular feminist notion that men are all-powerful, she counts on the ignorance of readers about feminist writing to perpetuate the notion that feminists have not understood male pain.
Imagine a nonpatriarchal culture where counseling was available to all men to help them find the work that they are best suited to, that they can do with joy.
Work can and should be life-enhancing for all men. When daring men come to work loved and loving, the nature of work will be transformed and the workplace will no longer demand that the hearts of men be broken to get the job done.
Reformist feminist women could not make this call because they were the group of women (mostly white women with class privilege) who had pushed the idea that all men were powerful in the first place. These were the women for whom feminist liberation was more about getting their piece of the power pie and less about freeing masses of women or less powerful men from sexist oppression. They were not mad at their powerful daddies and husbands who kept poor men exploited and oppressed; they were mad that they were not being giving equal access to power.
Teachers of children see gender equality mostly in terms of ensuring that girls get to have the same privileges and rights as boys within the existing social structure; they do not see it in terms of granting boys the same rights as girls—for instance, the right to choose not to engage in aggressive or violent play, the right to play with dolls, to play dress up, to wear costumes of either gender, the right to choose.
we must define maleness as a state of being rather than as performance. Male being, maleness, masculinity must stand for the essential core goodness of the self, of the human body that has a penis. Many of the critics who have written about masculinity suggest that we need to do away with the term, that we need “an end to manhood.” Yet such a stance furthers the notion that there is something inherently evil, bad, or unworthy about maleness.
To offer men a different way of being, we must first replace the dominator model with a partnership model that sees interbeing and interdependency as the organic relationship of all living beings.
Feminist masculinity presupposes that it is enough for males to be to have value, that they do not have to “do,” to “perform,” to be affirmed and loved. Rather than defining strength as “power over,” feminist masculinity defines strength as one’s capacity to be responsible for self and others.
The core of feminist masculinity is a commitment to gender equality and mutuality as crucial to interbeing and partnership in the creating and sustaining of life. Such a commitment always privileges nonviolent action over violence, peace over war, life over death.
No other contemporary film exposes the evil of patriarchy as masterfully as Monster’s Ball. The path to redemption requires the repudiation of white-male patriarchal rule. Yet as in many of the films that portray men resisting patriarchy, in the end the shift is merely a move from violent dominator patriarch to benevolent nice-guy patriarch.
To always wear a mask as a way of asserting masculine presence is to always live the lie, to be perpetually deprived of an authentic sense of identity and well-being. This falseness causes males to experience intense emotional pain. Rituals of domination help mediate the pain.
When feminist women insist that all men are powerful oppressors who victimize from the location of power, they obscure the reality that many victimize from the location of victimization. The violence they do to others is usually a mirroring of the violence enacted upon and within the self.
I did not want to hear the pain of my male partner because hearing it required that I surrender my investment in the patriarchal ideal of the male as protector of the wounded.
There has been such a strong tendency in patriarchal culture to simply assume that women are loving and capable of being intimate, that female failure to acquire the relational skills that would make intimacy possible, often goes unnoticed.
Since emotional pain is the feeling that most males have covered up, numbed out, or closed off, the journey back to feeling is frequently through the portal of suffering.
Were all men seeking to uncover greater soulfulness in their lives rather than seeking power through a dominator model, then the world as we know it would be transformed for the better.
In Ethics for the New Millennium the Dalai Lama calls for a spiritual revolution.
He learns that his core feelings cannot be expressed if they do not conform to the acceptable behaviors sexism defines as male. Asked to give up the true self in order to realize the patriarchal ideal, boys learn self-betrayal early and are rewarded for these acts of soul murder.
Since most men have been socialized to believe that compartmentalization is a positive practice, it feels right, it feels comfortable. To practice integrity, then, is difficult; it hurts.
Many adolescent girls go through a grieving process as they make the transition from being a small child to mature girlhood. Girls are allowed to mourn changes. Males have no rituals of mourning, as boys or men.
