The Gender Knot Quotes

“It is easier to allow a few women to occupy positions of authority and dominance than to question whether social life should be organized around principles of hierarchy, control, and dominance at all, to allow a few women to reach the heights of the corporate hierarchy rather than question whether people's needs should depend on an economic system based on dominance, control, and competition. It is easier to allow women to practice law than to question adversarial conflict as a model for resolving disputes and achieving justice. It has even been easier to admit women to military combat roles than to question the acceptability of warfare and its attendant images of patriarchal masculine power and heroism as instruments of national policy. And it has been easier to elevate and applaud a few women than to confront the cultural misogyny that is never far off, waiting in the wings and available for anyone who wants to use it to bring women down and put them in their place.”
― Allan G. Johnson, The Gender Knot: Unraveling Our Pariarchal Legacy

“The public response to feminism has been ferociously defensive precisely because feminism touches such a deep nerve of truth and the denial that keeps us from it. If feminism were truly ridiculous, it would be ignored. But it isn't ridiculous, and so provokes a vigorous backlash.”
― Allan G. Johnson, The Gender Knot: Unraveling Our Pariarchal Legacy

“As a system, patriarchy encourages men to accept male privilege and perpetuate women's oppression, if only through silence.”
― Allan G. Johnson, The Gender Knot: Unraveling Our Pariarchal Legacy

“If we are serious about change, we have to dig - preferably with plenty of company and with a full appreciation of the fact that although we did not start the fire, it belongs to us now.”
― Allan G. Johnson, The Gender Knot: Unraveling Our Patriarchal Legacy

“Women's potential to disrupt patriarchy and make men vulnerable is why it's so easy for women to make men feel foolish or emasculated through the mildest humor that focuses on maleness and hints at women's power to stop going along with the status quo.”
― Allan G. Johnson, The Gender Knot: Unraveling Our Pariarchal Legacy

“Male experience is what patriarchal culture uses to represent human experience, even when it is women who most often live it.”
― Allan G. Johnson, The Gender Knot: Unraveling Our Patriarchal Legacy

“The more powerful a woman is under patriarchy, the more ‘unsexed’
she becomes in the eyes of others as her female cultural identity recedes beneath the mantle of male-identified power and the masculine images associated with it. With men the effect is just the opposite: the more powerful they
are, the more aware they are of their manhood. In other words, in a patriarchal
culture, power looks sexy on men but not on women.”
― Allan G. Johnson, The Gender Knot: Unraveling Our Patriarchal Legacy

“A society is patriarchal to the degree that it promotes male privilege by being male dominated, male identified, and male centered. It is also organized around an obsession with control and involves as one of its key aspects the oppression of women.... If men occupy superior positions, it's a short leap to the idea that men must be superior...[and that] whatever men do will tend to be seen as having greater value.”
― Allan G. Johnson, The Gender Knot: Unraveling Our Patriarchal Legacy