The End of Patriarchy Quotes

“Complex systems produce complicated results, and still there are identifiable patterns: Patriarchy is a system that delivers material benefits to men—unequally depending on men’s other attributes (such as race, class, sexual orientation, nationality, immigration status) and on men’s willingness to adapt to patriarchal values—but patriarchy constrains all women. The physical, psychological, and spiritual suffering endured by women varies widely, again depending on other attributes and sometimes just on the luck of the draw, but no woman escapes some level of that suffering. And at the core of that system is men’s control of women’s sexuality and reproduction: Without”
― Robert Jensen, The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men

“Feminism remains a crucial element of any program for social justice today, which is why patriarchal forces attempt to eliminate or marginalize feminist ideas.”
― Robert Jensen, The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men

“It may be that in the long run, patriarchy has not been a successful adaptation and will lead to the extinction of the species. As we look around the world at the threats to the ecosphere from unsustainable human systems deeply rooted in patriarchy’s domination/subordination dynamic, that’s not only plausible but increasingly likely. That suggests that patriarchy is an evolutionary dead-end. Human”
― Robert Jensen, The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men

“The feminist philosophy that has shaped my thinking has been articulated most clearly by Marilyn Frye;67 Catharine MacKinnon68 has been influential in my understanding of the law’s role; Gerda Lerner helped me understand the relationship between gender and class; and Audre Lorde69 and Barbara Smith70 challenged many of my unconscious assumptions about gender and race. Important to the struggle to bring to feminist theory and politics a deeper analysis of the complexity of all these interactions among systems of power has been Patricia Hill Collins’ 1990 book on black feminist thought and “the matrix of domination.”71 Other sources of my early understanding of these themes were the work of bell hooks, especially her 1984 book72 and her ongoing critique of “white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy,” and the influential 1981 collection This Bridge Called My Back: Writing by Radical Women of Color.73 Today”
― Robert Jensen, The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men

“the difficult question these feminists raised: In women’s experience, how much consensual sex is consented to but not wanted? How much consensual sex is consented to out of fear? Out of insecurity? How much consensual sex is consented to simply because the woman finds it easier to have sex than to try to communicate with the man about her emotional state at the moment?”
― Robert Jensen, The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men

“But an adherence to ideology, to any ideology, can give us the grand illusion of freedom when in fact we are being manipulated and used by those whom the theory serves. The struggle for freedom has to be a struggle toward integrity defined in every possible sphere of reality—sexual integrity, economic integrity, psychological integrity, integrity of expression, integrity of faith and loyalty and heart. Anything that shortcuts us away from viewing integrity as an essential goal or anything that diverts our attention from integrity as a revolutionary value serves only to reinforce the authoritarian values of the world in which we live.”
― Robert Jensen, The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men

“The various inequalities that define the contemporary world—imposed through white supremacy, imperialism, capitalism—all are based on this central feature of patriarchy, an attempt to make the domination/subordination dynamic appear to be a natural, and hence inevitable, feature of human societies.”
― Robert Jensen, The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men

“The radical feminists I have worked with do not limit their critique to patriarchy. To emphasize the radical potential of radical feminism: Beyond the sex/gender system, radical feminism’s understanding of the way in which patriarchy normalizes hierarchy leads not just to a focus on men’s domination of women but also to a deeper critique of power systems more generally.”
― Robert Jensen, The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men

“Without (hetero)sexual abuse, (hetero)sexual harassment and the (hetero)sexualization of every aspect of female bodies and behaviors, there would not be patriarchy, and whatever other forms or materializations of oppression might exist, they would not have the shapes, boundaries and dynamics of the racism, nationalism, and so on that we are so familiar with.82 The”
― Robert Jensen, The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men

“To deconstruct a concept is to analyze it in a way which reveals its construction—both in the temporal sense of its birth and development over time and in a certain cultural and political matrix, and in the sense of its own present structure, its meaning, and its relation to other concepts. One of the most impressive aspects of such an analysis is the revelation of the ‘contingency’ of the concept, i.e. the fact that it is only the accidental collaboration of various historical events and circumstances that brought that concept into being, and the fact that there could be a world of sense without that concept in it (emphasis added).26 In”
― Robert Jensen, The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men

“The system of patriarchy is a historic construct; it has a beginning; it will have an end. Its time seems to have nearly run its course—it no longer serves the needs of men or women and in its inextricable linkage to militarism, hierarchy, and racism it threatens the very existence of life on earth.5”
― Robert Jensen, The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men

“In the 200,000 years of the species Homo sapiens, patriarchy accounts for less than 5% of our evolutionary history. If we consider the 2.5 million years of the Homo genus, our direct ancestors, patriarchy is less than 0.5% of our history.”
― Robert Jensen, The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men