Patriarchy Isn’t a Synonym for Men

One is a social system and the other is a demographic within that

Many Americans find it difficult to see themselves as a part of social dynamics. They’ve been fed a steady diet of faux individualism their entire lives, and they consequently have a difficult time imagining that they are anything other than an island, with no impact on or responsibility for anything that they didn’t directly do. From personal anecdotal experience, this seems to go double for American men.

Part of the mythos of masculinity in this country is that you are not a “real man” unless you are in control, and making your own way. We’ve all been led to believe that we are at the helm of our own lives, that our choices alone create the situations that we find ourselves in, and that we understand and know why we do what we do. Unfortunately, cognitive science begs to differ and instead tells us that very little thought is actually conscious. The concept of the rational man/person is mostly the product of 19th-century ideas.

A commonly held view assumes that conscious thought is in charge of behavior (e.g., Wegner, 2002). However, several decades of psychology research have challenged this notion. The findings have shown that conscious thought has limited access to the mind’s inner workings, while revealing that the unconscious is capable of initiating and guiding behavior without help from conscious thought.

Overwhelmingly, we are all driven in large part, not by consciously made choices and beliefs, but rather by pervasive cultural narratives, childhood indoctrination, media, and advertising propaganda, stereotypes, and other social and cultural elements. One of the places where conscious thought comes into play is in the communication of those beliefs in the social environment.

Each type of thought employs rules communicated within culture. And each allows individuals to operate successfully within the culture, whether it is used to cooperate with others, justify one’s actions (Haidt, 2007), or argue (Mercier and Sperber, 2011).

We aren’t the rational beings that 19th-century philosophers imagined, using “reason as the chief source and test of knowledge.” But a lot of people don’t know that or don’t want to believe it. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons that so many men conflate the term patriarchy with masculinity — they don’t know how to imagine themselves as a part of a larger social dynamic — one that we are all participating in often largely unconsciously.

From a sociological perspective, the primacy of men in a patriarchy is an important aspect, but it is far from the only one. For the most part, even most feminist usages of the term acknowledge this as well. One is a social system and the other is a demographic within that system.

Patriarchy is something that arose for the first time only about 6–9 thousand years ago. Prior to that time, most humans lived in egalitarian, matrilineal enclaves of foragers or proto-agricultural settlements. Egalitarianism was an enforced social dynamic, one that still exists among forager tribes today. It’s both intentional and part of a larger survival strategy.

Christopher Boehm is an anthropologist and primatologist who is currently the Director of the Jane Goodall Research Center at the University of Southern California. He believes that suppressing our primate ancestors’ dominance hierarchies by enforcing these egalitarian norms was a central adaptation of human evolution and many anthropologists agree with him. Enhanced cooperation lowered the risks of Paleolithic life for small, isolated bands of humans and was likely crucial to our survival and evolutionary success.

The social dynamics only began to change as greater personal property that came with a larger reliance on agriculture began to be a factor. Combine this with a wave of natural disasters and incursions from more warlike Proto-Indo-European tribes, and a new more stratified type of social organization arises. This included not only a gendered power differential but a whole new class system where none had existed before. The following excerpt from an article in the World Economic Forum explains quite well how this came about:

“Labor roles became more gendered as well. Generally, men did the majority of the fieldwork while women were relegated to child-rearing and household work. Without contributing food (and by association, without control over it), women became second-class citizens. Women also had babies more frequently, on average once every two years rather than once every four in hunter-gatherer societies.

Because somebody had to have control over surplus food, it became necessary to divide society into roles that supported this hierarchy. The roles of an administrator, a servant, a priest, and a soldier were invented. The soldier was especially important because agriculture was so unsustainable compared to hunting and gathering. The fickleness of agriculture ironically encouraged more migration into neighboring lands in search of more resources and warfare with neighboring groups. Capturing slaves was also important since farming was hard work, and more people were working in these new roles.

This division of labor and social inequality had very real consequences. For instance, while the majority of people had disastrous health compared to their hunter-gatherer ancestors, the skeletons of Mycenean royalty had better teeth and were three inches taller than their subjects. Chilean mummies from A.D. 1000 had a fourfold lower rate of bone lesions caused by disease than commoners.”

In other words, patriarchy is at its heart a dominance-based hierarchy where might makes right, and those who have the most social power have gotten it by intimidation, force, and coercion and by maintaining traditional power once it is established. This is typically accomplished by keeping those further down the pecking order from having an actual chance to compete. Ruthlessness is not only an accepted method of acquiring and maintaining power, but for many, it actually reads as a leadership quality, even today.

In the United States, up until just a few decades ago, there were laws that actively prevented both women and Blacks from having equal access to opportunity. Even though these laws are now defunct, the beliefs and traditional power dynamics they enshrined are not necessarily entirely gone. They linger on in our collective subconscious as well as the structural and institutional aspects of our culture.

Most people in America, even those who are close to the apex of the dominance hierarchy, are typically not oppressing others out of conscious malice. Some are, to be sure, but the vast majority of racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, etc., comes out of the subconscious desire to adhere to the patriarchal status quo. It’s the social system that we’ve all been indoctrinated into since birth, and through it we’ve been taught that if we don’t win, we lose — that it’s zero-sum world.

Because of this zero-sum outlook, everything in patriarchy is a binary. You are either a man or a woman. Because being male is dominant, women can strive to have a few male traits (but not too many), but men are not allowed to embody femininity in any way. In every interpersonal interaction, you must compare yourself to the other person and determine who is the one-up and who is the one-down, because there are no true equals or win-win scenarios.

In a patriarchy, men do have some measure of advantage and even in some cases, power over women. But because it is a dominance-based hierarchy, with only a few elites at the apex of the pyramid, men suffer under this system as well. There are strict rules about what it means to be “a real man” and anyone who tries to diverge from that is likely to meet strong societal discomfort and backlash.

When Paul Kivel conceptualized the “Act Like a Man Box” in the early 1980s, by asking high school boys what the rules were for being a man. It turned out the rules were pretty straightforward. They included: • Hide all emotions • Treat women as less, have control over women • Be tough, never admit self-doubt, fear • Police and bully other boys who don’t conform.

Forty years later, the Man Box still has a strong hold on many men. The Promundo survey of men done in 2017 in the US, UK, and Mexico found that overall, young men somewhat distance themselves from the Man Box rules, but they don’t reject them outright. “Some men may be able to reject restrictive and negative social pressures related to masculinity, but a great many embrace these pressures and the version of manhood that they promote.”

There is so much social reinforcement of these norms, even often coming from women, that men tend to feel good about themselves for succeeding in “playing the game correctly.” However, this also comes with a hefty price to pay. According to the Promundo research team:

Young men’s mental health is in a worrisome state. Their bravado masks deep insecurities, depression, and frequent thoughts of suicide. Men in the Man Box in the US and UK are statistically significantly more likely to meet a screening standard for depression than men outside the Man Box. Furthermore, all young men’s rates of suicidal ideation are troubling, with particularly high rates among men in the Man Box.

Young men are more likely to report providing emotional support to others than they are to report being emotionally vulnerable or seeking help themselves. In line with the Man Box rule that young men be self-sufficient, study participants tend to grapple with emotions with little or no support from others. When they do seek support, it is from women in their lives — almost never from their fathers. We also see that fear of appearing vulnerable or gay still has a powerful influence over young men’s behaviors, particularly for men in the Man Box.

The Man Box is also a place of extremely risky behaviors, particularly binge drinking and reckless driving. Too many young men associate being a “real man” with alcohol abuse and dangerous driving, putting themselves and others at risk when they try to meet this harmful standard.

Young men’s notions of physical attractiveness still link primarily with muscle bulk and body shape, as opposed to a more inward, individual sense of confidence and attractiveness.

The Man Box is an enormously violent place, with negative repercussions for young men themselves, for young women, and for others in their lives. Men in the Man Box in the US and UK are as much as six or seven times more likely to report having perpetrated acts of online or physical bullying against male peers than men outside the Man Box. Men in the Man Box in Mexico are also three times more likely than their peers outside the Man Box to report having perpetrated sexual harassment. In the US and UK, men in the Man Box are six times more likely to report perpetrating sexual harassment.

There are numerous ways that the social system of patriarchy is harmful, to men, women, and everyone. Patriarchy and men are not synonymous. Even though men have historically, and to some extent, still are closer to the top of the pyramid of power as a demographic, with most economic, political, and social power still overwhelmingly in male hands, this is not a slam dunk. Only a relatively small number of elite men truly feel the effects of their advantages — typically they are the ones who are rich, white, Christian, heterosexual, able-bodied, and well-educated.

Some other men may exert some measure of control over women in their family, but that is likely to be the most overt and semi-conscious expression of patriarchy in their lives. They often have no real understanding of the obstacles they do not face that women deal with on a continual basis — perhaps in part, because they face their own obstacles and challenges (and it’s a zero-sum system).

Patriarchy is a dynamic based in social stratification that includes not only gender, but race, sexuality, able-bodiedness, education, wealth, and other elements of class stratification. Things like police brutality are a manifestation of the dominance hierarchy aspects. So too is sexual harassment. It’s a way to remind women of their place, as well as a way to exert dominance. What it’s not is a binary where men rule and win in everything and women are always subject and lose. It’s a lot more complex than that.

Although we live in a culture where women are still expected to take their husband’s name in marriage and are often symbolically given by their fathers to their husbands in that ceremony, where more than 54% of Americans overtly believe that a man is the head of the household, and where women still do the vast majority of home, child, and elder-care work, patriarchy is about more than that. The whole system is bad for nearly everyone — although often in slightly different ways.

It’s not just about men, and it’s not all men’s fault. This social system is upheld and maintained by women in many ways as well. They still have vastly less societal and economic power, but there are plenty of ways that many women uphold and reinforce things like binary gender norms, social stratification, and ongoing comparison to everyone they interact with. It’s going to take us all doing better to start moving towards a social system that is less grounded in ruthlessness and domination, one that allows people to be more of who they naturally are, and where arbitrary things like race or gender are not associated with so many stereotypes and tacit roles.

We have the dominance hierarchy deeply embedded in our collective subconscious so we’ve got to make it conscious in order to challenge it. Understanding that a patriarchal culture is the problem — not men as individuals is an important start.

© Copyright Elle Beau 2022