The All-Gender Patriarchy Thread

Earlier this month cat started a thread about... well, I'll link to it here:

POLL: hey chaps why aren't any of you talking about the Gisele Pelicot rape trial

And I thought it was a good thread because it was about something that people who get seen as cishet men don't necessarily experience or understand the way people who aren't seen as cishet men often do. I didn't experience or understand patriarchy the same way I do now, back when I thought of myself as a cishet man. And this stuff does keep coming up, it is an ongoing concern, it's not limited to just what those men did to Gisele Pelicot, so I figured I'd try and start a rolling thread (all threads here are rolling these days, right?) to talk about this stuff in a context where cishet men are, like, explicitly welcome to listen and learn and hopefully _respectfully_ engage. The flip side of all this patriarchy shit becoming more and more blatant and horrifying is that my hope is people in general, but _particularly_ cishet guys that... it'll be easier for people to understand what patriarchy is, why it's A Problem, why it doesn't just affect women. All this stuff.

The impetus was that this video happened to show up in my YT sidebar this morning:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qZ0mHmCdu0

I'm kinda trying to move away from Youtube because Youtube is also, in my opinion, A Problem, but I mean, there are only certain contexts in which we can talk about things, right? And if those contexts are themselves patriarchal and heavily police the way people opposing patriarchy are allowed to express that opposition, well, I guess I radically accept that. What I like about ILX is that... as a message board it's not policed in the same ways that corporate for-profit social media is. That's rare on the internet in these days. (That doesn't mean I don't think it's not implicitly policed, for the record!)

If there was one thing I'd say about patriarchy, one thing that is most important for me to communicate, is that it's NOT PERSONAL. It's not a personal judgement on any individual person, it's not about being "good" or "bad". It applies to everyone, it affects everyone, including me. I'm not patriarchy-exempt, haha.

Anyway - welcome!

hey kate, thank you for starting it! i feel like i grew up so engulfed by patriarchy that it was the norm. my dad was ...*checks to see if this is on a private board, nope* ... a very interesting guy! and one of those interesting things was a rock solid belief in man, men, strong proud straight christian men, as the divinely appointed leader of society, from the highest levels all the way down to a father in a family in a small neighborhood by the prison where he worked as a guard. everything was decided by him, and it was understood and acknowledged and accepted (by my mother, too, and even to this day) and justified by scripture and "common sense". no every seventh day it was reenforced by the white evangelical church, a patriarchy evangelizing patriarchy to a patriarchy, where the free weekly thin print glossy magazine was something like 'pentecostal zionist' (i've never been able to remember the correct name or track down any online remnants of it - it was from the 1990s, like...the whole decade, at least, and into the 2000s).

i have been in a very anti-patriarchy kind of community of friends (the ones who still speak to me) for a long while, long enough that when i think about my upbringing i feel like i'm from (not trying to poke fun at older ilxors, which is almost everyone because i was born in 83) the 1950s or something, in black and white, an absurd understanding of "society" and a collective willingness to engage in a bullshit hoax of manliness and godliness and righteousness, and above all, keeping that power and being proud about how a man should want it, how a man should crave power and even more than that, how a man deserves the power. it's like looking on all that on a wooden-case tv, because the only people who act like that in my life are usually rolling coal as they drive by. they come and exhaust their horrible toxic bullshit but it's a drive-by because they know they're not welcome.

but it took me decades of alienation and real struggling to get me out of that world of patriarchal self-congratulatory bullshit, and on inauguration day of trump's second term, one where a dominating supermajority of white evangelicals voted for him and sealed his victory across the country, i'm not sure that i'm out of a bubble so much as in a new one. (at least this one doesn't smell like axe deodorant)

(also i guess this goes without saying, but i realize that patriarchy exists outside of the context of white evangelicals. i feel like godless violent drunks are the true primordial ancestors of patriarchy. but, just wanted to share that because i think it's very common, common enough to be the deciding factor in a national election that was a referendum on patriarchy)

hey kate, thank you for starting it! i feel like i grew up so engulfed by patriarchy that it was the norm.

i like the way you put that! for me, the thing about patriarchy is that it is fundamentally a _norm_, or a set of norms. like we got to this weird, fucked up place just by doing people what they thought was "normal". the problems caused by patriarchy have always been there, they just haven't always been this acute. to me that opens up possibilities in that there are these toxic norms that have become more and more intertwined, white supremacy, patriarchy, homophobia, imperialism, but there's that other thing that...

i mean shit, it's the christianity thing, isn't it?

your mention of the role of christianity in your experience of patriarchy is unfortunately not uncommon. i was raised roman catholic, which is a _very_ patriarchal religion. and i think that patriarchy causes problems. that's kinda hard for me to say because then one billion people get the impression that i'm picking a fight with them individually, which i'm not! christianity has had a very positive influence on me, it's kind of a fundamental part of my values. i've learned a lot of good things from christians, from catholics specifically. catholicism's institutional promotion of patriarchal norms causes problems, and has caused problems for a very, very long time. i'm genuinely not interested in picking a fight with pope francis, but he did say that i guess what advocating for trans rights "disfigures the face of man and woman". that's not necessarily widely known, but as far as i know that does, in fact, reflect beliefs. that kind of thing is sort of the elephant in the room for me, the way patriarchy is considered a fundamental norm not just within roman catholicism, but within institutional christianity as a whole.

if anything it makes me feel less like i'm in a bubble, because i do get a _lot_ of push-back for criticizing institutional christianity for its promotion of patriarchy, including within ilx. i do my best to be polite and respectful towards other people's beliefs... not talking about that aspect of patriachy, though, to me that makes it impossible to effectively oppose patriarchy :(