Patriarchy, Gun Violence, and the word "emasculate"
rethinking (and retiring) toxic social constructs
There are two kinds of people in America right now: those who see patriarchy as a problem and are actively working to dismantle it, and those who think (often rightly) that everyone in the first camp is judging them for being part of the problem. Say the word “patriarchy” and people tend to react strongly, often angrily. Based on those reactions it is easy to see which camp they fall into. Separating people into ideological categories like this, however, is itself a patriarchal symptom, because it automatically facilitates “us vs. them” kind of thinking, which is invariably “othering” and, therefore, violent. What I want to do here is talk about patriarchy in a new way. It is not a man vs. woman versus woman vs. man problem, it is a human problem. It hurts all of us. If we are to heal from patriarchy we must first learn to think about it differently. We must learn to think differently about ourselves and each other, about gender, about the ways in which we have been trained to interact, about the expectations placed on us at birth and the ways in which we have perpetuated the system by putting those same expectations on ourselves, each other, and our children. We must rethink literally everything about our lives. Healing is a long-term commitment at the individual level, societal healing is exponentially more so.
But is this truly necessary?
I have decided that it is. What follows (in probably at least three posts, so patience will be a virtue here) is an account of what I have learned over the course of the last two weeks (not long, I know, but it’s been intense) which has led me to this conclusion. Then you can decide for yourself.
what is patriarchy?
First: a long-overdue definition. But how to define something we have all grown up breathing like air? Philippe Leonard Fradet of The Body is Not an Apology online magazine, cites the Dictionary.com definition: “patriarchy (n.), Dictionary.com defines this primarily as a family, clan, or tribe that is ruled over by a father—or more generally a man—where his male children automatically take power through heirship.” It is the second part of the definition, however, that is most socially relevant: “a social system in which power is held by men, through cultural norms and customs that favor men and withhold opportunity from women.”1 This is, literally speaking, fairly accurate. However, it is not nearly nuanced enough to be valuable here. Miki Kashtan, Ph.D., co-founder of Bay Area Nonviolent Communication, in and article she wrote for Psychology Today, said she has bee trying for years to define patriarchy. Basically, it’s an all-encompassing system upon which the way of life of nearly every human on our planet is based, the fundamental components of which are separation and control. “The separation,” says Dr. Kashtan, “is from self, other, life, and nature.” She explains:
The fundamental structures we have created over these millennia are based on dominance and submission, and the worldview we have inherited justifies them as necessary to overcome both our basic nature and “Nature,” seen as separate from us. We pride self-control and frown on “emotionality”; we operate, organizationally, in command and control forms; we have been treating nature as a thing to exploit, use, subdue, and, most recently, convert to commodities for sale…We have become so habituated to this state of affairs that most of us don’t even see that it is our own creation.
As for the control, it is all too easy to pass patriarchy off as a system by which men control women. Certainly it has been, and still is being, used that way. It’s also much more complicated than that. Amanda Lindamood, a director of the DC Rape Crisis Center, says that patriarchy itself is, by nature, violent: and not just towards women. In an interview with writer Terri Coles of Huffpost Canada, she stated:
It's a myth that violence in a culture only affects those it specifically targets, and patriarchy is a form of cultural violence...When how you are allowed to engage in relationships, how you are able to relate to your body, and how you know to feel powerful is tied up in not feeling anything, you lose a lot of authenticity. You also lose your ability to have your emotional needs affirmed and met within your relationships, and lose out on developing those skills which are crucial to maintaining your relationships2.
This loss of relational skills is one way that patriarchy is harmful to men. There are many others. Coles’ Huffpost article and an article on The Body is Not an Apology outlined many ways that the patriarchy harms men: by reinforcing rigid gender norms; by encouraging toxic masculinity; by propagating a culture that makes it very difficult to move beyond harmful masculine stereotypes; by encouraging violence; by discouraging personal reflection for men; by assuming that competition with other men is good and normal; by making certainty an essential component of manhood, which results in static thinking and an inability to move beyond the status quo; because of the (largely not discussed) fact that patriarchy does not treat all men equally; by propagating rape culture and other forms of toxic masculinity that cause men to hurt themselves by allowing themselves to hurt others; and how, because men are human and just want to be seen, loved and valued the same way any of us do, all these harmful influences and expectations can lead to mental health problems.
As a matter of fact, patriarchy is systemic control of men and boys just as much as it is of girls. The control is just manifested in different ways. Said Dr. Kashtan:
Boys are brutalized in ways that girls are not in order to prepare them for positions of domination. As bell hooks says, “Learning to wear a mask (that word already embedded in the term ‘masculinity’) is the first lesson in patriarchal masculinity that a boy learns. 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.”3
Dr. Kashtan went one step farther by declaring, “I see this as the core source of violence: the physical, emotional, and spiritual brutalization of boys and men.” Violence it is producing, in spades; especially this year. As Will Bowen said, “Hurt people hurt people.”4
One of the things that make it difficult to speak about patriarchy, or any other system, to a mostly North American audience, is that the capacity to see systems as distinct from the individuals that live within and are affected by them has been systematically rooted out of most people’s awareness. Instead, everything is seen as an individual issue with only individual solutions.
Within this context, I want to speak to how I am affected by the idea in one of the comments that led me to write this piece. The writer urged me to embrace patriarchy as what it is; as a strategy that exists because it meets some needs; and then to support and encourage humans in growing and learning towards more healthy ways of living. When I read this I experienced a strong wave of fear and despair. This wave helped me focus my attention on what matters to me: I want to have so much more companionship and to mobilize with others to take on the task of thinking, speaking, and acting to transform the relations of dominance and submission and the separation, control, and scarcity that are at their root. In other words: I want togetherness in overcoming the legacy and effects of patriarchy, including all its offspring: capitalism, white supremacy, child trafficking, etc.
Yes, of course patriarchy, like everything else that humans have created, is a strategy designed to attend to needs. So is murder. Just because something, perhaps, meets some needs is no reason to embrace it; it’s the people I want to embrace, not the phenomenon of patriarchy as a system. Because I don’t see that patriarchy can be accommodated and lived with peacefully any more than cancer can. Like cancer, it spreads and metastasizes. Like cancer, it has no capacity to care for the healthy cells that want to continue to live and die in peace. Like cancer, it is ultimately unsustainable. Patriarchy will end. The only question is: will we all die with it, or will we manage to free ourselves soon enough that we can peacefully put patriarchy to death and return to the task of living interdependently with the rest of the magic on this planet?
Because this is simply too much to unpack in a single post, I’m going to focus here on just one aspect of these harmful repercussions, because I think it has had the largest societal impact in the last several months: violence as an aspect of the toxic masculine identity.
Lindamoor again:
In toxic masculinity we have rationalized and justified the use of control, violence and force to get your needs met, and we defend that rationality on a societal level...
We see it in our narratives about protection, about heroism, about nationality, about family values. We have tangled violence into our value systems, and then identified those value systems as inherently masculine.
This sounds eerily similar to the Reverend Sproul Jr.’s declaration about the male identity…and that was a modern-day pastor speaking. But it isn’t only women calling out the patriarchal system for it’s violence. One of many men to speak out, Jackson Katz, Ph.D., an American educator, filmmaker, author, and creator of the gender violence prevention and education program entitled 'Mentors in Violence Prevention', agrees with Lindamoor. As a guest on the Man Enough podcast hosted by Justin Baldoni, Liz Plank, and Jamey Heath, Jackson dove into the issue of gun violence and its relation to the American culture of male violence hard enough to make waves. One of the first statements he made on the episode “Is Gun Violence a Men’s Issue?” which aired on June 20th of this year, was a definitive yes to the question posed in the episode title: “I think the central factor in school shootings is gender.”5 Katz, who Baldoni describes as “a man’s man,” then went on to explain that what he means by gender being a central factor is that boys and young men are conditioned to violence through “cultural ideologies and beliefs about manhood that shape boys’ and men’s understandings of themselves as men and their relation to violence,” as well as their understanding of “violence as it’s connected to both the performance of manhood and the means by which men and young men are trained and taught to gain something or take back something that has been taken from them.” To be an American man, says Katz, is to be violent: that is the expectation. And the consequences of this cultural expectation is, and has been, devastating.
In support of his declaration that school shootings are essentially a gender issue, Katz proposed a thought experiment.
Imagine if 99% of school shootings were done by girls and young women. Would anybody be talking about mental illness, on the one side, or gun availability, on the other side, before talking about the fact that girls were the ones doing 99% of the shootings?
To which Justin Baldoni, the lead host of the podcast, immediately responded: “No, they would have removed the ability of women to buy guns. After, like, the second shooting women would have no rights to even buy a gun.”
“Exactly,” Katz replied.
And everybody would be talking about the fact that it was girls doing it, and it wouldn’t be, like, a second level analysis, it would be the first thing. People would say, “what is it about femininity, what is it about cultural ideas about girls and womanhood, what is it about the particular circumstances that girls and women find themselves in, that causes some of them—a small number, but some of them—to act out in this way.”
The reason that gender is not being connected to the gun violence issue—and Katz, who says that he has been “banging this drum since the ‘90s” assures us that it is not being talked about and never has rated more than a brief mention in twenty years of school shootings—is because “boys and men represent the dominant group,” and that very dominance renders the connection invisible. “If you represent the dominant group,” Katz explains, “you are, in a sense, representing the norm against which others measure themselves.” Men, says Katz, are not thought to have gender or gender issues because males are the “norm,” the control group, if you will. To link a phenomenon as horrific as gun violence to the gender group that we consider our human norm is simply too terrifying for most people to contemplate. So the problem goes unspoken, and continues to metastasize in silence.
According to Katz, talking about this issue is particularly difficult for men because you can be seen as a traitor to your own gender if you do. “Even those of us who wouldn’t in a million years commit a mass shooting nonetheless participate in a culture that helps to glorify and valorize violent masculinity,” to the extent that “violent American masculinity is nearly redundant.” Violent masculinity, and the gun as an implement of that violence, has become “so deeply interwoven in our cultural and historical narrative of America,” that to stop and examine our collective and individual “attitudes, beliefs and behaviors,” the ways in which we have contributed to a society in which first graders have mandatory active shooter drills and small children have to be instructed by their mothers to smear another kid’s blood on themselves and play dead if there’s a shooter on a rampage, is simply too much to even consider. It is so much easier to point to gun violence perpetrators (who almost all just happen to be men and boys) and pretend they are monsters, isolated and aberrant cautionary tales, or even sick and misbegotten accidents masquerading as humans until the moment they finally snapped, than it is to examine them in the light of a culture that has a deeply rooted and longstanding tradition of male violence. “Boys will be boys” we say fondly as they pummel each other, and girls, and especially gender nonconforming individuals, into submission. “Boys will be boys” we say as as we clean up the messes of bullying, sexual assault, explosive outbursts, destructive behaviors of all sorts. Then, when the boys start killing other children the narrative suddenly changes, and we say instead, “Oh my God, why are young people today so violent??? It must be the video games!” (Katz referred to a New York Times article published in the weeks after the Uvalde, Texas shooting that noted the shooter’s age in the headline and made the connection that it is young people doing the shootings. The perpetrator’s gender was only mentioned briefly in the body of the text.) And yet, if we are to heal as a society, we must be brave enough to face this.
Katz and Baldoni went on to note that activities such as wrestling and shooting guns (target practice) are not only for reaffirming one’s gender, they can just be fun. And not only for boys, either. I wrestled my brother routinely until he was big enough to actually beat me (at which point I decided wrestling “wasn’t ladylike”). The point here is not to make such activities be perceived as “bad” or “dangerous,” or for the aggressive energy itself, which is, unfortunately, most often associated with men and boys, be perceived that way (absolutely not!). The point is that we have a problem, a very dangerous and widespread problem, which is literally killing our children, and we need to address it. The answer, according to Katz, begins with having this conversation. We can agree or disagree, but we must talk about it, first and foremost. And then, he says, it is up to grown men to model and normalize behaviors like introspection and emotional vulnerability, and create safe spaces within which boys and young men can engage with them in learning these vital skills. Since I am not a man I can’t do this (a grateful shout-out here to all you courageous men who are, you make this world a better, safer place for all of us), but I can stop having a “boys will be boys” attitude (even though I never use the phrase itself because my husband, who is just about the least angry person I know, reacts immediately whenever he hears it). I can stop expecting girls to sit more quietly than boys. I can stop expecting that only girls are supposed to cry when they are hurt, or even to cry out of love or joy. I can create an atmosphere within my marriage that is safe for my husband to share his feelings, and I can stop being surprised that he has feelings. I can stop putting people into either the “male” bucket or the “female” bucket, which are always filled with enough expectations and assumptions to drown in, and start seeing people as individuals on a spectrum—no assumptions, no expectations, just human beings. These things I can do to help us all heal.
Space to heal is what we all need, because life, and the systems within which our culture operates, have hurt all of us. Towards the end of the podcast episode, Justin Baldoni shared some of his own pain. “I was bullied as a boy…so I became a bully,” he admitted, and there was a pause in which I could just make out a tear-damp in-drawn breath. The thing about masculinity, he said, is that there is this idea that it can be lost, it can be taken away. From the age of four, Baldoni felt like he was constantly defending his maleness. If you’re a boy, he said, the worst thing you can be called is a girl, or gay. That’s the worst insult possible. So you learn to kind of hate girls (even though you’re supposed to “like” them). You learn to hate gays. It makes sense, tragically. If to be male is to have power, it goes without saying that the fear of having that power taken away, of losing it, could be a very real—if only subconscious—fear for boys and men. Perhaps that is why emasculation has no feminine counterpart in the English language. Defeminize is the closest, but even that denotes only the loss of characteristics and not the loss of identity which is contained within the meaning of emasculate. None of this had I ever considered before, because, of course, it is outside of my realm of experience as a woman. If you are reading this and you disagree, please take a moment and leave a comment. I would like to open up this conversation. It’s time.
And if you’re a man and you have been hurt by patriarchy in any way, know that you are not alone. Writes hip-hop artist, Jordan Stephens, in The Guardian:
It’s our responsibility as we become adults to acknowledge this pain and gain compassion for ourselves and acceptance of others…Accepting the patriarchy from a place of false benefit will prevent you from ever truly loving yourself or understanding others. It's OK to feel sad. It's OK to cry. It's OK to have loved your mum and dad growing up. It's OK to have missed them or wanted more affection. It's OK to take a moment when you're reminded of these truths. When you allow your brain to access these emotions, it knows exactly what to do. So nurture yourself. Talk honestly to the people around you, and welcome the notion of understanding them more than you have ever done before.
Let’s talk, and heal, together.
Let’s start now.
Fradet, Philippe Leonard. The Body is Not an Apology. “Because America: 5 Must Have Facts on Sexism and Patriarchy 101.” December 4, 2017. https://thebodyisnotanapology.com/magazine/because-america-5-must-have-facts-on-sexism-and-patriarchy-101/. Accessed: September 19, 2022.
Coles, Terri. Huffpost. “How the Patriarchy Harms Men and Boys, Too.” November 10, 2017. https://www.huffpost.com/archive/ca/entry/patriarchy-men-boys_a_23273251. Accessed: September 17, 2022.
Kashtan, Miki. “Why Patriarchy is Not About Men.” Psychology Today. August 4, 2017. Who quotes: hooks, bell. The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. United States, Simon and Schuster, 2004. Accessed: September 23, 2022. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/acquired-spontaneity/201708/why-patriarchy-is-not-about-men
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/230715-hurt-people-hurt-people-we-are-not-being-judgmental-by
Baldoni, Justin; Liz Plank; and Jamey Heath, hosts. “Is Gun Violence a Men’s Issue?”. Man Enough, episode 50, Wayfarer Studios, 20 June 2022.