I’d like to pose a question to the thread about how you believe that patriarchy perpetuates itself. By this, I mean how patriarchy continues from one generation to the next. I believe that Patriarchy is in some ways an emergent cultural phenomenon. It see to me to be a whole that is larger than the sum of its parts that only fully manifests when looking at very large groups of people, on the scale of cultures and societies. One might see aspects or effects of it by looking at individuals or small groups, but there are certain aspects that don’t appear until looking at large populations.
The specific reason for this view is that it can explain why even a man that was never explicitly taught misogynistic views, might still internalize them anyway.
For instance, you may have seen this quote from Marilyn Frye’s
The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory
To say that straight men are heterosexual is only to say that they engage in sex (fucking exclusively with the other sex, i.e., women). All or almost all of that which pertains to love, most straight men reserve exclusively for other men. The people whom they admire, respect, adore, revere, honor, whom they imitate, idolize, and form profound attachments to, whom they are willing to teach and from whom they are willing to learn, and whose respect, admiration, recognition, honor, reverence and love they desire… those are, overwhelmingly, other men. In their relations with women, what passes for respect is kindness, generosity or paternalism; what passes for honor is removal to the pedestal. From women they want devotion, service and sex.
Heterosexual male culture is homoerotic; it is man-loving.
To me, this quote is actually far less useful or explanatory as it might at first appear.
I think that this quote is accurate when describing observed behavior “The people whom they…other men” but fails horribly when Frye frames this as a statement of some immutable nature of straight male culture. When critically examined, the quote makes no attempt to explain why the pattern observed is, but instead simply states that it is.
I recently thought of why men behave in the manner described by Frye, and I came to the conclusion that one possible (even likely) explanation is that boys are
also raised in a patriarchal culture that influences them on a subconscious level against their will. To provide an example that might explain the phenomenon stated in Frye’s quote, one could look at children’s media. How often in media for children, especially that which is aimed at boys in particular, are female role models, women and girls that are shown as being revered, respected, admired, etc. by male characters, depicted? How often are boys and girls portrayed as anything other than romantic interests for one another? Not very often. In fact it usually bares special mention. This might seem somewhat inconsequential, but it plants the seeds of patriarchy in children’s minds in the form of assumptions, and because the adults in their lives are often also oblivious to this, these misogynistic assumptions are never challenged until far later, if at all.
This is not an attempt to say “Patriarchy hurts men too!” Rather, it is to say that when looking at something as omnipresent as patriarchy, perhaps it is insufficient to consider it as
just a system of oppression, a tool used to extract resources (sex, labor, etc.) from women. To view it as something that the oppressor has complete conscious control over. Rather, Patriarchy has, in a way, become a memetic force of its own, that acts unconsciously to perpetuate itself.
When one fails to consider ways in which patriarchy effects men, it becomes easy to miss ways in which it might be fought against.
