Introduction
My great grandmother Bessie used to stick her hand in the oven to know when it was hot enough for any given recipe.
My uncle told me this and other stories about her as we baked pastries in his 1800s townhouse in Baltimore. They were close when he was growing up. He adored her.
He also hated the patriarchy. Still does. And, she’s part of the reason why.
My great grandmother was born sometime around 1905 and was part of the Greatest Generation… but, that generation wasn’t especially great to her.
(I apologize for the pun).
Her husband beat her and the children, so she got a divorce, which was very much not something a woman was supposed to do at the time. (And you’ll notice men are still complaining about it today).
She was tough as nails, but had a nervous breakdown when my grandfather was eight.
Life for a single mother at the time was especially brutal.
Someone asked me today how I can trust people from the patriarchy in a message hilariously titled: “Trusting A Stranger? A Stranger from the Patriarchy? What Could Go Wrong?”
It’s a good question.
The patriarchy has historically been cruel to women. It’s been cruel to men, as well… just in different ways.
I’ll tell you the answer I gave him in a minute, but first, I wanted to talk about why that question was so valid.
The patriarchy can be terrifying.
If we’re going to talk about how men and women are different, I feel like it’s fair to bring up the fact that men, stereotypically, are less empathetic than women.
It’s scary to entrust yourself to anyone, but especially to someone who is less empathetic than you are.
Empathy is what keeps us from doing bad shit to other people when nobody’s looking.
If men are less empathetic and in a position of power over us, women, what’s to stop very bad things from happening to us?
I don’t know exactly what my great grandmother Bessie went through in her life.
We always lived very far away from each other, and she was nearly deaf by the time I was born.
But I do know this: change is hard.
There are reasons change is hard. As humans, we learn from an early age how to survive in our environment. When that environment changes, all the skills we built to navigate it go out the window.
We feel like our time and energy were wasted.
We have to start over.
It’s no wonder that every progression is met with resistance.
The change, itself, is hard, and the resistance to it is even harder.
You become demonized. You’re hated. People become increasingly aggressive towards you as their old ways are threatened.
And yet, women endured it to change the world.
Why?
…because the alternative was worse.
For every bad thing you can say about the modern world, there’s a reason people made the effort to make it different from the way it was.
This doesn’t just apply to feminism.
Hate GMOs?
They saved us during the Great Depression.
Hate vaccines?
I bet you’d hate polio more.
Change is hard.
We don’t do it just to fuck around.
In this lesson, we’re going to talk about why women wanted to leave the patriarchy behind in the first place.
Unpaid labor is stressful.
All labor is stressful, but when you go into work, at least you get a paycheck out of it.
That paycheck gives you certain freedoms.
You have the freedom to eat more of what you want. You have the freedom to buy the little knick-knacks that make life more fun. You have the freedom to do more activities that bring you joy.
You have the freedom to leave, if you need to.
Baking bread, washing floors, and folding laundry doesn’t give you that freedom.
But it still takes work.
It takes time… time you will never be compensated for. Time that doesn’t contribute to your 401k. Time that won’t help you escape if the situation turns toxic.
So, you get the stress of doing the work and the stress of not having your own money.
Staying home is lonely.
I’m a solitary being, but even I go a little insane working at home all day… which is fine, if that’s your choice.
But, shaming another human into staying in the home because it aligns with your values is cruelty.
Compound this with them not having their own money to go out with their friends if that’s what they need, and it’s no wonder that women in the old days “took to their bed” for weeks, months, or even years.
They were losing their minds and we all knew it.
It’s not like the modern world invented depression, we just called it by other names.
Again, the change to feminism was painful. We didn’t do it for no reason.
Children are maddening.
I mean… not to everybody.
Some people really enjoy children, and that’s a good thing.
I don’t.
It’s not that I hate kids, but I can only deal with them in short bursts.
I just want to make it clear, if I haven’t already, that I am, in fact, a woman.
And I probably would’ve gone absolutely mad in a by-gone era where I had to stay home with the children all day.
I know it’s dark, but women losing it and murdering their children was a thing. I guess it still is. It’s not good.
Some women aren’t meant to be caretakers.
There is no volume of “alpha-male” podcasts or TradWife TikToks that will ever change this basic fact.
Keep in mind: feminism isn’t saying no woman should stay home and take care of the children… we’re just saying it shouldn’t be forced on every woman.
Historically, the patriarchy has been outright disrespectful to femininity.
This is going to be something that’s hard to explain to Gen Z.
Men used to be super disrespectful towards anything effeminate.
I don’t just mean they wouldn’t do it themselves… I mean that they would berate literally anything that became associated with women.
Doing your make-up was vain and a waste of time.
Cleaning the house was unimportant.
Getting together for arts and crafts was frivolous.
Cooing over babies was obnoxious.
Feminism never drove me away from wanting to be feminine when I was younger.
The men in my life did.
Thousands of choices for men.
One for women.
When you’re choosing a career, you have all kinds of choices.
You have the opportunity to chase whatever has meaning for you.
The options are endless.
Want to be a photographer? Excellent.
Graphic designer? Go for it.
Business magnate? The world is your oyster.
But for women under the thumb of patriarchy? Screw you and your ideas.
You can be a mother or a mother.
Honestly, the men berating women for wanting to go out and do other things are vicious.
Why can’t we have variety? Variety is nice.
Patriarchal ideas are often outright untrue.
A long time ago, I was dating a man who was alarmingly serious about The Red Pill.
He tried to re-educate me.
After many failed attempts, he told me one day that we were both going to take a logic test and afterwards I would understand why he needed to be in charge of our household and I needed to listen to him.
We both took the test.
I scored 100%.
He got 80-something percent.
He was furious. He told me that men on average were more logical, and he’s a man, so he needs to steer the ship.
It didn’t matter if I, personally, was more the more logical between us.
In a patriarchal situation, the truth of the humans involved get erased for convenience.
The patriarchy is biased which… duh. But also…
Most people don’t know what actual logic is.
I mean that.
What most people think is “logic” is really “what sounds reasonable to me.”
Logic, itself, is a systematic process with rules and structure.
But.
If you don’t understand that…
You’re going to think anyone who defies what you, personally, find sensible is being illogical.
This is a messy situation under normal conditions.
But it gets worse.
If you’re operating under the assumption that “men are more logical,” then anything that men do is going to become associated with logic, whether that’s true or not.
It creates a circular fallacy, and that’s… you know. The opposite of logic.
Believing things that aren’t true is dangerous.
Imagine that someone convinced you that arsenic was the key to a long and healthy life.
That’s bad enough.
But, what if that made you decide to put a gallon of arsenic into the town well?
Now you’d be poisoning everybody.
This is what happens when you say that one gender is always right and the other is always wrong.
It’s not true and you’re going to get everyone killed.
Men are sometimes wrong.
Women are sometimes right.
If we can’t accept this basic truth, we’ll be forced to believe any psychotic thing to come from an unwell man’s mouth and reject anything from a sound woman.
That… is not good.
The patriarchy has damaged men.
I love my dad to pieces, but I have never once in my entire life heard him apologize for anything.
Ever.
I’ve seen him be empathetic. I’ve seen him change his behavior. I’ve seen him try harder.
But I’ve never seen him apologize.
He considers it a weakness.
This is something I’ve heard from countless men in our community - the pressure to never show a fragment of weakness at any time.
Human beings have their weak moments. Hiding the truth of your existence and what you’re going through will shred your psyche.
Is it any wonder that men’s mental health is suffering?
Do we really want to keep doing this?
We can all have better lives, but we need to change the way things are to get there.
So, if the patriarchy is so terrible, why lean into it?
…because our patriarchy isn’t real.
I know a lot of you want it to be real, but it can’t be. I will literally die before going back.
That’s how bad the old, real patriarchy is.
Ours is a game.
…because it’s fun.
…because it’s sexy.
Seeing men in charge gets a lot of women going.
And men like it.
We’re all having fun.
And.
Ours is nicer.
Ours is built on empathy. It’s built on giving a damn. It’s build on leadership rather than bossing people around.
That’s what we’re all going to learn in this course… how to have the fun patriarchy.
Understanding why women are afraid of the patriarchy will make you a better leader.
I want to thank all my male readers who have made it this far.
Really.
Thank you for reading this.
Thank you for taking the time to better understand why women are afraid of the thing that the men in this community desire.
That’s probably you.
You probably desire a form of patriarchy in your relationship.
And you’ve made it all the way through this article about why it’s bad.
Good on you.
Genuinely.
Knowing our fears will make you a better leader.
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