Photo courtesy of IPS
What is patriarchy? According to Wikipedia “Patriarchy is a social system in which men typically hold authority and responsibility. In anthropology, it refers to a family or clan structure where the father or eldest male holds supremacy within the family, while in feminist theory, it encompasses a broader social structure where men collectively dominate societal norms and institutions.” You may or may not agree with this particular definition but even if you look elsewhere, the definitions are largely similar: Men dominate women. Men are superior to women.
But is this patriarchy a dominance or is it a hegemony? Domination uses coercion while a hegemony is based on consent. If you answer dominance wondering “what woman consents to patriarchy?” you could be forgiven but you would still be wrong.
This is not to say that there is no coercion. For example, the physical and sexual violence perpetrated against women are coercions that uphold patriarchy, as are legal sanctions such as the restriction in Sri Lanka on women purchasing alcohol. But it cannot be understood only in terms of coercion.
Nor can it be understood simply as men=perpetrators and women=victims. The framing of patriarchy as men dominating women actually makes it harder to dismantle it. The problem with simplified views is partly that it ignores intersections, for example, how a woman from a high social class has power over a man from a low social class or how a woman who is white has more power than a man who is black or brown, which we see not only in white countries but also brown countries and black countries. Of course this is not in terms of physical power but by being condescending (“these are such uneducated third class people, no?”) or discriminatory (servants’ entrances, servants’ toilets) or by demanding respect (being addressed as “madam”). When men are subalterns in one vector – social class, race/ethnicity, citizenship, caste and language – then the most accessible way to assert their dominance, to be seen as real men is to resort to physical power – assault and rape. In this context, even being convicted and jailed is not a deterrent; it just demonstrates the commitment to be a real man and the greater the punishment, the greater the commitment it calls for.
But even in the absence of intersections, we need to see how men are also victims and women are also perpetrators.
Men as victims of patriarchy
We are presented with a binary world; there are men and there are women. We have gendered clothes, gendered toys, gendered honorifics and even names are coded for gender. By seeing the name in print even before meeting the person we know the gender. If you are a Sri Lankan Samantha you would have experienced how this fails when you encounter foreigners who have presumed you to be female.
And then we have a set of human behaviours that are also categorised by gender. To be caring or sensitive is seen as feminine, to be brave and stoic is seen as masculine. It’s almost as if we actually want a world that has men who are uncaring and insensitive and society (men and women collectively) conditions us (men and women individually) to conform to the behaviours expected of the gender assigned to us. For example, I learned very early that real men do not cry. In nearly four decades of adolescence and adulthood I have only cried in public once and even that was in a space filled with people I had grown to trust.
When we disconnect men from a set of human behaviours arbitrarily labelled feminine, we disconnect them from those aspects of their humanity. Men suffer in a patriarchy firstly by being denied our full expression of humanity in order to be seen and accepted as real men. Then we suffer with the consequences of that on our mental and emotional wellbeing and people close to us suffer because we are insensitive and uncaring sons, brothers, husbands and fathers. They suffer when the only acceptable ways to release the strain between who we are as human beings and who we are supposed to show up as are all harmful. We can be neglectful towards our loved ones (a father is allowed to be too busy for his family, a woman, not, which is why successful men are never asked how they balance their work and family), we can be violent (why women are taught to not anger their partners) or we can find release in chemicals (tobacco, alcohol and other options).
Barring a few progressive countries, we deny fathers paternal leave because it isn’t considered important for fathers to bond with their children and then we wonder why fathers are distant and unattached. Even in the jurisdictions that do offer paternal leave, I suspect the motivations are either economic where the mother earns more than the father or perhaps child-centric, recognising that the child needs to bond with the father, rather than recognising that a father has a human need to bond with his child.
So we call antenatal clinics maternity clinics, schedule them at times when men cannot get leave from work and then wring our hands when men don’t show up for them.
Women as perpetrators in patriarchy
Some months ago my wife and I were in a bus where she was repeatedly touched inappropriately by the man seated behind her. We had a full blown argument with him about it and guess who came to his defense? Another woman. All the other passengers had acquired selective deafness.
This pacifying role is expected of women because they know that if they don’t pacify, things can get ugly in the short term. But it also ensures that the problem endures because they are essentially asking the victim of violence to ignore it, to suck it up and soldier on. After all, that resilience in the face of suffering is part of what it means to be a real woman.
A hegemony can only exist when people oppressed by it, both women and men but they experience it differently even within the same gender, consent to the oppression. It is not genuine, informed consent but manufactured consent. One of the most successful ways of manufacturing consent is to glorify martyrdom – how motherhood (the good mother) is glorified as the pinnacle of a woman’s life, her raison d’etre. “Mother knows best” relegates a father to a helper role by denying him a voice as a parent and then we men are accused of only helping when asked, leaving the mother to carry the mental load of being the default parent. There is no evidence for the claim of mother knows best. The honest version of this claim is that patriarchy demands that mothers carry the responsibility of childcare by inflating her competence for the role and undermining the father’s.
It is largely the role of the good mother to educate her children on what good girls do – how they should sit (feet together, even if there are wearing pants), how they should dress (modestly), how they should speak (with deference towards men) and so on. Ostensibly this is to protect girls but if we assert that good girls deserve to be safe, the flip side of the coin is the condemnation of bad girls to be unsafe because they were “asking for it”. This is victim blaming in advance, leaving victims of gender based violence wondering what they could have done to avoid becoming victims.
It’s not only girls who hear this; boys here this advice too and they start judging who are the good girls and who are the bad girls. Once we go down that path it’s easy to make any girl out to be a bad girl, that she was, indeed “asking for it”. In the 2012 rape and murder of Nirbhaya in New Delhi, one of the justifications was that she shouldn’t have been out at that time.
What next?
We need to remember that violence is not only physical. It’s also structural like lower wages for the same work and greater barriers for political representation. It’s epistemological in how we have very strict codes of behaviour for women but boys are excused as “boys will be boys”. All of these are interconnected. It isn’t possible to only address one aspect without addressing the rest. And if we want men to truly be allies, it is not good enough to appeal to “what if this was your sister/wife/mother?”. We must recognise the ways in which patriarchy hurts men as well as the ways in which women are complicit in upholding it. As long as it is framed as men perpetrators evil vs women victims innocent we can never unravel patriarchy.