Men! Patriarchy is Bad For Your Mental Health.

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Men.

I can’t make sense of you.

I sense this is mutual.

For a long time, I gave men more power than they deserved. Men were the authority, and women didn’t stand up to them. I was raised in a patriarchal country, in a patriarchal household, and I’m guessing you might have been, too.

As a child, I learned that being pretty was important. Wearing dresses made you pretty, and I hated dresses. I liked my Puma sneakers, my tube socks, tan corduroy pants, and my Babar T-shirts. I liked climbing trees, riding my Big Wheel, playing sports with boys, and making my family laugh. My way was boyish, and the outside world discouraged it.

Farrah Fawcett, Olivia Newton-John, and Maureen McCormick (Marcia Brady) were whom I was supposed to admire, but they were not my models. I related to the boys in movies until I discovered Tatum O’Neal, Kristy McNicol, and Jodie Foster, who felt more like me.

But as I grew, and my female friends began performing “femininity” so that the male objects of their affection would want to dote on them, I felt lost. Boys didn’t scare me, but men did. As a young girl, men had only taken advantage of me, so I downplayed my femininity.

I knew I was “supposed” to perform femininity for boys and men, but femininity itself scared me. I hid my gender and any appearance of sexuality by wearing boys' clothing and short hair until high school. I was afraid of my body because I had grown afraid of men.

When #Metoo hit, I began to ask myself questions I hadn’t considered before, like: Why do I give men more power than they deserve?

This entire charade of playing into men’s fantasies so they feel powerful plays into the patriarchy.

Patriarchy, the system upon which America is based, is one where men hold power over women.

Needless to say, patriarchy is bad for women.

Americans live in a world where the status quo means white, and power means male and masculinity has historically caused—and continues to cause—trauma and crisis.

As I reflected on how men mistreated me since childhood, I saw them as harmful and hateful. I generalized and globalized my feelings that ALL MEN were terrible, and in doing so, I felt myself gain a sense of power.

Fast forward to a few months ago, when I bought a copy of The Will to Change, by black feminist icon bell hooks, at a stoop sale in Brooklyn. The Will to Change interrogates patriarchal culture. I assumed it would clarify my thoughts and help me articulate my simple mantra: Men are awful.

But it did something else—it helped me understand that the patriarchy isn’t just bad for women; it’s also bad for men. And it’s not just men who need to change. So do women.

Now, before I go further, I want to say that while this book helped me reframe some things, it is also short-sighted, centers on cis-hetero relationships, and lacks citations and tools for actual change. But the focus here is on patriarchy and its harm to men. So, that will be the focus here.

Patriarchy is everywhere: It’s in the toy store, where dolls are marketed to girls and cars and trucks are to boys; clothing departments segregate blue clothes to boys and pink to girls. It’s in cartoons and movies, magazines, video games, and at home.

It’s hard to find its absence.

Patriarchal structures are so deeply embedded that movements have sprung up to push back. Radical feminism, for instance, challenges existing norms and institutions to disrupt the status quo and abolish patriarchy to liberate women and girls.

THE WILL TO CHANGE

bell hooks, who died in December 2021 at 69 years old, was a radical feminist, and she preached radical love. Abolishing patriarchy, she argued, wasn’t just to save women; it was also to save men.

In her book The Will to Change, hooks argued that many women seek love from men they will never get, and in trying to gain it, they often inadvertently reinforce the patriarchal standards that keep men from loving the way we want and need them to. It’s a Catch-22 that cannot be escaped until we abolish the patriarchy.

The media portrays masculinity as virulent, dominating, and aggressive. Boys are shaped and informed by these fictional models of maleness and are mocked when they reveal or expose more emotional attributes, considered feminine and weak.

Male attributes such as aggression and violence are glorified, and female attributes like love and care are considered shameful.

In heterosexual relationships, women often bemoan their male partner’s inability to offer emotional depth or be tender. Women are emotionally starved for male love. They hunger for a mutuality that is lacking.

These women may tell men what they want, but men have no role models to mold themselves to become the kind of man their woman describes. All they see is the violence and abuse that will dog them should they adopt the attributes their partner desires.

Making matters worse, hooks said, is that when men do express the more tender parts of themselves, many women get spooked and worry that their man has lost his masculinity.

Getting spooked in this way reflects the indoctrination of patriarchal culture. Women want more. But when it’s offered, patriarchy keeps them from knowing how to embrace men who behave in traditionally feminine ways.

Patriarchy is keeping us all stuck.

Hooks explains that it’s not that men don’t want to change—they are going at it alone, and they’re afraid. Because there simply is no roadmap for them to follow.

Yet men cannot know love without accessing their deeply buried feelings.

The only way that men can change is if society changes. If the media portrayed and idealized men who are softer, who work to locate their emotional truth, and who freely give and accept love, our culture could shift and begin to heal men and women.

Many men and women want to be healed by love, but they both tend to close off a part of themselves when disappointed or afraid. In this way, women often settle and overvalue whatever positive attention they get from men, no matter how insignificant. They learn to pretend that what’s being offered is love. They live a lie.

Young girls, desperate for their father's love, will accept any attention just to feel acknowledged, even if that attention is punitive… In this way, young girls are socialized to return repeatedly to their abuser to access the love they cannot get.

We try to love more so they will give us what we need. Patriarchy doesn’t care about male or female happiness. Patriarchy concerns itself only with power—and that power being wielded by men while subordinating women. It preaches stoicism and that feeling less makes one more manly. Should they feel hurt or emotional, they must suppress those emotions, cut them off like onion ends, and hope they go away.

The one emotion that patriarchy values when expressed by men is anger.

This keeps women in fear and men from expressing their other true emotions.

We are bombarded by news about male violence but never about men and love. Instead of loving maleness for what it wants to be, we reward men when they live up to sexist-defined notions of maleness.

PATRIARCHY

Patriarchy hurts everyone’s lives. It supports and promotes sexist violence. So long as we’re in collective denial about its impacts on us all, we cannot dismantle the system.

Traditional gender role norms are a system of patriarchy, yet in everyday speech, we call it “sexism” or “male chauvinism,” this is a type of silence that gives rise to denial and allows patriarchy to continue to dominate.

We cannot challenge a system we cannot name.

hooks often told readers that if she were to go door to door asking people if we should end male violence against women, most people would say yes. But if she explained that the only way to stop male violence against women meant eradicating patriarchy, most likely, they would hesitate or change their position. Patriarchy remains intact because many people believe it holds things together.

It does not.

Patriarchy creates damage and suffering and imprisons men in a system that denies them their full humanity. hooks believed, as I do, that we cannot begin to address male pain until we abolish the patriarchy.

Feminism did not create violence against women. That existed well before feminism as a movement began.

hooks wrote that “the crisis facing men is not the crisis of masculinity, it is the crisis of patriarchal masculinity. Until we clarify this distinction, men will continue to fear that any critique of patriarchy represents a threat.”

BOYHOOD

It’s vital to promote emotional health to boys when they are young and to push back against influences that encourage parents to devalue their emotional development.

But it must happen from the culture as well as from the home. Otherwise, we raise boys who live double lives. They are comfortable expressing themselves at home, but they are encouraged to perform patriarchal masculinity out in the world.

When we teach boys that “real men” don’t cry or feel things deeply, how can we expect them to feel comfortable expressing their feelings?

We isolate boys when we don’t give boys a blueprint for feeling.

And rage comes in response to this isolation and the culture’s demand that boys repress their emotions.

Because boys have no models for grief, but they have many models for anger, their response to feeling isolated and society’s demand that they repress their emotions turns into rage.

Just like their female counterparts, boys long for connection with their parents. When we turn boys into men too early with roles like “man of the house,” we force them into a position they’re not ready for while denying them the maternal care of a mother. When we force little boys to believe they must protect their mothers, who then protects them? This recasting of roles causes emotional injury.

When that connection is denied or shut down, boys feel emotionally abandoned and must cut themselves off from their emotional life to survive in society. This disconnection from their parents causes grief that must be suppressed.

And suppression and repression lead to depression, and suppressed depression leads to rage. With boys who are socialized to act out their rage, we see violence. Only then do people begin to pay attention to the problems of men and boys.

The violence that boys and men fall prey to began as an act of violence against them. By demanding they cut ties with their emotional life, we murder their spirit and a true sense of themselves.

If we care about the emotional well-being of boys, then we must create the spaces and subcultures for boys and men to flourish, to become rich with emotion and love, without being pressured to conform to the patriarchal vision of masculinity.

RESOURCES FOR MEN ARE AT THE END OF THIS POST.

Have you read this book? What did you think, and do you agree that Patriarchy is harmful? Let me know in the comments!

Until next week, I remain…

Amanda

About me: I am an author and a mental health advocate. I’ve published 13 books, most recently Little Panic: Dispatches From An Anxious Life. I sit on the advisory board of Bring Change to Mind and live in Brooklyn with my dog, Busy.

RESOURCES FOR MEN interested in learning more about emotional masculinity: