Patriarchy is bad for men and boys, too.
Patriarchy is bad for men and boys, too.
A reminder that despite what Trad Dads to JD Vance want us to think, patriarchal Christian Nationalism is anti-men.
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I grew up in a traditional Mormon neighborhood where pretty much every woman that I knew stayed at home with the kids, and every dad was at work all day.
The men in our religious community held all the authority—they held forth from the pulpit on Sunday, and they held all of the leadership positions since in the Mormon church only men are able to hold positions with decision-making power.
(I would also come to learn that the men held all of the economic power, but that would only become clear to me later when women in our community who divorced disappeared from our comfortable tree-lined neighborhood and, along with their children, fell into various configurations of economic precarity or hardship).
Yet, growing up a girl child in a highly patriarchal community didn’t make me want to be a man—in fact, I felt kind of bad for the men that I grew up with.
All the women and children on my street knew each other. As kids, we roamed around the neighborhood to the house up the street where the fridge was always stocked with Creamies popsicles from Costco, to the one down the street whose trampoline was the bounciest. The moms knew our names and we knew theirs, and to this day I could probably tell you each one’s first name, what make of car they drove (Chevy Suburban or Dodge Caravan minivan) and whether they stocked the good snacks like Cheez-its or gross ones like dried fruit leather. Because we were always in and out of each other’s homes, underfoot, in each other’s cars and kitchens.
The women and children were the community. And being in the community—being known—felt good.
The men were not the community, exactly. The men were like satellites that circled around it and pulled into driveways alone at night, sometimes late after dinner. I did not know their names or the timbre of their voices. They were simply “Brooke’s dad” or “Chris’s dad” and were passively judged on a scale from scary and strict, to less so, to invisible. They were mostly semi-strangers in our rich lives of play and homework and after-school soccer dramas.
My perception as a child was that it was the men’s job to fund the community and the cozy life that we had. Men were the workers who made it possible. No wonder we let them run everything at church and have their moment! After Sunday, they would disappear again into their drone lives.
I think about this when I hear the stats about how American men are struggling. Men are now nearly four times more likely to die by suicide than women. Between 2020 and 2021, data show an 8% uptick in suicides for young men of ages 15-24, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. One in 10 men experiences anxiety and depression, and only half will receive treatment for it. Nearly 15% of men under the age of 30 say they don’t have a close friend, an increase from 3% in 1990, according to 2021 data from AEI’s Center on American Life.
These numbers are heartbreaking, and part of me feels like because I grew up in one of the more patriarchal subcultures in America, I intuited on some level from a young age that patriarchy was not always so great for guys. Even though I didn’t fully comprehend the impacts of strict gender roles and inequity, even my child’s eye observations helped me sense that although these systems gave men forms of power and control it didn’t necessarily make their lives enviable or even good.
And America as a whole is not that different from the patriarchal Mormon subculture that I grew up in. Even though American men are not thriving, they still hold the vast majority of power in our culture. To wit:
Men still hold 71% of the seats in Congress and 75% of the Senate.
A stunning 94.8% of Supreme Court justices have been men (110 out of 116). All Supreme Court justices were males until 1981 when Reagan appointed Sandra Day O’Connor. (1981!! And am I the only one shocked to learn that RBG was the second one ever??)
Men run 90.5% of Fortune 500 companies. Men hold just under 70% of wealth in the U.S. Men comprise 83% of the leadership of the largest international media corporations.
Men hold 100% of the Executive Branch power in this country to this day (but maybe—please ye gods— not for much longer?!).
And this is to say nothing of state legislatures, lower courts, partners of law firms, boards of directors, church leadership, hospital administrators and university presidents and on and on. And let’s not forget that women still earn 16% less than men on average, with women of color making just 56 cents for every dollar that white men make in rural areas.
Men hold so, so much power in our patriarchal culture. And yet they are not thriving within patriarchy.
Why should this be? When I think about the toll that patriarchy takes on men, I often think of sociologist Michael Kimmel’s work on the corrosive effects of American masculinity. One easy answer could be, “wealth and power are not everything!” but they are not nothing, either and Kimmel argues that it’s a lot deeper than that.
Kimmel writes that the modern American construction of masculinity is one that is impossible for the vast majority of men to live up to,1 much like beauty standards are constructed for women so that everyone is set up to fail and feel inadequate. “We have constructed the rules of manhood so that only the tiniest fraction of men can meet them,” he writes, and the result is that men feel constantly insecure.
American masculinity is constituted not so much by what it is, but what it is not. It’s a construct that is defined by excluding “others,” Kimmel says, the “other” being foremost women and homosexuals, and also nonwhite men, nonnative born men, and men who are not wealthy. “It’s a tragic tale of striving to live up to impossible ideals of success, leading to chronic terrors of emasculation and emotional emptiness.”
He continues describing boyhood and manhood thusly:
“We are under the constant careful scrutiny of other men. Other men watch us, rank us, grant our acceptance into the realm of manhood. Manhood is demonstrated for other men’s approval…our real fear is of being ashamed or humiliated in front of other men, or being dominated by stronger men. We are afraid of other men.
Failure to embody the rules [of manhood] is a source of men’s confusion and pain..it is unrealizable for any man. But we keep trying, vainly, to measure up. American masculinity is a relentless test.”
Which sounds pretty brutal, and helps explain some of the isolation, depression, and general incel-proliferation that we are experiencing.
“Men are in power as a group and do not feel powerful as individuals,” writes Kimmel. “Men were raised to believe themselves entitled to feel that power, but do not feel it. No wonder men are frustrated and angry.”
As I wrote about here, the American masculinity tells boys and men: Have a family but spend all your time away from them. Devote yourself to work, a male-dominated place where you constantly pit yourself against other men.
Devalue women—as the embodiments of traits you have learned to despise in yourself (tenderness, nurturing)—even as you desperately crave their love. Remain silent when women, gay and queer people are bashed, even if you have to betray your loved ones to do it.
Seek attention from women to burnish your image with other men, not to experience real affection or connection.
And now we are living in a time where one party’s agenda is an enforced patriarchal conservative vision for the country, as I wrote about last week.
But the politics of conservative patriarchy, as much as it tries to sell itself as great for men (and best for everyone), is also anti-men if you think about it for even a few minutes.
As I wrote recently, if you’re a dude who has ever had sex and NOT had a baby, or would like to continue to have sex without babies resulting every time, birth control and reproductive freedom are your best friends.
Cutting off birth control is an anti-sex agenda. Forced birth that forces men to pay for and care for children that they don’t want or can’t afford is an anti-men agenda.
Cutting off IVF for men who do want children is an anti-men agenda. Cutting off access to no-fault divorce, as Project 2025 plans to do, forces men to stay in partnerships that they don’t want to be in.
Cutting off access to abortion puts the lives of the women in men’s lives at risk—when their loved ones and family members go septic, bleed out, or lose organs due to abortion bans like those in place in many states right now —that ruins men’s lives, too. When men’s children are forced to give birth even if they were raped, as is happening in states with abortion bans right now, that harms men, too.
The Republican Christian Nationalist platform wants us to believe that male supremacy is great for guys, but it’s a lie—a logical fallacy. It restricts men’s freedom, too.
Also, do we believe that this man, would-be vice president and Mister “the purpose of post-menopausal women is to raise my children,” has ever felt the warm embrace of— anyone? Besides Donald or his bizarro misogynist bestie, Peter Thiel?
Do we believe that there is anything besides deadness for these guys in their partners’ and families’ eyes?
Do we believe that Donald or any of these guys have ever had a spark of true connection and joy like this one here from a guy who is supporting a woman for president—and who (gasp!) provided free meals for children in his state, as well as free tampons and period products so that children could attend school worry-free and without period shame?
Patriarchal conservatism wants us to believe that it’s great for guys, but the evidence is literally everywhere that it’s just not. It makes men less happy, and it also makes them less free.
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SOURCE: Michael Kimmel’s “Masculinity as Homophobia: Fear, shame, and silence in the construction of gender identity.”
There’s so much amazing detail here and one thing I love in particular is how you put men back into the mix of caregiving relationships — relationships historically reserved as “women’s sphere” — and show how fathers and sons and brothers are so impacted and damaged by patriarchy. Thank you!
Thanks for this, I don’t think men’s health as a consequence of patriarchy is talked about as much as it used to be.
Back it the heady days of early 1990’s feminism, men’s health and happiness were very much topics of concern. It was observed that our current economic system actively discouraged men from having the types of relationships that might fortify them against the dehumanizing forces of corporate capitalism.
It seemed so obvious to me that men were being used up by other men to line the pockets of still other men. Economic growth practically depended on successfully discouraging men from directly caring for and nurturing their families, because care isn’t profitable. Get a wife to do all that for free and you can devote all your time and energy to making $ for the company, or something like that.
It was so surprising to me back then that men didn’t see the call to connect emotionally with, and share responsibility with, women as subverting their own exploitation. Instead many saw it as dangerously emasculating. So much so that some of them ran off into the woods with a copy of Iron John by Robert Bly in search of a Wild Man to initiate them into true masculinity. It could have been a great movement that empowered men to be agents of change, to reshape society for the better, and to be fully connected to themselves and others. Sadly, the message that resonated the most was reject your mother-soul, turn away from women - they will feminize you, loneliness is a small sacrifice to make at the altar of masculinity.
And here we are, over thirty years later, in the midst of a loneliness epidemic, with hollowed out men feeling unloved, unappreciated, and disconnected. And sadly some men are still so afraid of being “feminized” in the eyes of other men that they will willingly buy a one way ticket to loneliness rather than take the leap and embrace connection.
I think the real culprit is not patriarchy, per se, but a system that leverages the masculine longing for competitive individualism that is so profitable in the private sector. It rewards domination over collaboration, recognizes only winners and losers, and is rigidly hierarchical.
We call it patriarchy, but I strongly suspect it is actually all driven by a relatively few men, greedy for money and power, who have other men in their thrall, with no intention of making good on an explicit promise to share that power and wealth. They are little concerned with the status of men in general as per the rules of domination and highly individualistic competition. Patriarchy is a useful tool for increasing men’s productivity and securing an ample supply of free domestic labor, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. It’s much more insidious…