The Always Unfashionable Patriarchy

The author in first grade circa 1967.
As she grew older, she played football
but chose not to see herself as intimidating.

It's again unfashionable to talk about "patriarchy" -- if indeed it ever was, for a millisecond perhaps during the 1970's and 1980's, "in fashion."

But damn, as I become an older woman stepping out of the hierarchies of power, I experience daily its continued and oppressive dominance as a player in our White colonialist racist culture.

Patriarchy -- the hegemony of men over women -- is a cultural power structure and conjoined twin of capitalism because the hegemony of men over women has always, like capitalism, been about the power of property and power over the labor of those who create and cultivate it.

Who's got it, who's not.

What's annoying and frustrating to me these days are all the White men who conceive of themselves as "progressive" and talk-the-talk of diversity, equity, inclusion and change but whose actions still belie they are all about power and control. These defensive and offensive actions create a toxic environment of bullying, condescension, transactionality and ego-centeredness of the individual in which many of us know we no longer have to work, play, or live. 

Just one example: within the last year, when I was onboarding a White man to a new position in a company I founded, he made a point of telling me he was aware he was "intimidating" due to his size. He claimed to have been a football player. Obviously a small one -- maybe a running back? -- as he was barely taller than I and I in no way found his stature "intimidating." 

I laughed. I knew the goal of his passive aggressiveness: he wanted me to be intimidated. The same dude had rudely shut down another of the female founders during his orientation process.

THIS is what the "great resignation" is really about. The pandemic made a whole lot of workers and even volunteers, including in the nonprofit sector, aware we don't have to put up with this as "assumed normality" anymore. No being chided or lectured or "merely" condescended to by male staff or board members. No placating privileged and entitled donors of any gender. No being disrespected based on one's gender, the color of one's skin, or one's age. No being underpaid for same. No falsely attending to the transactional when we all know the relational is what matters. 

The pandemic, thankfully, forced many of us to break from the norms of White colonialist culture to belatedly realize that our families, friends, and relational personal lives are more important to which to attend than these priorities, values, and behaviors of a labor market constructed by White men to dominate, exploit, and justify their own inequitable gains. As one of the most important anti-racist documents in the arts stated it: we see you.

Imagine walking through the looking glass and into a different world. A world in which the values that have been ascribed to the feminine -- listening, questioning, collaborating, cooperating, respecting life, the planet, and the ancestors just to name a few -- govern our interactions: business, political, and social.

We can all, regardless of gender, walk through that mirror at any time. That's all feminism is: a choice. A choice of what world we want to live in, what values we want to promote, what behaviors we will tolerate. It's the courage and the privilege of saying "no" to terrible boyfriends, husbands, employers, boards and values. But we can't minimize the ramifications of saying no. They can be considerable: loss of income, loss of family, loss of prestige.

Let's wake up to unity. Too often we don't see that the values we ascribe to "all we have" overshadow the more important values we give up in order to have what we do.

#justsayno

#EndThePatriarchy