Yes and…

On Patriarchy and Grace

Ivan the Terrible and His Son on November 16th, 1581, Ilya Repin, 1885

I was going to write an article about the embarrassing betrayal both Pam Bondi and Kristi Noem experienced as a few of the token women in the MAGA party who unsurprisingly became the sacrificial lambs. I was going to write about the stupidity of a specific type of woman to believe that sucking up to patriarchy is going to award her dignity and respect rather than a long and humiliating death spiral once her use is up. I was, I did, it’s unfinished, collecting dust in my drafts.

It’s low hanging fruit. I can bash these women all day and not make a dent. There are countless bobble heads lining up to take their place, women so truly idiotic and brainwashed that they’ll happily take the brunt of whatever punishment is given so long as their father-figure stand-in showers them with validation. They’ll continue down their path of self-destruction even after the well of compliments has dried up. It’s a useless endeavor.

Instead, I want to tackle something different, a topic sparked by a recent note I posted in which male entitlement and patriarchal worshipping came into play, but also grace.

I’m not going to bring up Bell Hooks in this essay; quotes from “A Will To Change” have been used quite enough. No, I will simply be discussing my own observation, interpretations, and conclusions. Speaking from the heart, if you will.

To begin, let’s give some context. I recently posted the following note:

What I find to be pretty interesting (insane actually) is how the left is constantly blamed for why so many young men turned to the right. The reasoning is that the left is very anti-male or it is hostile to men. Detractors will often cite ways in which the left has made them feel bad about themselves or made them feel unwelcome. They’ll often bring up the concept of misandry as a driving force for their flight.

Let me go ahead and say that the left has a purity problem: there is a need for hero worship so intense that the second someone steps out of line, they must be torn to pieces, angry-mob style. There is a real ideological problem and horseshoe theory rings true the more extreme you get.

However, what I find to be insane is the immediate turn to a political framework that’s become more and more Christian nationalist as the years progress, a side that does not consider women to be people, a side that actively spews and promotes hatred against the poor, and that will allow minorities into its higher echelons only to be used as tokens. It is a side rife with destruction, a destruction currently ringing through the halls of our very government. It is a side actively seeking to remove legal rights from its enemies: people of color, women, immigrants, etc. A side willing to send countless of young lives to die in a war.

And all this because someone was mean to you. If that’s not entitlement, idk what is.

I received various responses from different people, mostly men, that varied. For some, the left is such an antagonistic force that sending men to die in a reckless war is a better alternative than the concept of DEI. For others, it’s all based on vibes, and the vibes were off when it came to the left. This didn’t really help me understand anything outside of:

A) men voted based on feelings

B) men voted based on vibes (which are also feelings)

Feelings are certainly not enough to justify what has been occurring in our country as of late (US-based for all my international readers). But what I ultimately did find out is that the men that responded were essentially speaking a completely foreign language.

As women, we deal with plenty of derision, passed down from grandmother to mother to daughter. The very act of giving birth is so steeped in patriarchal notions, that not even the most supposedly sacred female space is free of it. It is very likely that a lot of our mothers were abused, their mothers as well, so on and so forth. And that abuse carries, but now at least we have ways of describing it, observing it, and rectifying where we can.

However, this isn’t to say that we don’t continue to operate in a system that dislikes us, thinks us weak, or foolish, or emotional, or unworthy. We continue to fight. We don’t really have a choice. And so we deal with covert and overt misogyny everywhere we go, the left and liberal spaces being no exception. It’s not shocking when a prominent left-wing male leader turns out to be a raging misogynist behind closed doors. It’s expected. We wait with bated breath that the next pundit or figure head or actual leader has decent ideas on women, but sometimes we have to simply take “good enough (AHEM Hassan Piker).”

Of course, this “good enough” is very dependent on who you’re talking to and about. The left has an obnoxious tendency to cancel anyone it deems out of line, something, ironically, women get the worst of (Lindy West, Lizzo, Jameela Jamil, etc.). Male figures also receive plenty of backlash and cancellation, but they are not expected to embody perfection and purity. That’s really only reserved for women. I can’t curse the people who didn’t vote for Kamala enough simply because she wasn’t the ideologically pure candidate the left wanted (hope you’re happy with yourselves!). But I digress.

All this to say that women can’t really pick up our toys and go play somewhere else. We have to work with what we have. But men don’t have that constraint, they have the privilege to decide. And they have decided that making the lives of others more miserable is actually the better option whether they are aware of it or not.

I’ve had a few honest commenters on that note that gave me some perspective and something to think about.

Mitch wrote:

So I can speak to this from someone who was one of those young men.

I was a lost boy. Searching for something I belonged to.

What I saw a lot of in the left were groups for women, minorities, and LGBTQ+ people, but nothing for men. They just didn’t exist. I would ask them, ‘Why not?’ And often I would be dismissed. Even mainstream media would always put men in a negative light. The “jock” or the “absent-minded father.” Painting men as imbeciles. I even remember saying to myself, ‘If you’re a heterosexual white man, you’re screwed.’

Then you have a strongman like Donald Trump, who speaks to the core need of belonging by saying he’s for the working class (aka, rural white men). That resonates with someone like me who has no real sense of belonging. Even today.

The appeal is less about policy and more about being seen. Being heard. That’s a powerful motivator. If you talk to most of these men, they barely know what the policies are. All they know is that MAGA “fights for them.”

You then wrap that up with a Christian nationalist narrative, which a lot of these men also belong to, and suddenly you give them a moral obligation to fight “evil.” That justifies fighting against the very groups the left fights for, because the strongman tells them they are defending a nation “blessed by God.”

So what you end up with is a lot of men who feel like they are excluded from the left and from mainstream society, and you have an older strongman who is saying that he’s for them. That’s alluring, and once you’re in that camp, it’s incredibly hard to get out because it becomes bound to your identity. You will justify a lot of wrongs, because not doing so would fracture your identity. Your very sense of self.

So, yes, it is because someone was mean to you, but it’s also because there was nowhere else to go, and you finally had someone that was speaking to you.

Now, being on the other side, I completely agree with @Cultured Heathen that it’s a cult. It uses cult tactics to lure lonely men in, and then makes it impossible to get out.

To your point, the left needs to remove the hero worship and let people be messy, flawed, and human. Give the benefit of the doubt, but don’t put up with bullshit.

Real repair work is hard, and it’s entirely on us as men to do it, but we need the grace to be allowed to try and do it in public.

This and one other comment was what inspired me to write, because yes, I agree, we do need to give grace. And that’s hard, especially when women look around to see all of the destruction wrought by so many men (and women) only to be dismissed, because the men can’t see it.

But I can empathize with the desire to belong to something. The desire or need to belong is intrinsically human, and I won’t fault men for by wanting it the way someone lost in a desert wants water. I think it’s all very fresh for men, being cast in such a negative light, I posit many are not used to it.

Ryan Ruopp wrote:

As a liberal but not really a leftist man, though, I will say that a lot of “discourse” does feel pretty alienating. Casual misandry is no fun, and while I understand how “now YOU know how it feels” is emotionally satisfying, conversations that start from the premise that “men are trash”, which happen pretty frequently in my experience, do make me immediately peace out. I imagine for people further right than I am it feels like permission to just go ahead and hate.

Perhaps there are many men who do not feel responsible for the their forefathers actions and so hearing or reading such derision is probably akin to a fatal blow. Yet the uncomfortable truth is that they are. All of us who have something to gain from an exploitative system are always complicit in its cruelty. No one is off the hook simply because they were not present when the markers were set, the foundation poured, and columns erected; they were born and raised in the finished product.

But what about grace? I’ll be honest and admit I struggle with this, mainly because the problems we are facing are so obvious to me (and to countless other women) that it feels redundant to continue to point them out. Yet, men don’t see them. Or, more likely, they can’t see them because the truth is infinitely more uncomfortable than the lie. Perhaps they lack the language to address the uncomfortable or the outlet to let it go.

I like to think I give plenty of grace to the men who happen upon my content. Some are here for genuine conversations, some are more concerned with scoring imaginary points with whatever “pro-men/homosocial” group they belong to, others just need an internet woman to try to talk down to. I can’t say other women do the same, nor should they be expected to. Men are ultimately responsible for figuring themselves out, though I don’t think we should deny them a helping hand if they ask for it

I am a genuinely curious person, but I am truly stumped on how to bridge this language barrier. Heaven knows our current approach is not working. I don’t have all the answers. But maybe there is something to this concept of grace, and maybe it’s something we should be willing to allow more easily.

-Pythia