2 Patriarchy the System An It Not a He a Them or an Us When you say patriarchy a man complained from the rear of the audience I know what you really mean me A lot of peo ple hear men whenever someone says patriarchy so that criticism of male privilege and the oppression of women is taken to mean that all men each and every one of them are oppressive people It is enough to prompt many men to take it personally bristling at what they often see as a way to make them feel guilty And some women feel free to blame individual men for patriarchy simply because they are men Some of the time men feel defensive because they identify with patriarchy and its values and do not want to face the consequences these produce or the prospect of giving up male privilege But defensiveness can also reflect a com mon confusion about the difference between patriarchy as a kind of society and the people who participate in it If we are ever going to work toward real change it is a confusion we will have to clear up To do this we have to begin by realizing that we are stuck in a model of social life that views everything as beginning and ending with individuals Looking at things in this way the tendency is to think that if bad things hap pen in the world and if the bad thing is something big it is only because there are bad people who have entered into some kind of conspiracy Racism exists then because white people are racist bigots who hate members of racial and ethnic minorities and want to do them harm The oppression of women happens because men want and like to dominate women and act out There is poverty and class oppression because people in the upper classes are hostility to ward them greedy heartless and cruel Patriarchy the System 27 The flip side of this individualistic model of guilt and blame is that race gender and class oppression are actually not oppression at all but merely the sum of individual failings on the part of people of color women and people living in poverty who lack the right stuff to compete successfully with whites men and others who know how to make something of themselves What this kind of thinking ignores is that we are all participating in some thing larger than ourselves or any collection of us On some level most people are familiar with the idea that social life involves us in something larger than ourselves but few seem to know what to do with that idea Blaming everything on the system strikes a deep chord in many people 1 but it also touches on a basic misunderstanding of social life because blaming the system presumably society for our problems doesn t take the next step to understanding what that might mean What exactly is a system and how could it run our lives Do we have anything to do with shaping it and if so how How do we participate in patriarchy and how does that link us to the consequences How is what we think of as normal life related to male privilege women s oppression and the hierarchical control obsessed world in which everyone s lives are embedded Without asking such questions not only can we not understand gender fully but we also avoid taking responsibility either for ourselves or for patriar chy Instead the system serves as a vague unarticulated catch all a dumping ground for social problems a scapegoat that can never be held to account and that for all the power we think it has cannot talk back or actually do anything A powerful example of this is found in the work of Sam Keen and Robert Bly whose influential books on gender were part of the mythopoetic men s movement which attracted a wide following especially during the 1990s Although the movement is less visible than it was Bly s and Keen s books con tinue to enjoy brisk sales and the views of gender inequality they expressed are still widely used to reject feminism and defend male privilege Both Keen and Bly blame much of men s misery on industrialization and urbanization 2 The solutions they offer however amount to little more than personal transformation and adaptation without changing society itself The system is invoked in contradictory ways On the one hand it is portrayed as a formidable source of all our woes a great monster that runs us all On the other hand it is ignored as something we think we do not have to include in a solution But we cannot have it both ways If society is a powerful force in social life as it surely is then we have to understand it and how we are connected to it To do this we have to change how we think about it because how we think affects the kinds of questions we ask and the questions we ask in turn shape the kinds of answers and solutions we come up with If we see patriarchy as nothing more than men s and women s individ ual personalities motivations and behavior then it won t occur to us to ask about larger contexts such as institutions like the family religion and the 28 What Is This Thing Called Patriarchy economy and how people s lives are shaped in relation to them From an indi vidualistic perspective for example we might ask why a particular man raped harassed or beat a particular woman We would not ask however what kind of society would promote persistent patterns of such behavior in everyday life from wife beating jokes to the routine inclusion of sexual coercion and vio lence in mainstream movies We would be quick to explain rape and battery as the acts of sick or angry men but without taking seriously the question of what kind of society would produce so much male anger and pathology or direct it toward sexual violence rather than something else We would be unlikely to ask how gender violence might serve other more normalized ends such as masculine control and domination and the proving of manhood We might ask why a man would like pornography that objectifies exploits and promotes violence against women or debate whether the Constitution protects an indi vidual s right to produce and distribute it But it would be hard to stir up inter est in asking what kind of society would give violent and degrading visions of women s bodies and human sexuality such a prominent and pervasive place in its culture to begin with In short the tendency in this patriarchal society is to ignore and take for granted what we can least afford to overlook in trying to understand and change the world Rather than ask how social systems produce social problems such as men s violence against women we obsess over legal debates and titillat ing but irrelevant case histories soon to