The Greatest Threat to Patriarchy: Men Getting in Touch With Their Feelings

How does feminism serve the patriarchy?

Troy Cohen

Warning: This piece may offend everyone. The righteous, provocative tone is how the energy wished to be expressed at certain points. I went with it. And it was fun.

In her book, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, Bell Hooks shares that she does not believe feminism to be the greatest threat to patriarchy. Rather, she suggests the greatest threat to patriarchy is men getting in touch with their feelings of despair.

If men begin deeply feeling their emotional pain on a massive scale, the entire system that patriarchy is built upon may begin to crumble. When men start feeling, they’re no longer numb. When they’re no longer numb, they begin to care and they stop doing most of the fucked up shit that has the world in the mess it’s in. They begin questioning the ways they’re being conditioned and recognizing the ways they’ve bought into a system that turns them into mindless drones for the patriarchal war machine.

As I continued reflecting on Hooks’ message, I became aware of ways in which feminism actually serves this patriarchal agenda. A quote from Hooks’ book: “While feminism may ignore boys and young males, capitalist patriarchal men do not.” Hooks suggests that boys’ emotional well-being is being virtually ignored by feminism, leaving very little to counteract the relentless societal conditioning that grooms young men into unfeeling soldiers.

Feminism has been and continues to be, an incredibly important and powerful movement. It has played an essential role in creating massive gains in equality for millions of marginalized individuals. There are countless ways that this revolution has helped raise awareness and begin to dismantle patriarchal structures. Like everything else, feminism also has its shadows such as the ways it promotes separation. It has a huge blind spot when it comes to the value of including boys’ and men’s emotional needs.

The mere idea of this is met with rage in some feminist circles (often those that have conflated radical feminism with misandry). “Women are the victims! Men are the perpetrators! Women are oppressed! Men are the oppressors! Stop derailing! Stop drawing attention away from what really matters you privileged piece of shit!” This attitude, as well as gentler and subtler versions of this, plays in perfectly to the patriarchal agenda.

The patriarchal agenda is simple: Keep them distracted. Keep them at odds with each other. Make them think that the problem is their neighbors, not the puppeteers running the show.

Divide and conquer. Keep them in fear. Then, they will be easy to control.

It's working.

Part of the reason it's working is that some forms of feminism (most often radical feminism) are serving this agenda in some ways. Patriarchy, sometimes aided by feminism, has got us so busy attacking and blaming and protecting ourselves from one another that we’ve lost sight of the bigger picture:

We are all one being, and none of us fully heals unless all of us heal together.

Focusing on one group and not another is like focusing on only one side of our body after a massive car accident. Sure, one side may be experiencing more pain than the other and may appear to be in more immediate need of attention, but do we only treat that side of the body and expect a full recovery? How much of what we’re treating is on a surface level, while massive internal bleeding continues underneath?

Like the trillions of cells in our body, men and women (and everyone and everything else) all make up one organism. Until we start living from this knowing, our left arm will keep clawing at our right arm, our right leg will keep stomping on our left foot. We’ll continue to watch it all unfold, dumbfounded, wondering why the hell our wounds won’t heal.

There are many within the feminist movement that do care about the emotional experience of men, but as Hooks shared, there don't seem to be many efforts being made to do much about it. Whatever efforts are being made aren't getting widespread attention in the way that’s necessary to heal our collective wounding (thanks in large part to the largely patriarchal-controlled media that aren't big fans of stories that could potentially unite us).

Until we all unite as one, stop leaving people out of the healing process, and actively picking at the scabs of “others,” our wounds will keep reopening, and we will never heal. Patriarchy won’t dismantle through our attacks on one another; it will dismantle when the masses no longer support it. We’ll no longer wish to support it when we’re no longer numb.

Men will no longer be numb when they feel safe to express their feelings, and this is less likely to happen in a world in which others continue to send the message that their emotional experience is less important or doesn’t matter. A world that continues to shame men and shut them down when they attempt to open up (which means more repressed feelings, more rage, more desire for power and control, and bad news for all of us).

Women say they want men to open up emotionally, but this may not be the case much of the time. Because when men begin to vulnerably express themselves, women often feel repulsed.

Shame researcher Brene Brown shares that she was shaken when a man approached her after a lecture and told her that his wife and daughters would “rather see me die on top of my white horse than watch me fall off of it. You say you want us to be vulnerable and be real, but, c’mon. You can’t stand it. It makes you sick to see us like that."

Where does such an attitude come from? Patriarchy conditioning us all to reject the feminine in men. No wonder men are so controlling and angry. It's virtually all they have left.

This moment was hugely impactful for Brown, and she began including men in her research, after years of focusing almost exclusively on the experience of women. Perhaps feminism would be wise to follow Brown’s lead on a larger scale.

Through her research, Brown discovered that the attitude of this man's wife and daughters was far more widespread than we might imagine, and it keeps men in fear and shame. It keeps them feeling limited, powerless, and numb. They often respond with anger and control in order to regain some sense of power and freedom and to avoid feeling their deeper pain, so they don't fall short of who society has told them they must be in order to get what they want and be "real men."

I imagine most of us can agree that unconscious men are one of the biggest problems on the planet. I am one of them. Perhaps a bit less of a projection monster than I used to be because I’ve been fortunate enough to run into some pretty incredible people that have modeled vulnerability, welcomed my own, opened their hearts to me because of what I’ve revealed and not despite it (helping to bust my stories of what a "real man" is), and helped me begin to feel again.

Many men will never find the courage or motivation to venture down the path of accessing their deeper emotions and feeling their deep despair. So perhaps when they do, it would be wise to welcome and celebrate this. To offer them kindness, encouragement, and support, as others have done for me (rather than responding with, "Stop taking up space you entitled, ignorant asshole! Let the people with real problems speak!" as some do). Perhaps as we respond in this way, other men will witness the kind, encouraging and supportive reflections these brave men are receiving, and the wonderful changes in their relationships and emotional well-being that result, and they'll be inspired to follow their lead, creating a more peaceful world for us all.

Men are not biological monsters; they've been programmed this way. We've all been programmed to support them staying this way. If we want men to feel safe to return to the loving little boys they were before the world convinced them that wasn’t who they were supposed to be---creating a safer and more nurturing world for us all---we must unlearn this programming. We must educate ourselves about what our conditioned patriarchal attitudes of what it means to be a man are doing to our boys, and therefore to our world.

Hooks shares that research has shown that patriarchal attitudes about masculinity and the ways men "should be" are most commonly reinforced in homes headed by single mothers. Without a man in the house to contradict societal messages and stereotypes, mothers and children often default to patriarchal conditioning. This is but one example of how this is not just an issue of men grooming men. We're all contributing to creating men that are unfeeling and uncaring, and it is in all of our best interest to contribute to supporting men in reconnecting with their emotions.

None of this is anyone's fault. We're all products of the system we grow up in, we all have blind spots, and we're all meandering down the path of self-love and empowerment in our own ways. This message is not about judgment or blame, but about awareness, liberation, and creating a better future for us all.

Yes, men need to do the work to become more self-aware and emotionally available. No, it’s not women’s (or feminism's) "responsibility." Many men are basically disabled when it comes to emotions, and telling them to do all the emotional work on their own is like telling the kid in the wheelchair to get his own damn toy from the top shelf. They may find a way to get it on their own, but boy would some support be helpful from those able-bodied folks.

Maybe leaving men to do the work on their own would ultimately be the greatest learning opportunity for them, and would allow space for others to focus more on their own healing and well-being, but it’ll probably take a whole lot longer for them to heal. In the meantime, patriarchy will reign supreme, and we’ll all continue to suffer.

If we choose not to welcome men's emotional pain and offer support, and they struggle mightily through the process of figuring it out themselves or become discouraged and give up altogether, it’s going to impact us. Because we occupy the same world and are all ultimately part of the same “body.” And the fortunate/unfortunate ones that feel all this shit (aka empaths, aka “able-emotioned” folks) are going to feel their pain. So we can support on the front end or suffer on the back end. The choice is ours.

So, to sum up: Until men start feeling and caring, we’re all screwed. Men will care much more about others when they feel the world caring about them.

You can write me off as another whiny man that wants women to do the work for him and "just doesn't get it," or you can choose to consider a perspective that may differ from your own.

We’re all in this together. Let’s act like it. Let’s take down patriarchal systems of fear, oppression, violence, and control by using these systems as a model for what not to do, and doing the opposite: Uniting as one by loving the shit out of each other (literally), and creating a welcoming space for all of us to feel and heal.

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