by Jess Hill
So now, having explored men’s violence through the lens of biology and psychology, we need to take a closer look at it through the lens of gender.
It’s time to talk about the patriarchy.
*In 2011, a survey of clinicians found that shame was ‘easily overlooked or actively avoided in therapy sessions’.
#These are the basic affects defined by the psychologist Silvan Tomkins, one of the most influential figures in the study of shame. Affect is, according to the Tomkins Institute, ‘an innate, biological response’ that underlies emotion. The nine affects are with us from birth; they help us to survive.
†This raises interesting questions about the role shame plays in an antisocial personality disorder like sociopathy, and how shame may be experienced by men who fit the ‘Cobra’ type.
5
PATRIARCHY
there have been so many times
i have seen a man wanting to weep
but
instead
beat his heart until it was unconscious.
NAYYIRAH WAHEED
Patriarchy is an invisible mainframe that regulates how we live. It sets parameters around ‘acceptable’ behaviour for both genders: men should be ‘strong, independent, unemotional, logical and confident’, and women should be ‘expressive, nurturant, weak and dependent’.1 This artificial construct, which we mistake as natural, also renders various injustices ‘unavoidable’: the violence of men, the domestic servitude of women, the dominance of men in power, and so on. Under patriarchy, this is all unfortunate, but ‘normal’. Natural. Invisible.
Since the 1970s, the status of women in society has changed radically, and mostly for the better. But the patriarchy didn’t vanish – we just stopped talking about it. When I began writing this book in 2016, ‘patriarchy’ was still a dirty word; ‘gender equality’ was the polite euphemism used by politicians and the feminist advocates trying to work with them. But even as gender inequality became the popular catchcry against domestic abuse, I knew in my bones that it alone could not explain men’s abuse of women. As the violence prevention expert Professor Bob Pease told me at the time, ‘gender inequality cannot capture the nuance, complexity and multidimensional nature of patriarchy’. Besides, if solving gender inequality is a panacea to domestic abuse, you’d expect domestic abuse statistics across the Nordic countries of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Sweden and Norway – the closest we have to gender-equal utopias – to be much lower than average. Shockingly, however, the number of women in these countries who have been subjected to physical or sexual violence from an intimate partner hovers around 30 per cent2 – higher than the European Union average of 22 per cent and Australia’s rate of 25 per cent.*3
Even with all this in mind, I was still reluctant to write about patriarchy, for fear I’d be pegged as having some anti-male agenda. Then, in late 2017, the #MeToo movement went viral. Millions of women worldwide shared raw and unflinching accounts of being harassed, assaulted and raped. Sexual harassment – long considered ‘normal’ and ‘unavoidable’ – was suddenly intolerable. Since then, the paradigm has shifted: ‘normal’ gendered behaviours are being exposed and scrutinised as a matter of urgency, and ‘patriarchy’ is the subject of countless op-eds and dinner-party conversations. The invisible mainframe has been made visible.
Critically, aside from proving to women that the patriarchy still exists, #MeToo also proved it to some men. As the brutal stories of female friends filled their newsfeeds, men were genuinely shocked to learn that such behaviour was not only commonplace, but suffered by virtually every woman they knew. ‘Until now, I thought I was awake,’ wrote journalist David Leser in the Good Weekend, ‘but the truth is I had absolutely no idea what women faced. No idea what it was like to feel afraid walking to my car, or jogging at night; to be pressed against on a crowded train; to be ignored or talked over repeatedly; to know that my value at work was often predicated on my sexual attractiveness to my boss. No idea what it was like to have someone indecently expose themselves to me; to have to devise strategies each day, often unconsciously, to just feel safe.’4
Revolutions often eat their children, and it’s impossible to predict how the #MeToo movement will evolve. But the ground has already shifted in ways unseen since the 1970s. After centuries of pathologising women’s fury as ‘hysteria’, some men are finally starting to see that much of this fury is legitimate. Among this small but growing group of men, a new conversation is starting: Why do we do this, and how can we change?
For men, this conversation is fifty years late. While women have spent decades redefining what it is to be female in the modern world, men have clung stubbornly to old – and failing – definitions of patriarchal manhood. This, writes actor Michael Ian Black, has led ‘too many boys [to be] trapped in the same suffocating, outdated model of masculinity, where manhood is measured in strength, where there is no way to be vulnerable without being emasculated, where manliness is about having power over others. They are trapped, and they don’t even have the language to talk about how they feel about being trapped, because the language that exists to discuss the full range of human emotion is still viewed as sensitive and feminine.’5 In other words, as feminists have been trying to tell men for decades, patriarchy is a dud deal for men, too.
Black is talking about decent men – who aren’t sure how to change but are willing to try. But plenty of other men aren’t soul-searching – they’re seething. Everywhere they look, people are carping on about ‘toxic masculinity’ and male privilege, and some woman is whining about sexual harassment or unequal pay. These men nod along vigorously with statements like this one, from ACT Liberal politician Mark Parton in 2017: ‘If you are a heterosexual, employed, white male over the age of thirty, you’re not really included in anything.’6 In homes across Australia, men like this are taking out their humiliated fury on their girlfriends, wives and children, furious that women are getting all the attention while their suffering is ignored.
So we’re talking about patriarchy again, and not a moment too soon. There’s an epidemic of violence against women in this country, and to confront it we can’t just focus on gender inequality. We need to define and discuss the system that entraps both sexes, because domestic abuse doesn’t really start with men disrespecting women. Its roots go much deeper – into men’s fear of other men, and the way patriarchy shames them into rejecting their own so-called ‘feminine’ traits, like empathy, compassion, intuition and emotional intelligence. We need to talk about how, for too many men, patriarchy makes power a zero-sum game and shrinks the rich landscape of intimacy to a staging ground for competition and threat. This is the realm of men’s violence, with its underworld of male shame and humiliated fury.
Men have been sold a lie. They were brought up to believe that as long as they obeyed the rules of masculinity, they would be rewarded with power and privilege, limited only by how hard they were willing to work for it. But that system no longer exists (and for some, especially Indigenous men living under colonisation, it never did). Men can no longer rely on a job for life, and they’re no longer guaranteed that hard work will get them a house with a white-picket fence. Generations of men are frustrated, angry and ashamed that despite following the rules – and despite sacrificing the tender, emotionally connected boys inside them – they’re not getting what was promised to them. And some of them are looking to their own home as a place to restore their lost power.
This is why we need to talk about patriarchy. But what even is it? I tracked down one of the world’s most famous thinkers on the question and asked him to explain this notoriously slippery concept. Michael Kimmel is the SUNY Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies at Stony Brook University in New York, and the bestselling author of several books about modern masculinity. Talking to him on the phone late one night, I asked him to start at the beginning. To people who’ve never even heard of patriarchy, how do you explain it?
‘I explain patriarchy as a dual system of
power: men’s power over women, and some men’s power over other men,’ he began. Some men’s power over other men – that wasn’t something I was expecting to hear. It immediately struck a chord.
But before we get to the competition between men, let’s unpack the most obvious aspect of patriarchy: men’s power over women. To see how patriarchy entrenches male dominance, let’s turn to renowned sociologist Allan Johnson. In his book The Gender Knot, Johnson breaks down patriarchy into four elements.7 First, society is ‘male-dominated’: positions of power are held predominantly by men. Second, more subtly, society is ‘male-identified’: patriarchy sets masculinity as the benchmark for what is good, desirable or normal. That means our society privileges a certain set of ‘masculine’ values: ‘control, strength, competitiveness, logic, decisiveness, rationality, autonomy, self-sufficiency’. Opposite to these are the values considered to be ‘feminine’: ‘cooperation, equality, sharing, empathy, vulnerability, and intuition’. These so-called ‘feminine’ values are not the values of power: they are the values attributed to people like stay-at-home mums, and people who do volunteer work and get paid minimum wage to care for children or the elderly. In other words, they are values that are at best underappreciated, and at worst treated with contempt. Third, society is ‘male-centred’, which means that we focus primarily on the exploits of men and boys – in the news, in movies, in art and culture and in sport. Finally, the entire system of patriarchy is organised around an obsession with control. This is critical to our understanding of perpetrators of domestic abuse. The capacity to show power and control is the standard by which men are measured: whether it’s their ability to master technology, run vast business empires, dominate conversation, rob a bank, or exhibit physical and emotional mastery. How and what they control doesn’t matter, so long as they create the impression of being in control.
The way men exert power and control occurs on a spectrum: at the extreme end, it shows up as violence and abuse, but a little further down the spectrum this exact same behaviour fits the definition of a successful man. ‘In a big corporate entity, you’ve got men who are exerting power, exerting control, are narcissistic, are audacious, they’re not willing to compromise on their ideals, they’re used to having their way, they bark orders, they expect to be listened to, they show no remorse. You know, that’s what makes a successful man in a corporate world,’ says domestic abuse survivor-turned-advocate Kay Schubach. ‘Those behaviours are completely inappropriate in the family, and yet you see it time and time again; you’ve got these kids who are walking on eggshells when Dad gets home, Mum is completely terrified that everything needs to be perfect, and if it’s not you’re upsetting this incredibly powerful man with powerful friends, and everyone’s on his side because he is bringing home the bacon, and he’s provided this incredible lifestyle.’
As a group, men are dominant and privileged in relation to women. But as individuals, men pay a price for this privilege: to be considered ‘real men’, they have to live up to patriarchy’s standards and abide by its rules. These standards and rules are regulated – through fear, control and violence – by other men.
This leads us to the second part of patriarchy: some men’s power over other men. This is the side of patriarchy we rarely talk about, and it is the key to us understanding the abusive mind. Here’s why: traditionally, feminism has equated manhood with power, and has thus positioned all men as powerful and privileged. From this viewpoint, violence against women is just a tool for men to express, maintain and restore male power and privilege. But Kimmel says that although it’s understandable that women would see male power in this way, it doesn’t describe how men actually feel – which is why men commonly reject it. ‘A lot of men will often try to opt out of the idea that men have power over women by saying, “I don’t have any power; my wife has all the power, my kids, my boss,”’ says Kimmel. While men are powerful as a group, they do not necessarily feel powerful as individuals. In fact, many individual men feel powerless (whether they actually are or not). The essence of patriarchal masculinity, says Kimmel, is not that individual men feel powerful – it’s that they feel entitled to power.
This one statement, to me, makes sense of men’s violence. When men feel powerless and ashamed, it’s their entitlement to power that fuels their humiliated fury, and drives them to commit twisted, violent acts. That ‘entitlement to power’ is the key to understanding why men and women generally respond so differently to shame and humiliation. ‘Women are humiliated and shamed as well, and they don’t go off on shooting sprees,’ says Kimmel. ‘Why not? Because they don’t feel entitled to be in power. [For men], it’s humiliation plus entitlement. It’s the idea that “I don’t feel empowered, but I should.”’
This is the rallying cry of the men’s rights movement: men have been robbed – of jobs, dignity, sex and so on – and need to take back what’s rightfully theirs (especially from the women who have ‘stolen’ it). This attitude is weaponised into homicidal misogyny in the desperately sad and often vicious ‘incel’ community, where ‘involuntarily celibate’ men congregate in online forums like Reddit and post bitterly about how their ugliness has doomed them to a life without sex. When they’re not cheering each other on to suicide (because ‘hope is for idiots’), they workshop ideas on how to take violent revenge on the women (aka ‘Stacys’) who refuse to have sex with them. The Stacys aren’t just rejecting them – they are denying their basic human rights. This isn’t just empty talk in some dark corner of the internet: since 2014, self-proclaimed incels (including Elliot Rodger) have carried out two mass shootings in North America, with the explicit aim of punishing the Stacys and the ‘Chads’ (the attractive and successful men who get to have sex with Stacys).
*
Men’s violence against women is an epidemic, and its prevalence in private and in public means there is no place where women can be truly safe. But men’s violence against men – predominantly in public – is also perpetrated at staggering levels. When it comes to general violent crime – murder, assault, bullying, bashing – boys and men are the primary victims and the primary perpetrators of these crimes. In this maelstrom of competition and violence, men and boys become keenly aware of their position in the pecking order. Here we have the answer to the Atwood riddle at the end of Chapter 3. The self-consciousness and fear that men feel towards other men is the reason they are so afraid of women laughing at them: being humiliated by a woman means being emasculated, revealed as weak, and made vulnerable to the ridicule, control and violence of other men.
And nothing represents ‘weakness’ under patriarchy like being a girl.
The reality of men’s lives has changed dramatically over the past century, but the number one rule of masculinity hasn’t. ‘No sissy stuff. You can never do anything that even remotely hints at femininity,’ says Kimmel. ‘Your masculinity is the relentless repudiation of the feminine. That’s rule number one. Everything else is an elaboration of that.’ The way men prove they’re not a sissy is by obeying three other rules: be a big deal, be a ‘sturdy oak’ (aka boys don’t cry) and give ’em hell – show everyone how brave you are by taking risks. Essentially, being a man means not being in any way like a woman.
The pressure for boys and men to prove they’re not ‘girls’ is the propulsion fuel for misogyny. Rejecting, criticising and policing femininity – and girls and women – is not just something some men do. Misogyny is a ghost in the machine of our culture: it is what makes men and women alike believe that women are not as competent, trustworthy, reliable or authoritative as men, and that women are better suited to caregiving roles than jobs that require clear thinking and decision-making. Misogyny shapes the opinions and beliefs of men and women alike, to varying degrees, because misogyny isn’t a personality flaw, as Allan Johnson writes, but ‘part of patriarchal culture. We’re like fish swimming in a sea laced with it, and we can’t breathe without passing it through our gills. Misogyny infuses into our cells and becomes part of who
we are because by the time we know enough to reject it, it’s too late.’8
The training to reject anything ‘feminine’ starts young. Boys are expected to disconnect from their mothers – lest they become a ‘mama’s boy’ – and identify with their fathers. Then, in order to be strong, they must disconnect from their own sense of pain or distress – lest they be bullied by other boys (or girls) for being weak. And, first and foremost, they must prove that they are not a girl. Family therapist and expert on masculinity Terrence Real saw this in his own three-year-old son, Alexander, a flamboyant boy who loved dressing up, especially as the ‘good witch’ Barbie. One day, when his older brother had some friends around, Alexander came whooshing down the stairs in his ‘cherished paraphernalia – white dress, silver wand and matching tiara [and] struck a magnificent pose for the kids’. The boys looked up, and said nothing – they knew better than to ridicule Alexander, but their stares said it all: You are not to do this. ‘The medium that message was broadcast in was a potent emotion: shame. At three, Alexander was learning the rules.’ Real sensed his own face burning red as Alexander ‘turned heel, threw off the dress, jammed into a pair of jeans and, as casually as he could, joined the group as they retired downstairs to work on their swords, knives and guns. That dress has never been touched again.’