Jack Haven

"The Forgotten Victim of Patriarchy"

A boy, no older than ten, sobs on the front porch. He covers his face with his hands and is shaking uncontrollably when his mother steps out of her house. She is carrying a small belt in her hand.

"Why are you crying?" she asks coldly.

The boy replies, in broken words, that his bicycle has been stolen from him by a group of children who have been picking on him for his small stature.

"Boys don't cry. Are you a girl?"

"No," the boy whimpers and stands up. "But it really hurts."

"Stop crying, or I'll give you something to cry about!" The mother lifts her belt.

The boy quickly tightens his lips and squints his eyes, but he begins to shake more violently than before.

"I said stop crying this instant!" The mother rips her hand through the air, and a blur runs past the boy's leg, leaving a stinging red stripe along his calf.

The boy begins to wail.

"Get inside. You're punished for letting your bicycle get stolen." She pulls the boy toward her and whips him again, this time on the buttocks, to hurry him indoors.

I would like to admit that the scene above is rare, but it is not. "Man," just as much as "boy," has a particular definition; any person with characteristics that do not fit that definition is inherently less than a man. Families have traditionally found the allowance of such characteristics unacceptable and have taken strides to keep them from germinating in their children. Weakness must be eliminated, and crying is an unambiguous illustration of weakness. Crying cannot be tolerated in boys because men never cry, and boys are, after all, men-in-training.

Feminism has begun to stagnate. Women are still not earning as much as men, they are still subject to social stigmas that men do not experience, and they put themselves in more dangerous situations than men can rationally comprehend when they walk somewhere alone at night. There is a great deal of work still left for the movement to accomplish, but enough people seem content with the status quo that any further change has been forestalled. Why does a discussion of feminism begin with a story about boys not being allowed to cry? Feminism has begun to stagnate because it has failed to grasp the answer to this key question.

Man is not the enemy of feminism. This can be difficult to accept because man is often made out to be the oppressor of the woman. He denied her the vote, he stole her rights, he imprisoned her body, and he enslaved her soul. In pointing the finger at all men, however, not only has feminism often been unable to target its enemies among women, but it has failed to employ its allies among men. The ideas that debase women are often most cruelly espoused by other women, from Catharine Beecher to Phyllis Schlafly, while men like Wendell Phillips, Francis Minor, and Michael Itimmel have been some of the most vociferous advocates of women's rights. Yet men are continually portrayed as the enemy—not one man, but men as a whole—thus excluding them from a movement that, in reality, seeks to defeat an enemy that affects us all.

Patriarchy is the enemy of feminism. It is the enemy of both women and men. Patriarchy is a system under which the male head of an extended family exercises authority over the entire family: his wife, his sons, his son's wives, and his grandchildren. When the father dies, then the oldest son takes over and rules over the extended family as its new patriarch. Patriarchy had already lost many battles before the women's rights movement took shape in the 19th-century. The system of rule begins with the concept of rule by the Father: God. God was the Father, and he gave to fathers the divine right to rule. This was translated into the monarchy during the medieval period and used as a political mechanism to retain absolute power in the monarchy during the ancien régime. This mechanism became known as the Divine Right of Kings: The right of a king to rule over his kingdom as he sees fit is ordained by God and absolute.

The Divine Right of Kings reached its fullest conclusion when Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet published Politics drawn from the very words of Holy Scripture, which claimed that kings were the anointed representatives of God, and no one had the right to participate in his authority, which is granted by Divine providence by the right of primogeniture. The Divine Right of Kings was challenged many times. One of the first of these challenges, the Magna Carta of 1215, forced the English king to share his authority with a Parliament composed of the nobility. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 established a constitutional monarchy and put ultimate authority in the hands Parliament. The American and French revolutions finally destroyed the Divine Right of Kings by removing the monarchy in its entirety, putting ultimate authority to rule, instead, in the hands of propertied men.

Property was once a means by which power was held by kings. Robert Filmer argued that the institution of kingship was like fatherhood, the subjects are like children, and property rights are like those goods that a father can give and take from his children at his pleasure. When rule was transferred to those men who owned property, these men became the political sovereigns of every man, woman, and child who did not—or could not—own property. Political authority was further withheld from the rest of the people by ensuring that presidents would be elected by an electoral college and that senators would be elected by state legislatures. The Founding Fathers had secured rights for some people, not all.

Before women's rights, then, the fight to obtain equal rights for all men raged. Although the Declaration of Independence had claimed that "all men are created equal," even men without property did not yet apply. But working men were not denied the right to vote because of a Machiavellian scheme on the part of the Founders to rule over all people without property. Their goal was part of a philosophy known as paternalism.

Paternalism is the belief that one knows more or is more rational than another, making one justified in using threat of punishment or force to prevent the other person from taking a course of action that one believes may be harmful. This philosophy has been adopted by governments who believe it must care for its people by enacting legislation that will ensure the people's physical, emotional, or spiritual, well-being. Traffic laws that fine people who do not wear their seat belts are examples of paternalistic legislation, along with laws that forbid marriage between persons of the same sex and make illegal the use of marijuana. Paternalism was often used to rationalize racism by claiming that Blacks were inferior to Whites and, thus, were better off as slaves than as freemen.

When paternalism is not merely an excuse for discrimination, there is a genuinely beneficent character to it. This has made paternalism very defensible in the eyes of those people who continue to argue that certain groups of people, women among them, must be taken care of by stronger or better off members of society. Paternalism restricts the freedom of choice of the protected in order to facilitate their protection from harm; it is seen as a responsibility of the father, not as tyranny over the child. The problem with the presumption of superiority lies in the assumption that if one group appears better than another, then each individual in that group must necessarily be better than the individuals in the other.

In traditional households, the breakdown of paternalism has been well documented. The father is held to be the bread-winner. He works in order to feed his family. Other members of the family are assigned other roles. The mother is the head of the household: When the father is at work, she makes certain that the house is in excellent shape for when he returns. The children act as subordinates to the mother: They perform those duties—chores—that assist the mother to ready the home for the return of the father. If there is a dog, then its role is to provide companionship to the members of the family and to facilitate play among the children. The father, who ensures the well-being of his family by offering the mother all that she needs to keep the household running, is at the head of the family. He listens to the mother, who is his second-in-command, but the final decision on any subject is his to make. This is paternalism: patriarchy at its nicest.

If the father is a poor decision-maker, however, then he may fail to listen to the mother. He may bankrupt the household and hurt his family. The mother may expect the father to provide certain luxuries that he cannot properly afford. As the bread-winner, however, he sees it as his duty to provide for all of his wife's wants, and he may overwork himself, thereby leading him to resent his wife and children. These two situations are canon causes of domestic violence. The father, overwhelmed by his failure in his role as bread-winner, may take up drinking. Exhausted, resentful, and inebriated, he may come home late at night to find that his family has eaten dinner without him. He storms into the bedroom and resolves to deal with his troubles by beating his wife bloody with clenched fists.

He may have dealt with his anger differently, perhaps by talking to his wife and allowing himself to cry, but we have already seen that is unacceptable in a man. The mother who has just been beaten is the same mother who, at the beginning of this paper, hit her son for doing that very thing. Patriarchy is a system, and systems are as amoral as a gale. But when a system breeds people who act immorally in order to keep the system in place, then the system must be replaced with a better one. The problem with both patriarchy and paternalism is that they rely on the father as the centerpiece in a unit called the family. "Father," however, is a relative term. A father is not a father of nothing, but of something. Father cannot exist without son. If there were no son, there could be no father. Father, then, in order to be father, must also be not-son. Father cannot exist without mother, who is also wife. But wife cannot exist without husband, who father also must be. In his role as husband, he must strive always to be not-wife. In both of these cases, by being what he is, he must struggle not to be what he is not. By keeping to traditional ideas about the family, the father must retain power over his son. If his son will not do what he says at all times, then he loses his authority as a father, and his patriarchal rule becomes rocky. He has become the victim in an Oedipal drama of his own design.

In his relation as husband, to remain husband, he must always struggle to be not-wife. He must always fight to avoid the tasks that would normally be associated with what it means to be a wife; he must remain the bread-winner. But being what one believes one is by avoiding becoming what one is not, is not a central position. The central figure in the family, the father, pushes himself away from the center by striving not to be the son. This conflict can be seen easily in contemporary families when the grandfather lives with his family. The father will, in most cases, struggle with the grandfather for leadership. In fighting his title as son, he pushes himself out to the margin, and the patriarchal family unit breaks apart. Today, this happens as well between husband and wife. Middle­class families cannot survive without two paychecks. In those situations where the wife begins to earn a larger salary than the husband, the wife becomes the bread-winner, and the husband is forced to fight for his role as bread-winner. If he does not succeed, then he becomes wife, and he cannot accept that. He must fight to be not-wife, and husband is again pushed away from the center; the patriarchal system breaks down.

The earliest arguments against feminism urged that if women began to read, work, and vote, they would lose their femininity and become men. The struggle of the feminist movement has not only been to obtain rights for women, but to redefine what it means to be a woman. Feminism's great success is that it made what it means to be a woman inclusive and free from subordination to man. In the process, feminism has destroyed the ability of men morally to create the conditions for the expression of masculinity. If women will no longer stay at home to cook and clean, then men must cook and clean themselves, and this is a dilemma for the definition of what it means to be a man. Today, a husband cannot force his wife to stay at home so that he can remain the bread­winner. Therefore, he cannot cultivate the conditions under which he can truly be a man under the standards by which men continue to define themselves. Woman redefined "woman" to become free; man has not redefined "man," and we are trapped by a system that both men and women created and set to dominate the world.

To be a man is a tireless struggle that requires positive proof. We see this drama played out in the social rules and consequences regarding sex. Women have been criticized for centuries for their promiscuity. If a woman had sex out of wedlock, she was a harlot. Today, a woman who has three to four partners in one year may still be considered lecherous. On the other hand, according to popular belief, men have been allowed to have as much sex as they want without any social consequences. This is not so. The social consequences are extensive, but men are criticized if they do not have sex with women. Men who do not have sex with women are deficient, inferior not-men. Celibacy is a mark of effeminacy. Historically, priests were considered to be effeminized men not only for their robes, but for their celibacy. Today, gay men are subject to worse reproach not only because they do not have sex with women, but because they have sex with men. Worse yet, a man who does not feel the need to treat women like objects may be derided for his restraint. His masculinity is immediately questioned.

There is a great need among men to redefine what it means to be a man. The feminist movement freed women from their bonds to the patriarchal system that we have been trying to eradicate since the first group of dissidents came together to oppose their king. Unfortunately, while women have been progressing, men have been left behind. We have remained artificially attached to conceptions of masculinity that have become obsolete. There is a great need for a movement like the feminist movement that will seek to redefine what it means to be a man, that will set men and women truly and completely equal to one another, and that will banish patriarchy from our free societies forever.

Works Consulted

Bossuet, Jacques Bénigne. Politics drawn from the very words of Holy Scripture. Trans. Patrick Riley. New York: Cambridge UP, 1990.

Filmer, Robert, Sir. Patriarcha and other political works. Ed. Peter Laslett. Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1949.