Element Descriptor
Patriarchy isn’t just wife-beaters and rancid elderly uncles. It’s an ideology, and like any ideology, it has its supple and hidden sides, complete with justifications and immune responses when attacked. And you’re walking around with a big healthy dose of it. So, if you want to do allyship at any meaningful level, you’re gonna have to take a good look at patriarchy and yourself. If you don’t, you’re part of the problem, and you’re gonna (further) exhaust women (and some men).
Level descriptors
| Novice | Practitioner | Expert | Ninja |
|---|---|---|---|
| You know patriarchy when you see it (and you can see it most places. Sometimes you really don’t have to look hard at all). From health stats to Miss Triggs’ ideas that a man will have to say, it’s kinda … everywhere. But it’s also not explicable if you don’t also think about other isms – this is where the challenge of intersectionality becomes real… | You have a clear (but not academic) understanding on the project of the creation/maintenance/inclusions and exclusions of who patriarchy, of the mobilisation of arguments about “nature” and sex roles. You’ve read some books on the subject of patriarchy, you know it’s not going anywhere anytime soon and you know that you have to be part of the solution. You are also not blind to the track record of some forms of (white) feminism.. | You may or may not have read some academic work – who cares unless it is good work and you can explain it to other folks and use it in discussions with people less convinced than you about what is going on. You’re able to keep your cool while being attacked as a cultural marxist, a leftard a shrill termagant/cuck, whatever distractions and derangements are being hurled these days. | Ninjadom is probably not really a thing for this element, unless maybe it is literally your day job and you’re really really good at your day job. |
Element Overview Essay
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Yeah, obviously this is gonna need a woman’s touch.
So the causes of not understanding patriarchy are probably related to how we’re reluctant because of our education system and our training and general disposition, human dispositions, to really see things in terms of systems rather than individuals and individual bad behaviour. The next problem is the conflation of individual everyday sexism, and people being dicks (and there’s an interesting word) with an overarching system. So it’s not patriarchy unless he hits me or whatever, and failure to see it as imbricated throughout what happens in the society whose voices get louder, to whose ideas get promoted, who gets paid what, for the same amount of work.
The consequences of not seeing patriarchy is you fail to see the systemic system that needs to be challenged and obviously ultimately replaced by something more nice. And you will therefore, lose allies and you will perpetuate the thing that you can’t see.
So, how to see it? What to do? Well, obviously, there’s a lot of listening and a lot of reading and a lot of thinking, and a lot of good old fashioned consciousness raising to use the term that was used in the late 60s, early 70s in the West. And of course, there is an ongoing and very solid and important critique of mainstream middle class. White feminism,which tends to shy away anyway from the term patriarchy and refer instead to you know, systemic sexism or whatever.
Development Resources
Assessment Resources
