We can trace harmful sex binaries, reproductive control and white Christian nationalism back to the same root system: patriarchy. Naming it is the first step toward dismantling its power.
In the Harry Potter novels, the archvillain Voldemort generates so much fear that witches and wizards do not dare to utter his name and instead refer to him as “You-Know-Who” or “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.” It feels like there’s a similar taboo of fearful silence around the word patriarchy, even though it’s so often at the root of what media analysts and public policymakers are talking about.
I’m a straight, relatively straight-arrow, not-very-straitlaced woman who came of age in the 1960s in a culture that I took for granted was the only way for the world to work. I didn’t see sex discrimination as a socially constructed system until the Equal Rights Amendment triggered my feminist click in my mid-30s.
The more I learned about patriarchy, the literal “rule of the fathers,” the more clearly I saw that sexism isn’t just individuals and groups behaving badly toward women. It’s patriarchy’s playbook—a game plan of assumptions, theories and strategies that drills the culture on how to rationalize and enforce men’s dominance over women.
I’m tired of snapping at the talking heads on the TV or computer screen, ‘Come on, say the P word! It’s the patriarchy, stupid!’
Male supremacy is underpinned by a definition of sex I learned in high school biology—that a “normal” person is male or female based on external and internal anatomy, physiology and biochemistry. That either-or template ignores the fact that an estimated 1.7 percent of the world’s population—over 135 million human beings—fall into the category of “intersex.”
DNA research shows that President Donald Trump’s Executive Order 14168—which states that “it is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female”—is no more reality-based than an order would be if it used the physics I was taught in 1960.
Sex is biological. Gender, a construct of identity and behavior in relation to one’s sex, is culturally and personally fluid. But the patriarchal playbook requires a rigid binary sex-gender hierarchy in order to leave no doubt about who belongs on top.
I bet some patriarchal brains figuratively exploded from cognitive dissonance when they saw who was chosen as Miss America 2024: Second Lieutenant Madison Marsh, a graduate of the Air Force Academy with an astrophysics major, who deferred active duty as a pilot to attend graduate school at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and hold an internship at Harvard Medical School.
Because of patriarchy’s “Madonna or whore” schizophrenia about females, teenage girls have been suspended for coming to school in off-the-shoulder or cutoff tops, while Norway’s 2020 Olympic women’s beach handball team was fined 1,500 euros because their players wore stretch shorts rather than the mandated bottom-baring bikinis.
“Hetero” is the only sexuality endorsed by the patriarchal playbook. Many Indigenous cultures with a more balanced male-female tradition have an accepted status for certain gender-nonconforming or “two-spirit” individuals, often in connection with a religious, healing or artistic role.
What if patriarchal societies affirmed those correlations as well? U.S. Roman Catholic priests reported homosexual identities or tendencies at a rate of 30 percent or more, considerably higher than the 7 percent found in the general public by a 2022 Gallup poll.
Same-sex sexual activity, seen in over 1,500 species, is increasingly viewed as a variant rather than disdained as a deviance. To flip a glib anti-gay gibe back on its users, we’re finding out that God actually did create “Adam and Steve” as well as Adam and Eve.
The patriarchy is fighting back.
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, 2023
I think of patriarchy’s problem with sex as the poster child for the feminist maxim, “The personal is political,” and reproductive autonomy as the elephant in the womb.
Countless forms of physical and psychological violence, including cruelties like female genital mutilation, have been contrived to exercise men’s control over women’s sexual behavior, purportedly to guarantee the paternity of offspring.
In some cultures, wives and concubines have been secluded in harems, appearing in public only if veiled and chaperoned. Patriarchy’s abuse of men, as well as women, is obvious in the practice of castration to create eunuchs for service in that oppression.
The metaphorical harem of English common law’s doctrine of coverture survived in U.S. jurisprudence into the 20th century. A woman’s legal identity was subsumed into that of her husband upon marriage, giving him control over not only her property and wages but also the custody of their children (his property) upon divorce.
Patriarchy’s continued compulsion to control the means of reproduction is at the core of the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, in which the reactionary majority overturned nearly 50 years of Roe v. Wade’s protection of an individual’s right to decide whether or not to continue a pregnancy under specified circumstances.
The second Trump administration is a textbook example of patriarchy’s problem with sex. Its policies largely line up with the Heritage Foundation’s authoritarian, male-dominant Project 2025 agenda, which includes criminalizing medication abortion and expanding bans on reproductive choice.
Administration leaders often employ what feminist philosopher Mary Daly called patriarchal reversal—an inversion of reality through psychological projection and presenting lies as truth to oppress women. Reflecting his own behavior, Donald Trump claimed in the 2024 presidential campaign that his opponent Kamala Harris used violent political rhetoric and was mentally disabled.
In 1992, presidential candidate Bill Clinton’s campaign consultant James Carville coined the slogan, “It’s the economy, stupid.” For many voters, that isn’t the deciding factor.
Abetted and deceived by disinformation, voter suppression, billionaire funding and foreign intervention, many Trump supporters vote the interest that matters to them most—their alliance with the top rung of the patriarchal caste ladder based on their male sex, their white race and/or their financial assets.
News commentators still overlook the obvious when they speculate about why the majority of white female voters in the last three presidential elections cast their ballots for a dishonest, fraudulent, racist, misogynistic sexual predator, or why people who call themselves Christians support someone who embodies in virtually every way the opposite of “what would Jesus do?”
I’m tired of snapping at the talking heads on the TV or computer screen, “Come on, say the P word! It’s the patriarchy, stupid!”
On March 8, 2023, International Women’s Day, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres warned that women’s rights around the world are being “abused, threatened and violated” because “the patriarchy is fighting back.”
Bravo, Guterres! We must consistently call out the patriarchy by name when we speak truth about what the rule of the fathers really means.
When we do, we’re pulling back the curtain to reveal the all-too-human Wizard of Oz, the flustered little man frantically scrambling to operate the levers of the fabricated larger-than-life image of the divinely ordained superior male.
I take heart when I find good news embedded in the bad news. The word patriarchy is heard more often in the media these days as the unspeakable abuses of the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking operation continue to unfold.
The virulent opposition to women’s equality globally is the patriarchy fighting for its life, and its intensity is a measure of the progress we’ve been making in changing the way most of the world has worked for the past five thousand years.
Our persistence will continue to bend the arc of the moral universe toward justice and inspire succeeding generations to keep on marching toward our shared vision for a fairer world.
Success may never be linear or complete, but failure is impossible.
Great Job Roberta W. Francis & the Team @ Ms. Magazine for sharing this story.
