Patriarchy: Its ability to turn the Governed into Governors.

A person being governed by a pariarchal state

From our grandmothers who then told our mothers that a woman’s place remains in the kitchen, it has been ingrained in some of us to think of patriarchy as a cultural attitude. A myriad of biases. A bad habit inherited from less “enlightened” ancestors that education and goodwill might gradually correct.

But what if we have been thinking too small?

What if patriarchy is not an “attitude” but a full fledged system of governance, as deliberate and as structural as anything political humanity has ever constructed? What if it has branches, and enforcement mechanisms, just like every other system that has ever organised human life?

Because when you look at it honestly. Let’s strip it of the softening language we use to make it feel like a mistake, patriarchy functions less like prejudice and more like a state. And misogyny, in that reading, is not simply hatred. It is the system’s judiciary. The arm that reaches out when

the governed have stepped out of line.

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What Makes a System of Government?

To govern is to organise power. It means determining who holds it, who is subject to it, and what happens when that is challenged. Every system of government, regardless of its shape, requires certain fundamental components to sustain itself.

Examine patriarchy through this lens, and something clarifying happens. You will see that every single component is present.

If we walk down history’s memory lane, you’ll find that every system needs a legitimising story. For example, monarchy had divine legitimacy and right, the king ruled because God had ordained it, and to resist the king was to resist God.

Patriarchy hides behind biology and culture.

The story goes: women are naturally and physically suited to nurturing and men? Leadership.

By the book, this is each gender fulfilling its natural function. To resist it would be resisting nature itself right?

Then of course, religion sanctified it. Woman created from man, woman as the origin of sin with the apple in the Garden of Eden.

“For the husband is head of the wife as also Christ is head of the church”, Ephesians 5 verse 23 records.

Subtly, the family enforced it at the most intimate level. The domestic unit itself organised as a mini-state, with the father as sovereign and the wife and children as subjects whose obedience was expected and, when necessary, compelled.

Perhaps the most sophisticated feature of patriarchy as a system of governance is its ability to recruit the governed, making them governors.

Women have been, throughout history, among the most effective administrators of patriarchal order. Mothers who taught their daughters to shrink themselves for a man and policed other women's sexuality, ambition, and appearance.

A person who has fully internalised a system's logic does not necessarily experience their compliance as compliance. They experience it as values. As the natural expression of who they are. The woman who insists that a girl who was raped must have been dressed inappropriately to invite such a heinous act is perhaps not consciously protecting patriarchy. She might just be protecting herself. Protecting herself from the unbearable knowledge that the system her life has been built around is not, in fact, protecting her. That her compliance has still not, after giving so much, purchased her safety and that the walls surrounding her are a prison and not a home.

Now this is the genius of governance by assimilation.

If patriarchy is a system of governance, then dismantling it requires what the dismantling of any governing system requires: the redistribution of power across all its institutional arms.

Full dismantling requires that men participate. Certainly not as saviours, but as people who must also reckon with what the system has done to them.

Though we often choose to deny it, patriarchy's governance of men is real though different. It has governed men's emotional lives with extraordinary cruelty, demanding they perform strength and suppress their emotions until they can no longer distinguish between the performance and their person. It has made their worth contingent on dominance they can exhibit, their “masculinity” fragile and their capacity for intimacy limited by the very system that placed them at its top.

The one who occupies the seat of governance, on close inspection, is also a person. More comfortable, amassing more power, yes, but a person nonetheless.

We began with governance. So let us end it there.

You would agree with me that it has lasted for far too long.

The work of dismantling, unlike typical government systems, does not begin in parliaments or protest lines, though it has already reached there. It begins in the moment you catch the system operating through you and choose, with full knowledge of the cost, to do something different.

If it must be dismantled, it will be done by the difficult, institutional, and political work of people who understand what they are actually facing. Not by those who view it as a mere bad attitude. Or as individuals who simply need better education.

But those who have understood that it is a system. As old as mankind. Defended by an enforcement arm that has shaped the boundaries of men and women's lives for millenia.

Let us not forget that systems built by human hands can be unmade by the same hands as history continually proves to us.

And history, for all its worth, has always belonged to those willing to make and reshape it as their own.

So start there. With yourself