So okay, what’s the patriarchy? It’s the man keeping the woman down, right? Or is there a more specific definition than that, something beyond the vague “men work to keep themselves in charge”.
Maybe it’s about men holding predominance of power in all situations involving a woman – male presidents, male priests, male bosses, male police, right down to male fathers and male husbands who boss women around and sometimes even force her to do what she doesn’t want to do. Okay, I can see that. Women have achieved parity under the law, but there are lots of social norms that are still shifting to conform to reality. They are, however, shifting, the sphinx moving its slow thighs. Ultimately the center cannot hold. We really are headed to a new normal.
But here’s the thing: the patriarchy isn’t just going away, leaving a void behind. It’s being traded in for the matriarchy. Not in the traditional roles of boss, politician, father – but rather in the social roles of friendship and sisterhood, maiden aunt and just-like-a-mother-to-me. Except instead of bossing people around (there’s another word for that, but I’ll get to it in a moment) women are getting nurtured to death.
Here’s a case in point. A while back, a friend of mine had an affair while her fiancee was deployed to Afghanistan. She posted to a Facebook group, asking if she’d been wrong to do it and whether she should tell him. The men (wisely) stayed silent.
EVERY female friend she had said no, keep it secret, it’s understandable, you were lonely, we love you (name). They affirmed her decision. NONE of them gave her anything but love and understanding and forgiveness.
Except it was not their forgiveness that needed giving. It was her fiancee’s – and her own.
I said every female friend – it was every female friend but me. No, I said. You were wrong, so very wrong. It was a mistake, and you need to own up to that, and yes, you need to tell him and never do it again – or break up with him. Because you can’t be engaged to him and mess around like that. It’s not fair.
What was going on here is an example of the echo chamber that is the matriarchy, a not-so-secret sisterhood that believes that if it involves a man, the woman is always right. It impacts divorce, child rearing, how well a marriage succeeds, whether the woman has an affair, etc. And the evil of it is, the woman is given a moral out. If she wants to do something bad, so long as the group agrees, it’s okay to do so.
She chooses to do precisely the thing women were FORCED to do when patriarchy was genuinely the law of the land and women were excused from law-breaking if they participated with their husbands: she eschews her own moral judgment. Making moral decisions is HARD. But if everyone else thinks it’s a good idea to choose path Y, then it must be a good idea.
No. No, it’s a very bad idea. Men, at least, for all their flaws and foibles, make choices, for good or ill. A man doesn’t sit in a bar and have all his friends weigh in on whether he should go up and honk Suzy Q. Waitress’s humongous bazongas. No, either he gets drunk enough that he goes up and does it and gets clobbered by Suzy’s boyfriend behind the bar, or he sneaks peeks for the next several hours and leaves her a good tip. A man doesn’t follow the choice of the crowd; his particular crowd would tell him to do it partly because they would enjoy watching the beat-down. (Because men are perverse and weird that way.)
But women follow the crowd. And the crowd does not boss. It pressures. You’re okay, it says. You are totally normal. You can do these things. And I will love you if you do them, whether you really want to do them or not. The not-so-subtle subtext, of course is “if you don’t do what we all just recommended, we will be disappointed, and then we may not like you any more.” And just from an evolutionary point of view, that cannot be stood by a woman. In prehistoric times, the woman who did not join the group got eaten by the hyena. Today we women go to the safest public bathroom in packs; groups are important to us.
The crowd, my friends, is the shaping matriarchy: a civilization in which your sins are all forgiven if everyone says so, in which personal responsibility can be replaced with the hugs of your friends – and no one understands where the consequences are coming from or why all the bad things happen to you.
It doesn’t take much to break the matriarchy, though. In my friend’s case, my lone voice of dissent made her think. She understood that I, at least, would join her in facing down the hyena. She broke up with that marine, and then, while traveling abroad on 9/11, she realized that she wanted to be with him. They got married. (And later divorced, but that’s another story entirely.)
One person. One woman, willing to be ostracized if necessary, can break the siren spell of the echo chamber. Be that woman, every day, in small things and large. Don’t follow the waning patriarchy, and don’t follow the rising matriarchy either. Instead, woman up: trust and follow your innate sense of right and wrong. It’s nearly always more correct than the crowd.
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