Is The P-Word Just Feminist Rhetoric?
Why understanding patriarchy is key to disrupting it
We toss around the word patriarchy—and its byproducts, misogyny, and sexism—so often they can start to feel overused or stripped of meaning. I was initially hesitant to even introduce the word patriarchy into my book1 even though the entire book is about sexism—and the word sexism is right there in the title. I worried it might alienate readers who find feminist language off-putting, too political, or overly academic.
But I quickly realized, there’s no more accurate word to describe a culture whose core institutions—modern democracy, medicine, the justice system, even the nuclear family—were designed by and for men2, even though women depend on them too. No other term so effectively captures a society that consistently fails women (to put it mildly), resists meaningful change, and punishes progress with fierce backlash.
And yet, despite mountains of evidence that we live in a world structured around the male experience, plenty of people still roll their eyes at the word patriarchy.
They assume it means you hate men, rather than a system that benefits men at women’s expense. They think you’re implying all men are doing better than all women, or that women don’t have any advantages. They think you don’t appreciate the progress women have made and should stop complaining. And they often fail to realize that men are also being screwed over by the patriarchy—just in different ways.
If we want to dismantle patriarchy, we need to understand what it actually is. But first, let’s address the elephant in the room before it shows up in the comments section:
Yes, the US is less patriarchal than it once was. Men no longer legally own their wives. Since 1993, marital rape is no longer protected by law. Women can work, wear pants, play sports, and open their own credit cards, bank accounts, and businesses. We are better off than women in many parts of the world.
The problem is, we’re expected to be grateful for the rights we do have rather than expect full equality. Progress is too often used to shut down the work still to be done.
Women remain systematically underrepresented in the rooms where decisions that shape their societies and lives get made—politics, tech, finance, medicine. They’re also underrepresented in medical research, car crash safety testing, and other areas with life-and-death consequences. They still earn less than men, face harsher judgment for the same behaviors, and their bodily autonomy is under constant threat—including being less safe in their own homes.
Most women know what it’s like to have their labor exploited by men—at work, at home, or both. And yet most men claim they don’t exploit women. The epidemic of sexual violence is a shared reality for women, but seemingly invisible to men. How is it that so many women encounter daily acts of misogyny—large and small, subtle and overt—that curdle their insides, yet men so often insist they’re imagining it or misinterpreting it?
The fact that women are routinely mocked, dismissed, or ignored when they point out these experiences, is a case in point.
A true democracy values equality. It listens when half the population says, “Something is missing.” When women say they are exhausted, enraged, broken—or simply ask, “Can we do things differently?”—ignoring or silencing them isn’t democracy. It’s patriarchy.
Why does patriarchy persist?
Patriarchy is a system that prioritizes men’s needs, experiences, and authority—often at the direct expense of women’s. It persists because the benefits it grants men are too good to give up. Free labor, easy access to sex, unacknowledged career boosts, and countless unearned advantages come to feel like a birthright. It makes it normal—expected, even—for men’s success to be built off the backs of women’s unpaid and underpaid work, with little recognition or awareness. And when men do acknowledge it—like the misognyst football player, Harrison Butker who told female graduates to stay in their lanes, and said he wouldn’t be who he is without his wife (because, duh, he wouldn’t)—the problem is they think that simple acknowledgment should be enough.
Misogyny implies a hatred for women. Most men don’t hate women simply for being women. And there are certainly women who are loved by misogynistic men. But misogyny—degradation, mistreatment, abuse—happen when men feel that the benefits they get from having their needs and comfort prioritized are threatened. They believe these privileges are God-given, biological, or hard-earned. That isn’t to say men don’t work hard—which is how many hear it when they hear the word privileged. It is to say they fail to recognize how they benefit from women's opportunities being restricted and from women being routinely dismissed and underestimated.
They get defensive or retaliate when women step outside of narrow expectations. As Zawn Villines puts it, “hating women is a side effect of patriarchy, not the main goal.” She argues the real goal isn’t to harm women—it’s to preserve unearned benefits like leisure, power, and higher wages. “Harming women is the means to the end, not the end in itself.”
This is why backlash is so intense right now—especially against women, queer people, and people of color. White men are terrified of losing unearned privilege.
There is no obvious reason (to men) that they should give up their privilege but there are good reasons. Two in particular: 1) because it hurts women, who many men purport to love and 2) because it robs men of their full humanity, emotional depth, and capacity for real connection. Sharing the wealth—and the burdens—isn’t a loss. It’s liberation. Not just for women, but for men too.
But haven’t men always ruled?
The deeper we dive into prehistory, the more we learn social organization was not always patriarchal.
One of the oldest known cities, Çatalhöyük chatal-HOO-yuhk in Turkey, offers evidence that gender roles were relatively egalitarian, with men and women enjoying similar status and access to resources. But at some point, things changed. Throughout recorded history, men began to enjoy more power, status, freedom, and opportunity than women.
What the hell happened?
Our understanding is still evolving. But as more women join the ranks of anthropology, sociology, archeology, biology and other disciplines, it becomes increasingly clear that much of the data previously interpreted (cough, by men) to explain male supremacy is just wrong.
…women are finally in the room, filling the giant woman-shaped hole in our historical narratives.
We learned men were the hunters and women the gatherers; not so. Turns out women are physiologically better suited than men for the persistence hunting that once dominated and involved chasing prey on foot over long distances until the animals collapsed from exhaustion.
We thought patriarchy emerged with agriculture—that once physical strength became essential, men took control. But women have always done agricultural work. Even today, they make up nearly half the global agricultural workforce, according to the United Nations.
We’ve been told the invention of private property—particularly livestock—is the culprit. The story goes: once men owned herds, they needed to ensure their wealth passed to legitimate heirs, and so began the effort to control women’s sexuality. But animal domestication existed long before any strong evidence of gender-based oppression. The timeline doesn’t quite line up.
We’ve been taught patriarchy is natural — just look at the animal kingdom, they said. And then we discovered that one of our closest genetic relatives, bonobo apes, are matriarchal (despite the males being larger). Female bonobos form alliances to manage group dynamics and keep male aggression in check. In fact, across the primate world, social structures tend to revolve around mothers, not fathers.
Among humans, patriarchy isn't universal either. Anthropologists have identified at least 160 contemporary matrilineal societies across the Americas, Africa, and Asia—cultures where lineage is traced through the mother’s line, and inheritance often passes from mother to daughter. In many matrilineal communities, power and influence are shared3 between women and men.
“[Patriarchy’s] intention was only ever to serve those at the very top: society's elites.”
When modern medicine came along and female brains were discovered to be smaller, we were persuaded this signaled an inferior intellect. But then came intelligence testing and now we know there are no significant sex differences in intelligence; that brain size isn’t a meaningful predictor of intelligence. Einstein’s brain, for example, was smaller than the male average. If size mattered, the sperm whale, whose brain weighs 18 pounds (more than 50 times the size of a human’s), would be swimming intellectual circles around us.
The explanations we’ve been given for male dominance—whether biological, historical, or cultural—are being reconsidered. Rewritten. Debunked.
That’s not a coincidence.
It’s because women are finally in the room, filling the giant woman-shaped hole in our historical narratives.
So when did patriarchy begin?
In her book The Patriarchs: The Origins of Equality, Angela Saini who traveled the world to investigate the roots of human patriarchy, explains that the first clear signs of women being treated categorically differently from men didn’t appear until about 5,000 years ago, in the early states of Mesopotamia—located in what is now Iraq and surrounding regions. Around this time, ruling elites began using people to generate resource surpluses and defend their territories. Maintaining population levels became a priority. Women gradually disappeared from the public world of work and leadership, redirected instead toward bearing more children—especially sons who would one day fight.
Demands from the top filtered down into the family, forcing ruptures in the most basic human relationships, even those between parents and their children. It sowed distrust between those whom people might otherwise turn to for love and support. No longer were people living for themselves and those closest to them. Now, they were living in the interests of the patriarchal state.
Eventually, daughters were expected to leave their family homes to live with their husbands’ families. The risk for abuse and exploitation increased. Over time women came to be seen as the property of men. Enter colonialism and empire and you have patriarchal norms and customs spreading wildly.
Saini further explains:
The lasting psychological damage of the patriarchal state was to make its gendered order appear normal, even natural, in the same way that class and racial oppression have historically been framed as natural by those in power. Those social norms became today's gender stereotypes, including the idea that women are universally caring and nurturing and that men are all naturally violent and suited to war. By deliberately confining people to narrow gender roles, patriarchy disadvantaged not just women, but also many men. Its intention was only ever to serve those at the very top: society's elites.
Many of the gender differences people rely on to explain inequality simply do not exist, and if they do, they are largely created by society and result from, rather than cause, women's lower status.
Patriarchy is not something that men did to women at some point in history, but a fragile system whose perpetuation we all participate in every day. Until we claim the word and confront our complicity, we can’t effectively disrupt it.
Take 50% off a one-year subscription to this newsletter by purchasing a copy of Sexism and Sensibility.That’s a book AND a subscription…FOR LESS THAN A SUBSCRIPTION! Just email me your receipt and I’ll send you a link.
Women, of course, contributed, rarely getting credit, but there was little room allotted to think and act outside the patriarchal box.
Unlike a patriarchal society, matrilineal does not imply domination