Patriarchal Impoverishment of Masculinity

Patriarchal masculinity promotes standards of narcissistic codependence as the ideal for traditional gender roles

In my first post of this series, I argue that patriarchy is the keystone inequality that capitalism and all systems of exploitation and supremacy grow upon because they require the core beliefs that patriarchal dynamics instill at the family raising level. 

These core beliefs are rooted in conditioning codependent narcissistic exploitation as the basis for relationships and social order.

Today, we’re going to dive deeper into how these patriarchal core beliefs manifest to get a better handle on the internalized dynamics that encourage narcissistic orientations on individual and collective scales.  

Remember, narcissistic orientations are orientations of supremacy where self-esteem and character are replaced by feeling superior.  

The requirement to feel superior is the bedrock of codependency and exploitation because it requires extracting that feeling from the perceived, forced or manipulated subservience of and extraction from the othered.  This extraction happens psychologically, materially, politically, culturally, and spiritually.  

This patterned dynamic of codependent subjugation perpetuates across many scales and realms.  Today, we’re focusing specifically on how patriarchy conditions men that they are entitled to feel superior to women and that feeling superior replaces self-esteem and the work of character development.

This commitment to entitlement denies processes of emotional maturation and the mastering of basic life skills from occurring.

Self-Esteem and Objective Orientations

Self-esteem is an internal state of fundamental self-worth that isn’t wholly dependent upon the specific conditions one is experiencing.  It is the foundation of resiliency that allows a person to maintain an intact sense of wholeness and optimistic potential despite experiencing unfavorable outcomes, disappointments, confusion, or rejection.  

That doesn’t mean painful emotions aren’t real or felt, but it does mean that a person doesn’t emotionally and functionally collapse or violently lash out against others from an inability to cultivate the inner strength necessary to lead themselves forward.  

Healthy self-esteem is necessary for cultivating an objective orientation that allows a person to perceive and accept self, external realities, and others as they are.  Objective perspectives are capable and willing to decenter their own fears, desires, and raw emotions when processing experiences, relationships, and the impact of their own choices, perspectives, and presence.

This objectivity is required to process conditions of life and self in a healthy way where the person is empowered to initiate shifts in choices, actions, behaviors, or perceptions necessary to create new outcomes and experiences. 

These are processes of emotional maturation and cognitive evolution required to become a healthy and sovereign adult capable of empathy, accountability, intentional creation, and loving connection.  

Adhering to patriarchal conditioning sabotages these processes of normal human development, resulting in orientations of narcissistic codependency and exploitation as virtuous social norms.

Patriarchal Impoverishment of Masculinity

Patriarchy promotes impoverished standards of masculinity that define being a man as rejecting and devaluing all femininity within oneself as an expression of superiority and domination over women and femininity. 

The issue is, every single person - regardless of sex or gender - is a constellation of masculine and feminine coded energies.  

We attribute the initiative to take action and the linear logic required to execute goals as masculine qualities.  Also, all actions and choices related to protecting and providing material resources to oneself or others. 

These are the realms of executing choices in the material world and defending oneself against adversarial forces or ideas - which every single person must learn how to do for themselves.

We attribute the realms of the interior self to femininity - emotionality, self-understanding, empathy for oneself and others, nurturing capacities, and creative expression. 

Once again, these are basic life skills and requirements of self-knowledge that all people must cultivate to build an authentic life with harmonious and genuine human connections.

I’m not saying that there aren’t differences between men and women, but I am saying that all people must balance their unique set of masculine and feminine coded qualities to build an enjoyable life grounded in a self-driven sense of purpose that reflects who they truly are.  

It is finding the right individual balance for our own selves that allows us to live from a place of empowerment, individuality, and wholeness.

By denying men the dignity and confidence to face their own interior selves - the fears and pains from childhood, the unprocessed emotions and wounds, the desires of passion and creation that may exist outside of the narrow definition of patriarchal manliness - they cannot establish self-knowledge, self-trust, or self-esteem.  

Men are then forced to rely codependently on receiving emotional regulation and sense of worth from feeling superior to women.  They are conditioned to believe that seeking this feeling is actually a logical expression of their innate superiority - and not emotional insecurity and fearful denial of self masquerading as projections of strength.  

Whether through philosophical or religious manipulations, men are taught to view this perpetual emotional state and codependent need to receive from women as a logical, stoic, and irrefutable truth or divine doctrine - when it’s actually a conditioned state of learned helplessness and child-like arrested development.

Listen, I’m not without empathy for men.  Living out these conditioned limitations is ridiculously painful and straight up scary.  If you cannot engage with your own internal world with any sense of openness, compassion, or nurturing curiosity, then you need to outrun yourself by externalizing your sense of self and worth completely.  

This is where addictions grow - drugs, alcohol, gambling, doom scrolling endlessly, relentless consumption of pornography or video games, excessive political rumination on scapegoats to blame for your own state of lack, fear, circumstance, and disempowerment. These are all tools to escape the self and avoid the work of nurturing self to wholeness.

This pain isn’t limited to men - women and others go through this under patriarchy as well - but men’s refusal to face it is a systemic problem that perpetuates cycles of dysfunction for absolutely everyone.  

To be clear - only the soul's work of self-development and self-understanding via therapy or other intentional modalities of compassionate self-discovery and self-accountability can heal the root of pain. 

Nothing and no one can sidestep that work for anyone else - not even God.

Avoidance of Patriarchal Pain

To avoid this pain, patriarchy teaches boys and men to focus on feeling whole through conformity with other men, pleasure seeking, and attaining material status symbols that reflect back a sense of superiority to other men by eliciting jealousy and competition.  

Extracting attention, labor, care, and resources from women are included in material status symbols since patriarchal men value what they receive from women, not the connection they can build with a woman as an individual.

This creates a very toxic, performative, and codependent way to live. 

• Receiving approval from other men replaces self-knowledge and resiliency.

• Living a fantasy of superiority over women replaces self-esteem and self-worth.

• Pleasure seeking replaces self-development and social contribution.  

The culmination of these expressions of immaturity and internal poverty leaves men in a state of arrested development and helpless, codependent narcissism where they are incapable of engaging with others or the world without being centered as the main character and exclusive focus.

This does not allow for any objectivity in relationships, which cripples their ability to communicate or receive communication without distorting the situation to only reflect their own feelings and needs as the truth.  An example is when a woman tries to set a boundary with a patriarchal man.  

Say, for instance, a young woman tells an older work colleague that she feels diminished and disrespected when he introduces her to clients by remarking on what a beauty she is.  That woman is asking for professional communications to respectfully focus on the skills she has intentionally cultivated to meet the business needs of their clients instead of the aesthetic pleasure he derives from her presence.

When the male colleague reacts as if he’s been insulted and degraded by her very reasonable and appropriate boundary, he’ll likely respond with a tirade of how he was just being nice and how everyone loves a pretty girl, so he’s really hyping her up so clients will want to work with her. 

In this situation, he has no damn objectivity or boundaries and so he cannot even conceive of her as an independent being outside of his own feelings and desires.

He centers his perception and emotionality - I love pretty women and I’m being nice to you by expressing how your beauty pleases me - and then he feels betrayed and belittled when she does not submit to his uncompromising centeredness as the truth of value for herself.  

His conformity with patriarchal men has replaced self-esteem, he cannot fathom why she would be insulted or degraded by being told men find her attractive - that’s the highest opinion patriarchal men can offer to women. So why is she being such a bitch about it?  

In response, he becomes angry about her violation of his centeredness and will consciously or unconsciously seek opportunities to force her back into his fantasy of subservience to his desires and values. This can happen through reputational sabotage or other lowkey or explicit efforts to degrade her professional standing in retaliation.  

He must do this to reclaim his fantasy of superiority.  He does not have the basic emotional maturity or life skills to meaningfully engage with boundaries. He cannot tolerate not feeling centered and respected as the arbitrator of values and virtues by any woman in any context. He requires to be centered to feel superior and thus to feel real and worthy in his own existence.

Violating the Fantasy of Superiority 

So what’s a man to do when his fantasy of patriarchal superiority is violated?  As our earlier example outlined, the most efficient path to restoring that sense of superiority is violence and sabotage. 

Impulsive destruction is of the other cheaper than the intentional creation of self.  

Invitations to accountability or growth are viewed as assaults and theft by patriarchal men who rely on their innate sense of (unearned) superiority for self-esteem and identity.  When women violate their sense of owed superiority - by speaking directly, by not performing for male benefit or pleasure, by not becoming smaller in his presence so he may feel commanding - patriarchal men view it as profound violation, almost like a terrorist attack.

Because if patriarchal men do not feel superior to women - and women refuse to do the work to make him feel superior - then the men experience an emotional crisis that they cannot face because they fear their own interior world. 

This is where adages like men need to feel respected, men need to feel needed, men need to feel like men are born from.  It pushes the work of development and contribution onto women to serve back to men through performances of inferiority or submission.  

None of these common wisdoms ask anything of men right?  It’s not about how to cultivate a healthy masculine presence and standard for oneself that leads through contribution and is therefore naturally desired and valued by others. 

It’s about others partaking in the fantasy of innate superiority by pretending to be less than the man to center his fragile ego and make him feel strong without having to develop inner strength.

Violations to the fantasy are the root cause of male violence. 

This is why, statistically speaking, the most dangerous person a woman will ever encounter is her husband.  This is why, statistically speaking, mass shooters and serial killers are men.

State Violence in Service of Patriarchal Fantasy

This is also why we’re seeing such vehement reactionary backlash to the economic and social independence of women that’s resulted in abortion bans, policy proposals to eliminate no fault divorce, and other political motivations to force women back into artificial material and social dependence upon men.  

Patriarchal men are codependent on women, so they must violently sabotage her agency to force her to live out his fantasy and protect him from the work of maturing and relating through contribution instead of extraction.  

This is why misogynists are obsessed with women and constantly seek to insert themselves in the lives, cultures, and spaces of women despite claiming to not want or need women.

Misandrists - women who are prejudice against men - which I, by the way, do not believe to be a real thing because resenting and avoiding men because of their high propensity for sexual violence and degradation isn’t a prejudice, it’s a form of self-preservation - avoid men in all aspects of their life.  

This does not harm men the way misogyny objectively harms women - it just hurts men’s codependent need to be centered by women through indifferent withdrawal of attention and participation.

Narcissistic Codependence of Patriarchal Masculinity

This is critical - narcissistic people have no interior sense of self or worth and thus no boundaries between self and the external world and peoples.  Narcissists require attention, engagement, and emotional reactions from other people to regulate their emotions and to feel real in their own existence.

Without the fuel of external human attention - whether positive or negative - narcissists fall into total emotional collapse to the point of nonfunctional despondency or violent outbursts.  

Patriarchal men follow the exact same pattern, requiring that their existence be centered in women’s lives - lovingly or fearfully, willingly or violently - it does not matter. 

This is the fundamental impoverishment of masculinity under patriarchy.

This is the animating truth of patriarchal conservative backlash and all targeted state violence against women and girls - from abortion bans to seeking to monitor the menstrual cycle of high school athletes to initiatives to rescind no-fault divorce laws that enable women to leave abusive marriages with the dignity of privacy.  

It’s also why these patriarchal conservative movements rally against policies that are designed to meet the basic needs of human life like free school lunches, subsidized child care support, public preschool, and universal health care. 

It’s not that America is incapable of creating and investing in social systems that fundamentally support the needs of human life.

It’s that doing so would further erode the patriarchal fantasy of superiority that requires the subjugation of women to artificially force women’s attention, resources, and labor to be directed towards centering men at all times to materially survive. 

In patriarchal worldviews, children are an appendage to controlling women, not developing human beings requiring unconditional care and investment by their communities and the country as a whole.  

Patriarchy requires conditions for care and resources - how else will men forcibly maintain dominance and control over all aspects of life without any meeting standards of personal accountability and social contribution?

How else will patriarchal men force all of society to center their needs, their desires, their fears, their preferences as the only force for social organization and access to resources?

What Lonely Men Mean When They Rally Against Feminism

When MAGA men complain that all of their problems and feelings of lonely inadequacy are the result of feminism, or accuse feminism of destroying the family unit, what they are really saying is:

• The impoverished masculine standards of patriarchy have left me fractured and unable to function independently - let alone participate in healthy relationships or environments.

• I am so afraid of being seen as feminine in any capacity that I cannot even identify my own internal needs or feelings, let alone recognize, respect, and care for the needs of another

• Patriarchal masculinity has robbed me of the basic life skills necessary for emotional maturity and the ability to lead through contribution

  ---

• I’m too internally impoverished to contribute anything without expectations to receive more than I gave

• If it doesn’t elicit immediate pay, praise, or pleasure, I am too poor to care or participate

• I have little to offer in relationships because I refuse the work of self development, so I need women’s labor and attention to survive

• Because I’m sure as shit not going to do something feminine like go to therapy or invest in cultivating these basic life and relational skills for my own self

• I am too committed to the comfort of my fantasies of entitlement and superiority to help myself, so I require the state to violently intervene to give me a woman to care for me, pleasure me, and live out the violence and degradation of my fantasies of domination. 

• Otherwise, I can’t escape awareness of how emotionally crippled and unwell I truly am

The State of Affairs

Losing ground in feeling perpetually centered and superior culturally is terrifying to patriarchal men.  As women reject the culturally conditioned impulse to cater to the male gaze and alter their behaviors, dress, interests, and desires in service of actively seeking male approval, the fantasy of superiority erodes at scale.

Just 10 years ago being called a single cat lady held some real cultural sting.  It implied that no man would choose you and that being unchosen was rot incarnate. 

The insult has lost potency as women embrace the truth that investing in an independent lifestyle is better than being tethered to an insecure man who is unwilling or incapable of respecting and meeting her needs.  

As MAGA sell-out J.D. Vance bemoans childless cat ladies as sociopaths, billionaire creative powerhouse Taylor Swift - and proud childless cat lady - is selling out arenas across the globe and gifting each country visited with a measurable GDP bump. 

This exposes the impoverished lies of patriarchal masculinity and demonstrates that its insults are projections of their own fears of living alone. 

The fantasy of patriarchal superiority is falling apart.  It was always propped up by artificial systems of exploitation and subjugation.  Will men find the courage and humility to reject patriarchal impoverishment and begin the work of healing from its toxic codependent ideology?  

Will they find the strength - and seek the professional therapeutic support - necessary to dismantle the lies and limitations that have stunted their ability to learn how to truly know, love, and care for their own selves?

Because that is the true leadership the world needs from men right now.  There is an avalanche of social changes approaching that require us to consciously build new social systems and relations. 

AI alone is going to require a fundamental overhaul of our economies and distribution of resources.  Climate change requires immediate and ongoing structural changes to ensure Earth remains habitable - not just for humans, but for all life.  

Are men brave enough to face self and heal from the patriarchal lies they’ve been so thoroughly poisoned by that too many men fear that it's gay to wash their own ass? 

Will they commit to the internal work that will allow us to collectively create a society that fundamentally seeks to cooperate in meeting basic human needs?  

A society that builds social systems with the specific mandate to meet basic needs across the board - and which will inevitably result in creating opportunities for achievement and innovation greater than the world has ever known? 

Because we have a lot of work to do together.  As patriarchal conditioning fails, so too does the social logic of exploitation and supremacy based codependence that requires classes of scapegoats to suffer for the comfort and salvation of the few and functionally useless.

Our climate cannot sustain supremacy and exploitation as our way of life, women cannot sustain supremacy and exploitation as our way of life, men cannot sustain supremacy and exploitation as our way of life. 

There are higher paths available - we can cooperate to create them together.  

But first, men need to catch up to a space where cooperation doesn’t feel threatening to their fundamental sense of self.  This requires intentional cultivation of character and life skills instead of relying on patriarchal entitlements to superiority for social acceptance and validation. 

No one else can do that work for them.

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xoxoxoxo, Coco + Maude

Coco has the ideas and writes the ideas, Maude edits and promotes