The Costs of Patriarchal Centering of Men

There are no standards to be a man under patriarchy, only the promise to stand in petulant male solidarity to protect all men from accountability, consequence, and standards of social contribution

Patriarchy displaced children as the center of society to artificially center adult men.  Human community and social structures emerged to cooperatively support meeting human needs - specifically those around pregnancy, childbirth, and community investments in child rearing.  

Patriarchy displaced cooperatively meeting the needs of children and all human life as the primary purpose of social structures to forcibly center society and culture upon the fears, desires, and denials of adult men.

Patriarchy says that men must be centered at all times.  That centering men economically, culturally, religiously, and as the standard of humanness will ensure that men receive enough to then provide that overflow of love, attention, resources, and investment with the women and children who are forced to depend upon them.  

This made men the center of social logic and forced women and children into secondary subhuman roles who must appease the patriarch to receive access to life sustaining resources and care.

The promise of patriarchy that the unchallenged perpetual centering of men will make them strong enough to be good partners, protectors, and providers - thus ensuring everyone’s needs are met after his - has been exposed as a fraudulent and destructive lie of seduction.

This was a false promise meant to obscure the truth that men exploit and extract from women as a privately owned for-profit means of production.  All to relieve men of the labor and stress of meeting human needs - the requirement for adults to proactively and autonomously participate in the work of meeting human needs day in and day out. 

This offset of labor and stress isn't limited to actions within the material world.  Just as importantly, it’s about men denying the internal work of the soul.

It’s the soul’s work to mature from child-like narcissism into adult perspectives capable of decentering oneself in service of participating and contributing to the greater whole of family, community, and environmental stewardship.  It is the balance of individual efforts and cooperative investments.

Patriarchy Is Literally a Boys Club with No Standards of Maturity or Conduct for Men

In the patriarchal worldview, only men are full human beings with the necessary cognitive and reasoning capacities to be privileged with decision making powers.  Men are to set the community’s standards of conduct, justice, resource allocation, and what constitutes value or debt. 

Simultaneously, there are no patriarchal standards of initiation for boys to become men.  There is no threshold of maturity and sovereignty of thought and action that must be demonstrated to be seen and empowered by patriarchy as a man and a leader.  

There are no standards to be a man under patriarchy, only the promise to stand in petulant male solidarity to protect other men from accountability and the consequences of their own actions - or lack thereof.  It is the terroristic promise to hold the line by threat of causing even more harm to the women and children of their families and communities if pressured to meet standards of maturity and accountability.

When they call patriarchy a boys club, that’s a literal description.  Patriarchy is not the realm of strong, sovereign men - it is the club of boyhood maintained, celebrated, and protected from the discomfort of reckoning with oneself to intentionally become.  

It is a club where boys are boys are boys are boys forever and ever.  Addicted to appetite, pleasure, and fantasies of some innate unearned and uncultivated superiority that enshrines their pettiness and laziness as egoic virtue and masculine cunning, these boys are willfully lost and perpetually at war with the echoes of shame they seek to outrun with distractions.

And it is a shame that perpetual boys feel but cannot face within their own selves.  I doubt many of them can stand the truth and discomfort of owning and naming that vicious churning knife within.  

Unable to own and confront his own shame, he’ll rant and rave narratives of his victimization at her hands to excuse himself for experiencing the results of his commitment to rejecting responsibility and the process of maturing out of his narcissistic arrested development.

Patriarchal men - those perpetual boys - project all of that shame they fear within onto narratives of how others - often women - betrayed their mandates to love him without boundaries or standards, and to accept him as the boy he is while pretending he’s a man to the outside world to keep the fantasy going for him.

Mostly, these patriarchal narcissists cannot face the shame of seeing a woman continue to grow into her becoming while he intentionally neglects his own duties to himself and the cultivation of his own talents and values.

And now we’re collectively experiencing a gendered gap in maturity and capability that is so painfully blatant that men hate women for their own lack of discipline, direction, and strength.  Men have denied themselves the necessary self-driven investments into becoming mature men.  

Now, these men hate how truly small they feel in comparison to their female peers who continuously invested in their becoming and mastered skills across all realms of life.

That hate is born from the haunting shame of neglecting his own mandates to mature, his own capacities to contribute to others and the world from the intentional, patient, thoughtful journey of growth and becoming.  

It is the haunting shame of knowing he chose to revel in the comfort of fantasies, distractions, and destructive impulses rather than face his own fears to embark on the work of development towards responsible sovereignty.

The seduction of narcissism and patriarchy is the promise that he doesn't have to do the hard work of maturing into a man to demand pleasure, deference, and labor from women.  It’s always been a lie.  

Isolation is the only destiny for every person who is radically unwilling to take accountability for their own choices and the quality their presence brings - do they degrade or uplift, extract or contribute, engage or oppress?  

Sure, some will garner enough money or power to ensure they must be included in some social arrangements - at work or political fundraisers or whatever the case may be.  But that is the worst flavor of isolation - to know that your presence is unwanted but courted exclusively to exploit the resources or power you hold.  To know that not a single person would willingly choose to spend time with you if there wasn’t a personal material benefit to specifically exploit.  

This is the fate that patriarchal narcissism leads to.  Men can wake up and make different choices or continue to float down the path of least resistance until one day the fate sets in too deep to mitigate or change.  No one can help the man who refused to help his own self.

Patriarchal Scapegoating to Avoid Maturing

Ultimately, patriarchal centering of men in every sphere and domain of life has crippled the standards of men and left society with overgrown boys as the default.  Overgrown boys who view cooperative competence, intrinsic motivation, and contribution as assaults against their birthright to use and abuse women to avoid work and discomfort.  

Patriarchal narcissists cannot fathom a world where they are responsible for independently developing competency and the emotional maturity to work in cooperation with others - especially not women.  

There is always a woman or other to scapegoat for why men can’t be accountable for their own actions and development.  Some of the scapegoats are very real challenges or social disadvantages that men do truly experience.  But why would that external condition excuse abusive, manipulative, ignorant, or violent behavior towards the girls and women in their communities?

White supremacy is real and racist structural oppression is real.  Economic stagnation is real and the structural oppression of the poor and working classes are real.  That’s still not an excuse for men of any background to abuse or exploit any woman.  

It’s another dark facet of male narcissism - the weaponization of real social threats to a group of people to excuse men abusing and exploiting girls and women within their community.  It’s an insidious manipulation to believe that holding men accountable for their shameful behaviors will cause more social harm to the entire group.  

It’s a patriarchal lie that to protect these men, women must suffer as their punching bags and do so quietly, willingly, and with total devotion to protecting his ego from consequences at all costs.

Patriarchal Incentives Against Maturing

Choosing to mature into an adult man is one hundred percent optional under patriarchy - if often discouraged.  Boy-men don’t want mature men who’ve found the self driven strength and motivation to become valuable, wise, contributors to their relationships and community.  It makes the boy-men feel threatened by the reflection of their own immaturity and lack of self-cultivation.

There is nothing more threatening to patriarchal immaturity than sharing space with a man who chooses to do the work and speaks on it openly and proudly.  Nothing more threatening than the man who embodies his intentional belief system and acts out the values he intentionally upholds for himself and others regardless of the benefit or loss incurred from standing strong against the grain of patriarchal excuses.

This is part of why many men don’t date women who have children - even men who have their own children (sometimes by multiple women at that).  They’ll say things like they want to be the only man in the picture.  In actuality, they want to avoid a situation where comparison can naturally occur.  

Such comparison could easily illuminate their own manipulations, incompetence, and lack of initiative to lead by contribution if there’s another man joyfully and successfully performing his responsibilities of contribution and investment in care towards the family.  

That’s too scary for immature patriarchal men, so they project all sorts of demeaning logic against women/motherhood to cover up their own insecurity instead of facing it and doing the work to respect their own selves and respect their own conduct.

Patriarchal Consequences for Women and Society

The perpetual catering to men under patriarchy has left us with no mature vision for men’s role in society.  The work and roles patriarchal men reject and neglect has caused such an overburdening upon women that many are choosing to remain single rather than pour their life force into a parasitic man.  

Women choosing to focus on self instead of patriarchal demands is the natural consequence to patriarchal standards of narcissistic abuse.  The lie has been exposed, centering men at the expense of everyone else has not led to radiating benefits for every woman and child under a patriarch’s authority.

That patriarchal argument that prioritizing men first will naturally lead to men caring for women and children contains the same primordial and disproven logic underlying failed trickle down economic policies. 

Proponents of trickle down economic policies advocate for tax cuts for the already wealthy and corporations saying that those prosperous demographics will reinvest those tax savings into businesses and increased wages for their employees, resulting in a positive trickle down effect throughout the entire economy and labor force.

This does not pan out.  It never has and it never will.  Mostly, they sit on the cash or invest it in financial markets in ways that never benefit another living soul outside of the major corporate shareholder class.  And by major corporate shareholder class, I mean people whose primary source of income is the passive dividends from their financial portfolio - not income they create through skills or direct participation in operating businesses.

Reducing corporate tax responsibilities - you know, contributing to the society that buys your goods and staffs your companies - just puts more pressure on taxing people who earn their living.  It also puts pressure on communities and states to make up for the lost corporate tax revenue that is necessary to continue providing basic and necessary services (road maintenance, power grid updates, funding schools, etc.).  

To this end, policing must become for profit by meeting ticketing quotas - further burdening working people with harsh financial penalties for minor or frivolous violations.  

Fees must be added to every step of every bureaucratic process.  Applying for a permit to build a new deck?  That will be an extra $200 in processing fees - not because it's relevant or necessary for the work of processing the permit, but because Walmart saved a few million in taxes, so you must make up for it.

Layers and layers of state and municipal fees - to offset the loss of corporate taxes - is also a major contributing factor in our affordable housing crisis.  Seriously - and it all goes back to trickle down policies designed to further consolidate wealth and power without any social responsibilities into fewer hands at the direct expense of everyone else. 

Corporate welfare is class warfare.

ANYWAY -  patriarchy functions the same.  I wanted to outline the clear economic impact of empowering a class with freedom and prosperity without any accountability of their impact or requirement to meet explicit standards of investment and stewardship towards meeting collective needs across all realms of society.

Enriching and empowering a group of people without any standards of meaningful contribution to the welfare and functioning of the whole impoverishes absolutely everyone involved - materially or spiritually or both.  

Such recklessness radiates out like a poison introduced to a river, it flows to harm and pollute all it encounters downstream.

We undeniably see the effects of patriarchal entitlement on women’s health.  When corporations exploit communities for riches without contribution, we see poverty and violence increase under the displaced stress.  When men abandon their adult responsibilities onto women with petulant entitlement, we see women’s health and life expectancy erode.

Did you know that women account for 80% of autoimmune disorders?  Research is clearly demonstrating a relationship between prolonged stress and the appearance of autoimmune disorders.  

Sure, there are likely a multitude of biological factors at play - some including genetic predisposition.  Genes are activated or left dormant in response to the person’s environmental conditions and stresses.

A growing body of evidence is clearly linking perpetual, unsustainable levels of stress in the lives of women as a critical force in the manifestation of autoimmune disorders.  Narcissistic abuse - a hallmark of patriarchal relationships - is absolutely a factor.  

Patriarchy conditions men to value narcissistically abusing women and girls as some birthright display of dominance.  The result of men viciously refusing accountability and refusing to cooperate in relationships and households is so stressful for women, that their immune system attacks their own body.  

Acute stress - like public speaking - will activate the immune system in a healthy way where it kicks into higher gear to positive results.  Chronic stress - like the stress of a willfully incompetent man abandoning all of the responsibilities of home, parenting, elder care, and all forms of emotional labor and support onto the shoulders of a woman - damages her physiologically and neurologically so thoroughly that her body attacks itself.

The chronic stress of patriarchy can be addressed by women refusing to allow men into their lives in any meaningful or intimate capacities or by men choosing to mature into adults capable of fulfilling their responsibilities to partnership, family and community.

Currently, as it stands in patriarchal relations, a grown woman must function at 200% so the overgrown boy can skate by at 40-50% capacity.  Just like the tax dodging corporations, patriarchal men drain the life out of the women in their lives by abandoning their responsibilities as men and then projecting the shame of their own failures of self onto the women working to fill the gaps left by his immaturity.  

So, the bottom line is that men need to step up to do the work or get out of women’s lives and homes.  Men are not entitled to drain the life out of women.  The choice forward is theirs alone. 

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