patriarchy Quotes

“‘You make it sound like she’s an accessory he needs to go with his outfit.’”

“And besides – he’s so proud of being a man – it’d be so painful and humiliating for him to know that he owed anything to me. It’d completely wreck our relationship.”

“Daughters draw with their husbands’ families, Tessie,”

“Medea: Well, suppose they are dead: … will any man afford me home in a country safe for living…?”

“For as long as I could recall, my mother had simply called me ‘Son,’ and, since her name was Asta, ‘Asta’s son’ became my common name. In a world in which one lived by the light of a father’s name and rank, that meant—since I had no father—I existed in a shadow.”

“Elizabeth Zott held grudges too. Except her grudges were mainly reserved for a patriarchal society founded on the idea that women were less.”

“Learning to wear a mask (that word already embedded in the term “masculinity”) is the first lesson in patriarchal masculinity that a boy learns. He learns that his core feelings cannot be expressed if they do not conform to the acceptable behaviors sexism defines as male. Asked to give up the true self in order to realize the patriarchal ideal, boys learn self-betrayal early and are rewarded for these acts of soul murder.”

“We need to highlight the role women play in perpetuating and sustaining patriarchal culture so that we will recognize patriarchy as a system women and men support equally, even if men receive more rewards from that system. Dismantling and changing patriarchal culture is work that men and women must do together.”

“To indoctrinate boys into the rules of patriarchy, we force them to feel pain and to deny their feelings.”

“This fear of maleness that they inspire estranges men from every female in their lives to greater or lesser degrees, and men feel the loss. Ultimately, one of the emotional costs of allegiance to patriarchy is to be seen as unworthy of trust. If women and girls in patriarchal culture are taught to see every male, including the males with whom we are intimate, as potential rapists and murderers, then we cannot offer them our trust, and without trust there is no love.”

“This is a patriarchal truism that most people in our society want to deny. Whenever women thinkers, especially advocates of feminism, speak about the widespread problem of male violence, folks are eager to stand up and make the point that most men are not violent. They refuse to acknowledge that masses of boys and men have been programmed from birth on to believe that at some point they must be violent, whether psychologically or physically, to prove that they are men.”

“Of course a man may know every one. Men are welcome to the privilege!”