We're getting patriarchy wrong. Correcting this is critical to the feminist project.

Patriarchy is about advantaging men, not hating women. Understanding this helps us more effectively fight back.

Note: This is a theory I’ve been building upon for a while. It’s not fully fleshed out. I welcome your feedback and thoughts!

I don’t know a single man who will openly admit to hating women. In fact, that’s their first defense to every allegation of misogyny.

“I don’t hate women! I love them!” Much like how every white accused racist has a Black best friend.

Yet nearly every man I know has a history of mistreating women in some way, and almost all of them refuse to acknowledge their own misogyny or to recognize the pivotal role it plays in women’s lives.

I bet it’s the same for you. You’re surrounded by misogynists who claim to love women. They probably view misogyny as something other men do, and certainly not something the men they know, like, and respect participate in. They probably think that because they’ve never kidnapped and raped a stranger, they’re immune to allegations of sexual violence, and they’re certainly not part of the problem.

The easy explanation here is that these men are lying. But I think many, if not all, of them believe their own bullshit. If we want to understand how patriarchy actually works, we have to listen to and unpack this bullshit rather than completely ignoring it.

So what is going on here? How can we live in a world where every woman has been exposed to sexual violence but no man claims to have ever seen it? Where every woman has been in a relationship that exploits her labor but no man will admit to doing such a thing? Where misogyny is everywhere and remains the dominant culture, yet no man will admit to hating women? And where men claim that every single instance in which they are accused to misogyny is just a terrible misunderstanding?

We’re getting patriarchy wrong

Patriarchy, and the misogyny and sexism it spawns, are about hating women. Everyone knows this. That’s what enables men to confidently and comfortably hurt women, to exploit their labor, to not care about their emotions. Right?

I don’t think so. Patriarchy certainly causes many men to act like they hate women, and some men to actively and openly despise all women. But hating women is a side effect of patriarchy, not the main goal.

Consider it this way: Hating women on its own serves no specific purpose. Just as racism isolated from the system in which it exists doesn’t serve any particular end.

When white colonizers enslaved Black people, they did so for a reason: They wanted to profit off of free labor. To accomplish this end, they had to dehumanize the people they enslaved. So anti-Blackness was a side effect of slavery; racism was not the goal. Allowing white people to profit without concern for Black people was. This is a goal that cannot exist without racism, of course, but racism does not exist in a vacuum, or for no reason.

I believe a similar dynamic is at play with patriarchy.

When we look at sexist men, we see that there are some women whom they are nice to, some women whom they definitely don’t hate—sometimes their mothers, sometimes their daughters. They may behave in passively sexist ways, or adopt benevolently sexist ideas toward these women, but they’re not actively abusing them.

Philosopher Kate Manne argues that patriarchy exists to keep women in line, which is why men are capable of being kind and decent to some women and horrifically abusive to women who ever dare to step outside of their cages.

To understand patriarchy, we have to understand that it benefits men, and this is its primary purpose.

Patriarchy: A system for using women to benefit men

Men, despite what advice columnists and message boards would have you believe, are not stupid or irrational. They did not create patriarchy for no reason. They created it to benefit themselves. Patriarchy helps men. This is also why men continue to uphold patriarchy. It confers ongoing benefits—even, and perhaps especially, to men who identify as feminist, woke, or otherwise enlightened.

Patriarchy gives men free labor, easy sex, workplace advantages, a myriad of opportunities, and so much more. It gives them the right to lean heavily on women’s labor without ever recognizing it as such.

This is why household labor inequity is such a core feature of misogyny, and why time logs from across the globe always show women doing more and harder work than men. It works like this: Men don’t want to do “boring” work that gains them no credit. And they want to control the primary means of production and power—reproduction. So they outsource the bulk of the labor to women, then use their power to prevent women from fighting back.

Their primary goal isn’t to harm women; it’s to gain unearned benefits like leisure, free time, and higher wages. Harming women is the means to the end, not the end in itself.

Dehumanization, oppression, and why no one seems able to see women’s suffering

You can’t exploit someone’s labor, or use them sexually, or physically intimidate them if you see them as fully human in the same way that you are. Dehumanization is critical to the project of patriarchy. Dehumanizing women enables men to use women with impunity.

This is the “hating women” part of patriarchy. Men disconnect from women as human beings, which allows them to treat them terribly.

Something else happens here, too. Society treats women’s needs as amusing little inconveniences. So domestic labor inequity becomes a running joke rather than a brutal act of stealing women’s lives and time. Our culture builds in an assortment of justifications, which most people accept without question, to support men’s dominance and ignore women’s emotions. Some examples:

• Biological determinism. We pretend that women are just naturally better at household labor and parenting, or that men can’t be expected to step up. We deride women’s abilities, and pretend that inequitable results are the result of innate inferiority rather than years of socialization.

• Gender role socialization. We give girls Barbies and princesses, and make men and prettiness the center of their worlds from birth. This makes it difficult for them to objectively judge men, or to believe that they deserve anything better than what they get. In spite of this, we blame them when they experience abuse.

• Denial. We pretend that abuse and exploitation aren’t there. We tell women to communicate better, or take a self-defense class, or ask for a raise at work, as if there are individual solutions to oppression. Then it becomes the woman’s fault if a man mistreats her. Women, it seems, are responsible for everything.

• Gaslighting. We pretend that there is a reason other than sexism for the abuse. Maybe’s he neurodivergent and doesn’t know how to not be abusive. Maybe she just needs to make him a list. Maybe he never learned how to speak respectfully to women. Maybe he magically can’t hear when a woman says no, and instead needs a class on consent. In a patriarchy, we always give men the benefit of the doubt.

• Stigmatizing women. Patriarchy stigmatizes women and their emotions so that there is a high penalty for pushing back. Women who complain about the oppressive constraints of motherhood must be bad mothers. We’ve developed the myth that women are excessively emotional so that they never demand better, lest they be stigmatized as crazy. We pretend postpartum depression is the result of women’s hormones rather than the abusive system in which we force them to birth and mother.

In a patriarchy, the worst thing you can do is name the fact that you’re in a patriarchy. Men don’t like that—and of course, patriarchy is all about what men like. The wants and needs of men are so heavily normalized that simple, obvious observations—stealing women’s time is stealing their lives, and therefore abusive; sexual coercion is an act of violence; women are under no obligation to make men feel loved; most men are of low value to women and society—seem radical and extreme. The people who make these claims are derided as angry and unreasonable.

None of this is an accident. Each of these pieces interlocks to form the patriarchal system.

Why we have to understand patriarchy to fight it

“Why do men refuse to do household labor?” “Why would men rather coerce their wives into sex than treat them like human beings and actually be good at sex?”

These are the two most common questions I get from readers. A close third is about whether feminism can improve men’s lives—because, of course, in a patriarchy, even feminism has to be about men.

If you understand what patriarchy actually is, the answers to these queries becomes obvious: Because it is to their benefit to do so. Patriarchy makes men lazy and selfish, and it makes them comfortable with exploiting women—and with refusing to acknowledge the exploitation as such. It also supplies them with hundreds of socially acceptable excuses, which their friends, family, and even therapists will endorse. So women who push back against men’s patriarchal excuses are often dismissed as the real abusers, the real bad guys.

Patriarchy doesn’t follow the logic of ethics or critical thinking or science. It follows its own logic—a logic we must understand if we are to fight back. And one of the most important things to understand is that if you attack on of patriarchy’s levers—household labor inequity, for example—it will attack you with another. Because patriarchy’s primary goal is to protect itself, and the men it serves. At all costs—hating women, killing women, destroying relationships, even damaging individual men by causing profoundly broken relationships.

Patriarchy wants men to have to do nothing challenging. This is to their benefit, in the short-term. But ultimately, it harms men too. It robs them of their critical thinking, turning them into patriarchy-bots who can’t think or do anything other than what patriarchy tells them to. It prevents them from building meaningful relationships with women. It steals much of what makes life purposeful: connections to others, giving back, building a legacy made from more than money. It ensures that all but the stupidest of men will have death bed regrets, and that ultimately, men will die alone, having failed to nurture the only thing that really lasts: the love that lives on after death.

Men must choose: a little convenience now, at the expense of all that matters, or a more expansive vision for everyone.

Just like everyone else, men must sacrifice some things—laziness, entitlement, guaranteed leisure—to build a life that really matters.

That’s the real benefit of feminism—for everyone.