What you need for exiting the Patriarchy
Until about 8 months ago, I wasn’t aware of how my life is shaped by Patriarchy; I wasn’t aware of the opportunities and advantages being a man grants me. I didn’t realize that the world we live in is made by and made for men. I didn’t know what I was creating in terms of relationships or intimacy, either. What I knew, I learned from my father and from my mother, and both of them live in Patriarchy. If parents in Patriarchy, and I do mean both mother and father, did not raise their children according to the same values they themselves were raised with, Patriarchy would have already died out centuries ago.
Fuck, it’s heavy and painful for me to realize that since I was raised in Patriarchy and haven’t escaped it yet, that means that I am sourcing it.
Therefore, the first step of leaving the Patriarchy is to become aware of something we have not been aware of: We men are living in and sourcing Patriarchy. This is the basic premise, yet many men go and stay in denial about it. Denial about how men are in charge in the dominant culture on Earth or that the modern Capitalist Patriarchal Empire is disrupting and destroying Planet Earth. Another typical defense mechanism is to believe that ‘all the other men are like this but I’m not’. The realization that every single man — and therefore including myself — is part of ‘all the other men’ is painful to look at.
However, even though we now know we are Patriarchs that does not change anything. What we need to find and stay at the edge of Patriarchy is the will to find it and move from there. To do this we need a strong commitment to walking a path into the unknown. We don’t have to know or understand anything about what our life will be like or where we end up at — what we need is the awareness that there is more in life than a 9 to 5 job, a relationship where we are safe and making money. We need the burning awareness that something else is possible and that we want to create it. In a way, it seems easier and less painful to deny this, but really only at first glance. We are so used to our pain that we would rather have the known pain than taking the risk of creating something unknown.
Therefore, another step towards the edge of Patriarchy is to work with our feelings. In Patriarchy, men usually suppress and numb their feelings. We do not take a stand for their feelings. If men had access to their feelings, we could feel the pain of what we create with our hierarchies and numbness. We could take a stand for something else and use the energy and information of our feelings to create it.
Not feeling or numbing our feeling drives us into disconnection. We keep superficial connections to other men whilst believing that this is how friendship or brotherhood works, because we have never even suspected that something else is possible. We are lone warriors, too afraid of being with each other to give honest appreciation to other men, especially in front of a group.
I have isolated myself my whole life, become a lone wolf and then manipulated myself into believing I was in connection. I had my drinking buddies that I met with frequently to drink, eat a lot and play video games. We never asked ourselves why men don’t cry in front of other men but instead semi-jokingly called each other pussies when one of us admitted to being scared. Ever since I broke out of this isolation, I see so many other men being ‘fine’ with shallow connections that are easy and safe. I do not know what brotherhood in next culture looks like and I am eager to find out. I am curious what men create when they stop playing this game of who is the best or who is the worst or who has slept with the most girls or has the highest income.
I need all my four feelings: I need my anger to move forward and to keep my training to leave Patriarchy dangerous, so I don’t fall asleep on the way and to choose my next step out of the 1000 possibilities ahead. I need my sadness to grieve all the times when I have not been alive or in the unknown or in intimacy but instead focused on being safe or on getting to have orgasms. Every time I find another pattern I repeat over and over, the first step is to grieve the consequences it had for my life for many many years. I need my fear, because I am stepping into the unknown, creating from nothing without knowing. I need it to give up the feeling of being in control that comes from knowing who I think am. Since there are no role models for being a man outside of Patriarchy, I need my fear to create. And I need my joy, which tells me that something else is possible and that there’s always another possibility. The path of transformation is a joyful one, where every step I take catapults me into a new shape with more and bigger possibilities to create new spaces.
In Patriarchy, human beings that are born as male can choose between two different ways to survive. They can either join the Patriarchal Empire and therefore choose the path of hierarchy and power where man collects the centers of others or they can decide to be a good boy and thus give away their center to their mother and later to their partners and authorities.
I chose to be a good boy and therefore by default did not stand up for myself for a huge part of my life. I learned to make myself small and do everything for my partner, even if it destroyed me. I learned not to trust men, since I saw how they were contesting for women’s attention and destroying their spaces. In my survival strategy making myself small and invisible like that is valued higher than more obviously Patriarchal behavior, because I learned that being visible as a man and possibly overstepping boundaries or invading female spaces is very bad and dangerous. One of the consequences of choosing this strategy is that I give up my power and my needs and wants — I do everything to please the women in my life. I also use the same strategy of giving my center away and trying to please with men who my box deems to have a higher status than me, like my boss or the police. Consequently, to stand at the edge of this survival strategy means to stand up for myself and to acknowledge that I am an amazing person. It means that I do what I want to do, express what I need to say and bring to the world and that I do not surrender my wishes and needs to what a woman might need. That includes asking for what I want, without expectation. To learn to do that, I am training and making conscious my nonlinear, wild, go-bananas unconscious part. I am training to be centered and with my sword of clarity out at any moment. This is a part of growing up and also growing out of Patriarchy.
Men inside a Patriarchy have no idea about the ways they are affected by it. We have the ‘advantage’ in Patriarchy, we ‘succeed’. Yet in reality we are not able to build relationships that are based on being and creating instead of surviving, i.e., having the same fights and problems over and over again. I’ve even had the same problems and fights with different girlfriends! And yet I still didn’t even begin to think that it might be my unconsciousness that creates these problems. We men in Patriarchy don’t know how to be in relation without hierarchy, how to create in togetherness or how to be in authentic connection with other men. Since we are living in a Patriarchy, almost 100% of our life is affected by it without us knowing or seeing alternatives. That means we have to question everything! There are reasons why the women’s movement to get out of Patriarchy is already ongoing for centuries: In Patriarchy, women are slaves — they adapt to it and teach it to their children, but their role is a very visibly suppressed one. Seeing and experiencing the pain of that role every day makes breaking out of it a more obvious wish. Men are Patriarchy, we seem to be the ones having all the advantages, why should we change anything when it seems to benefit us?
I have experienced that many men argue about this. My perception is that they are angry or afraid that it might be true.
As illustrated above, a man has a great deal of parts that are based in Patriarchy. Going to the edge and expanding from there includes learning to be okay with many of those parts dying. You need the willpower and the possibility and the love to burn the old, obsolete rubbish so that something new can be born. Just like a phoenix. This impermanence is a central part of living. The parts that have to die could be for example working a 9 to 5 job, sexualizing women, thinking in hierarchies, using other people for your own benefit, sex, power games on the highway, contemplating how and where to shop, giving away your authority, using women, being afraid of overstepping boundaries or actually doing it, making yourself small or overconfidently big, living in scarcity of money/food/attention/fame, not accessing your feelings, flirting with girlfriends of your friends, possessing women, etc…
I could go on for a very long time.
One way to get to and stay at the edge of Patriarchy is self-observation. With that I mean putting part of your attention on the question “What are the ways in which I am sourcing Patriarchy right now?” to become aware of the tiny little things you do. You can ask yourself: “Am I using women for my needs right now?” or “Am I sourcing competition?” or “Am I valuing myself higher or lower than anyone else in the room?” A helpful trick is to observe other men, to find out in what ways they are living and sourcing Patriarchy and then assume you do the same thing. Then, you can stay with that assumption until you either find that you use the same patterns or until you find proof that you don’t — this may take a while. I have found out that, personally, I usually first deny that I also do the “bad things” I see in others. It takes love towards ourselves to accept those parts, and we need to stay at the edge. Only when staying at the edge can those parts unfold into something new.
A big and necessary step in leaving Patriarchy is finding your team. There’s this saying that goes: A man cannot build a house, but ten men can build ten houses. For me, it’s the same about escaping Patriarchy. A man cannot escape Patriarchy, but ten men can. It is way easier to put your attention on other men and examine how they are behaving than to put that attention on yourself. Therefore, having a team that stands at the edge together, that puts their attention on each other to coach each other, is essential.
To go to the edge, the whole team needs to start being in the context of radical responsibility. As we are living in a culture where no one takes responsibility for the huge problems we have (like the climate crisis or the exploitation of foreign countries and Planet Earth in general), exiting this culture is not possible without taking responsibility.
It is quite difficult to find a path to exit Patriarchy, since there are no men that could function as role models. There is no idol, there is no manual. Exiting Patriarchy is about inventing next culture — from the way you greet each other to how men relate to each other. What new possibilities are there for men to be in the same space, together? How could working together look like when it is about creating something together? I am ready to ask the dangerous questions I have never asked before. What pain do I have that I do not show? About life, love, sexuality?
How does grocery shopping work if supermarkets (whose profit margin has tripled in the last ten years in Germany) are not an option anymore? Where do I live if cities (which are based in scarcity by design) are not on the menu anymore? How do I let go of the dependance on money? How do I find a job that fulfills me? Since the entire world is influenced by Patriarchy: How do I go to the edge of something that is everywhere? My clothes and shoes that I wear, the phone that I have, the laptop that I use to write this — almost all my belongings are based in Patriarchy. The car I am sitting in is manufactured in Patriarchy by people living in Patriarchy. How can I escape something that sells the very water I drink?
I find the biggest job is to create something new. Without knowing. Staying at the edge with all the questions and experimenting — trial and error — until something works.
To be honest, in my personal experience Patriarchy is a sweet prison, where I have insurances and job security and ‘work in teams’ with ‘flat hierarchies’ and get discounts at the gym. As long as I bring the results that my boss is searching for, I’ll have my freedom. Until COVID-19 happens and the boss dictates what measures to take. So still, if shit hits the fan, my boss is my boss — no matter how flat the hierarchies are. In Patriarchy, I can have a nice, comfortable, safe zombie life.
In the end, I cannot really prepare for escaping Patriarchy. I commit to escaping the Patriarchy, even though I do not know the next step, even though I do not see where I will land. I am okay with losing everything and with starting over in a new culture. The whole identity of who I am might crash down multiple times. These are the core requirement for leaving Patriarchy: The willingness to burn the parts that are based in Patriarchy; taking the radical responsibility that I create everything I experience — consciously or unconsciously; the commitment to create the path that leads into something new. I know that it is not an easy journey and I am willing to step up anyway. I have no idea how long it will take, and I am okay with that.
What happens when I stop playing this game? Who am I when my Patriarchal behavior patterns are burnt to ashes? What new choices do I have? At the moment I am stuck in my identity that is living in Patriarchy and I cannot choose to not live there. I want to have this choice about the culture I live in. In order to achieve this, I can just go to the edge and take one step after another, always with the question: “Where is my new edge?”
