Patriarchy (noun): a system of society or government in which men hold the power and women are largely excluded from it.
Patriarchy, a word I’m sure many of us are familiar with. Whether you benefit, detriment, or are simply a bystander to it, it is an invisible force field that grabs our society and refuses to let go.
While I self-identify as a feminist and someone who is very anti-patriarchy, I am unable to avoid it. I can share as many “Boys are the worst” comments with my friends as I please, and feel joyfully inspired by my future as a woman in a male-dominated field, but I exist within the vacuum that is patriarchy. I’ll even go as far as to say that I am a hypocrite by denoting myself as a rebel against the system: I’m a key player in it every single day.
It wasn’t until I arrived home on break in the suburbia of my New Jersey town that I truly began to think. More importantly, it wasn’t until I shared a boy war story with my mother that I became enraged. It was my mother, a sixty-year-old, self-proclaimed feminist, who lit this fire: I wasn’t angry at the system, I was angry that I was so blindly engulfed in it.
She told me of the mid-90s, a mystical time of Dr. Martens and NSYNC, and more importantly Sex and the City, a show that glamorized the life of single women. In between cocktail dresses, shopping, and bad dates with men, what more could a woman want! Maybe you were a little Samantha with a dash of Charlotte or a touch of Miranda with Carrie’s whimsy. However, this isn’t a show review: my point is, she brought up what she considered to be a similar literary masterpiece of the time: The Rules by Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider.
Don’t meet him halfway or go dutch on a date.
Don’t open up too fast.
Don’t call him and rarely return his calls.
Don’t expect a man to change or try to change him.
That’s just a little taste to give a general synopsis: supposedly a dating guide for women, what to do and not to do to catch a man. Well, you can imagine how far my eyes popped out of my head when my mother enlightened her twenty-year-old daughter with this wonderful knowledge. And you can maybe even picture my accompanied disgust when I realized that these printed words, patriarchal bits of knowledge, were things I subconsciously followed. Pieces of advice I often gave my friends in conversations.
Now, I write all of this to share my epiphany: stop letting patriarchy bleed into your life. These supposed “rules” aim to benefit men and force women to act in a way so “perfect,” “classy,” or “ladylike,” that how could we not take the perfect man off the market? We are given this idea that we’ll find the perfect boyfriend or husband if we don’t become emotionally intimate and refuse to pay on the first date. Even worse, we’re told that men will NEVER change and that we must change ourselves to suit their needs.
Patriarchy will not guarantee you the perfect life partner. Hell, if it does, I’m not even sure I want him. If I’m expected to follow a guidebook to make men want to spend more than two hours clothed with me, I will live peacefully in solitude. I will exist in this ecosystem of patriarchy and for once make men figure out what to do and not do to catch me.
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