There are always any number of reasons to think about patriarchy, from lack of equal pay to lack of the equal rights amendment to lack of capital for all-female founding team. (I received some of the mythical 2% of capital so allocated…an allocation that hasn’t changed since BlogHer raised its first round in 2007.)

Maybe it’s the way women’s bodily autonomy is still in the hands of mostly male legislators, and how we’re counting on the kindness of strangers like the unpredictable Supreme Court to sometimes throw us just a little bone in the fight to preserve our vanishing reproductive rights. The way anti-trans-ness is so focused on trans women because transphobia and misogyny go hand in hand, this week resulting in the murder of a 19-year-old University of Washington student named Juniper Blessing.

And this week it bubbled to top of mind because of all of the above PLUS this week’s Buffy re-watch featured two episodes where patriarchy and its negative impact were subtext throughout. Including its negative impact on boys and men.

Picture if you will, Xander Harris, lovable-ish Buffy sidekick, getting bullied and manhandled by your typical high school jock-bully. Buffy steps in, with her superior strength, and moves the bully along. And Xander tells her that being saved from the bully by a girl is more damaging to both his reputation and his self-esteem than living with a black eye for a few days would have been.

Yup, he’d rather get punched than get back-up from a girl.

So, I did a little research this week on how the patriarchy is bad for us all, not just girls and women. First let’s define our terms:

I focused on two areas of inquiry:

The gender pay gap is stubborn. And lack of equal pay is a drain on the economy. And degrades the standard of living for too many people.

In general, and worldwide, women invest more of their earnings and income back into their families and communities. This Harvard link is a good overview about why investing in women pays dividends, and the World Bank has published data about the global stats.

In particular, children of all genders are the victims of the fact that women still make much less on the dollar than men. Half of U.S. households with children have either a single mother head of household or a woman who contributes at least 40% of their household income.

So a world in which women make less and have less support in the workplace and at home is a world missing out on all the ways women would use their fair pay (and use it differently than men, according to Harvard.

And the ironic (but utterly expected because patriarchy) truth is that men make more money as father, while women make less money as mothers. Gah!

But again: This is having big impact on kids.

For those of you who are not familiar, my Governor Gavin Newsom’s wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom is a badass documentarian. Her first film, Miss Representation, was about the lack of adequate representation for women in the media we all consume every day, and how that impacts women’s power and influence in society.

Her second film turned her lens on boys and men. It’s called The Mask You Live In, and it explores America’s “narrow definition of masculinity,” and why that definition is contributing to a mental health crisis for boys and men.

And it is a true crisis. According to the film, “compared to girls, boys in the U.S. are more likely to be diagnosed with a behavior disorder, prescribed stimulant medications, fail out of school, binge drink, commit a violent crime, and/or take their own lives.“

Men are much less likely to seek mental health treatment compared to women, but much more likely to attempt (and succeed) at ending their lives.

I could probably write a lot more words on the subject, but for now I’ll stick to saying that it’s frustrating to have folks talk about our current “loneliness epidemic,” and implicitly ask women to somehow fix that for men by dating them (looking at you Scott Galloway), but there’s little to no talk about how smashing the patriarchy would probably help. Give men more room to express emotions, ask for help, make heart connections with friends, family, and partners, not feel so much pressure to perform, and generally be safer and therefore more appealing, particularly to women who have learned that men can be dangerous to them. Here’s one paper I found that does explore the topic.

Basically, any time is the right time to talk about patriarchy, not just as an individual experience, but as a system that hurts every single one of us who isn’t in the absolute upper echelon (and amongst the minority who will access mental healthcare when they need it.)

That being said, sometimes I confess I get bugged by all the worrying about men in this system they also benefit from tremendously. Do you feel that conflict? How do you parse it out in your mind?

There’s a moment at the end of a frat-boys-from-hell episode of Buffy I watched this week that hit a little close to home and felt poignant to me, and almost anachronistic. The evildoings of this frat turn out to be multi-generational, and once that is discovered, there are consequences:

And all I could think was we could really use some accountability like that today for the rich and powerful who have abused their power and abused people.

Questions: How are you seeing the social construct of patriarchy affect people in your life, or does that just feel like theoretical BS in today’s world?

I watched Season 2, episodes 5 (Reptile Boy live recap) and 6 (Halloween live recap)…which aired on October 13 and October 27, 1997, respectively. We’re a bit in the messy middle of the season here…all the loose ends have been tied from Season 1, but we are not quite in the accelerating Big Bad arc of Season 2 yet. We’re in a phase of cementing relationships between more characters, giving us more hints into their pasts and their vulnerabilities in the present. And those vulnerabilities put Buffy in a less-than-strong position for two episodes in a row. From which she has to extract herself and save others.

The core #BuffyLifeLesson in Season 2 Episode 5 is that lack of balance leads to lack of good choices. In a way Buffy lives within her own set of constraints as the Slayer, but if she doesn’t make room for her own humanity (or if others push her into that), that frustration will manifest in bad choices and danger. Sort of like how men caught in the throes of the patriarchy act.

The core #BuffyLifeLesson in Season 2 Episode 6 is explicitly stated as “Be careful what you wish for,” but to me it’s also about not waiting for a socially sanctioned moment to know yourself and acknowledge your shadow self and secret fears. When you stuff that down, it’s going to bubble up and be way more disruptive than if you let yourself off the hook and let off a little steam when you need to.

I got a little exhausted watching the interview above…I have done a LOT of different things in my life 😹 but I also just wrote in an email to a friend this weekend, “Maybe I’m in my anti-ambition era.”

How are you feeling about ambition these days?

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