Part 3 - Dismantling My Patriarchal Ideas

I have talked about my experience of how patriarchal ideals impacted me throughout my childhood, and how I took that influence and carried its teachings and lessons in my adulthood. Now I will talk about my work to dismantle those patriarchal ideals.

In working to dismantle my patriarchal ideals, I've connected to a healthier essence of masculinity/humanity that patriarchy promises men and fails to deliver on. I've found my courage to do what I feel is right and speak up for what I believe in even when I feel alone in my stance. I've found profound love and connection from partners who see me doing my work and are willing to connect, engage, and encourage me to continue.

The main aspects of my internalized patriarchal ideals which I felt I needed to dismantle were:

• cultural masculinity
• love/sex
• work
• integrity

My patriarchal ideals of cultural masculinity

Men cannot speak their pain in patriarchal culture. Boys learn this in early childhood. As a girl, I was awed by a man in my church, a deacon, who would stand before the congregation and speak his love for the divine spirit. Often in the midst of his testimony he would begin to weep, sobbing tears into a big white handkerchief. The girls and boys who witnessed his tears were embarrassed for him, for in their eyes he was showing himself to be weak. When he wept, the men who stood beside him turned their eyes away. They were ashamed to see a man express intense feeling.

One of my earliest memories is of a bike accident when I was 7 years old. I was biking at my grandparent's house and fell, splitting my head open. I ran back to my family, I was crying and terrified, thinking I was dying, and I remember hearing my Nana tell me "big boys don't cry". At that moment I internalized a belief that my fear and pain were unacceptable as a boy and that I was wrong to be feeling this way.

I learned this patriarchal ideal at a very young age. So much so that when I had a similar accident the next year, instead of running to the adults, I snuck back into my grandparent's house and hid in the bathroom. I remember trying to staunch the blood with toilet paper, crying as quietly as I could. Thinking that it might never stop and I might die and deciding death would be better than showing that I wasn't a "big boy".

This message was reinforced throughout my life by the actions of men I saw on TV and in movies fighting and often dying "heroically" without tears, the kinds of men who women found attractive, strong men who never showed emotion.

In my adult life, this grew into never sharing my pain, fear, discomfort, feelings, or true self with anyone. I adopted the patriarchal ideal, reinforced by my father, that the only valid emotion I could feel and express was anger, anything else would make me weak and therefore less than a man.

I am still healing from this mentality. The first step towards this was joining a men's group and starting the incredibly uncomfortable process of learning to feel my feelings and being vulnerable with other men. I can't understate how profoundly helpful it has been for me to find a place where I can learn to be vulnerable and honest with other men.

After years of avoiding and pushing my feelings away, allowing them to come up and be expressed has been incredibly challenging. No single method has been a silver bullet, but a mix of therapy (psychotherapy, IFS, and EMDR), physical activity, meditation, men's groups, and openly talking about my feelings with friends and family has helped significantly.

My patriarchal ideals of love/sex

While masses of men continue to use patriarchal sex and pornography to numb themselves, many men are weary of numbing and are trying to find a way to reclaim selfhood. This process of recovery includes finding a new sexuality.

Throughout my life, I absorbed and adopted a conflicted view of women. I always felt closer to the women in my life due to a fear of men, stemming from interactions with my dad. However, I also grew up with and adopted the patriarchal ideal that women were objects of desire and that I needed them, and only them, to satisfy my need for sex/connection and that not being able to get that would mean I was not enough as a man.

The end of my most committed romantic relationship, along with some awareness that I was afraid of getting back on another relationship escalator, allowed me the space and drive I needed to interrogate my needs.

I explored several things, one of which was Tantra. While Tantra has a much broader focus than just the sexual/sensual, I did find the practices around pleasure and exploring my own pleasure incredibly helpful. While I had explored sexuality extensively with partners, my growth was stunted when it came to exploring pleasure with myself. The practices I found there led me back to a place where I had a healthy sexual relationship with myself, which allowed me space to start interrogating and dismantling my patriarchal ideal of seeing women as objects of sexual desire.

I also was introduced to the idea of polyamory which opened up a whole world of learning around what relationships could look like. In particular the idea of relationship anarchy which is essentially the belief that the other person and I can choose how we want our relationships to look based on our wants and needs, rather than societal norms. This allowed me to step off the relationship escalator path which I recognized was not what I wanted.

My patriarchal ideals of work

Many men use work as the place where they can flee from the self, from emotional awareness, where they can lose themselves and operate from a space of emotional numbness.

My whole life I have had an unhealthy relationship with "achieving" which stems from seeking validation from my dad. Patriarchal ideals around success took that need for validation and told me that making a lot of money would make me more desirable to women, validate me as a man who could provide, and provide validation of how intelligent/valuable/dominant I was over other people around me. Money also gave me a feeling of security which was important to me because I was so emotionally distant from others that I felt I had to be able to survive completely on my own, which is how I would end up if anyone ever saw me without all my masks.

This allowed me to focus the majority of my energy on work and making money and provided me with a way to avoid myself and my emotions. At the height of this, I was working in New York as a software developer making several hundreds of thousands dollars a year and working 10-14 hour days. In retrospect, this lifestyle didn't align with my values and I had to be emotionally numb to survive it. Making that salary allowed me to tell myself that I was successful when, in reality, I was profoundly unhappy and completely out of touch emotionally. These feelings continued to build and, as they did, I had to increase my numbing mechanisms of food, alcohol, Netflix, sex, travel, consumerism, etc to compensate and remain numb to the underlying feelings.

The healing here took several years. It started with moving away from NYC during COVID back to the small town I grew up in. Here I wasn't surrounded by the constant pressure to earn more money and I was further from a number of my unhealthy numbing mechanisms.

From this place, I started interrogating my relationship with money. A significant practice I undertook was to start giving away 10% of my paycheck every month to various causes. This helped me to embody the fact that I was "safe" without that money and also forced me to find causes that I connected with and felt were important. This was a significant factor in starting to reconnect me to my humanity and care of other people.

Next, I started working with an executive coach, initially as a way to improve my managerial skills. However, they quickly helped me to identify that the root cause of my struggle was related to my trying to have things (money, home, free time, travel) so I felt I had to do my job and get paid this salary so eventually I could be happy. With their encouragement, I put a significant amount of effort into reframing my thoughts from this have > do > be mentality into a be > do > have with the emphasis on starting with who I want to be in the world and as that person, deciding what I want to do and ultimately I would have whatever comes from that.

This reframe was incredibly powerful and challenging for me. It led me to understand that the work I was doing wasn't what I wanted and that I needed to take time off and take a step back to focus on discovering who I wanted to be. That is where I am at the moment, discovering more of who I want to be in the world and experimenting with different projects to see what feels right for me in what I want to do.

My patriarchal ideals of integrity

Learning to wear a mask [...] 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.

I learned to wear all the masks patriarchy told me to. The mask of a "masculine man", that of a "masculine lover", and that of a "masculine worker". All of these are masks I was shown as a child and chose to wear as an adult. At first, I wasn't aware that I was wearing them due to my avoidance of my feelings. Once I became aware I found I lacked the courage to stand up and remove them, fearing I would be ostracized and isolated if I didn't continue to conform, so I chose to hide.

This choice to hide had profound effects on my self-worth as I developed a "protective" part that would tell me to change myself to fit the mould whenever I felt uncomfortable with a situation. It resulted in a division between my true self, the one that held my own values and ideals which I repressed, and a patriarchal ideal self, the one I thought I should be and could never live up to. It resulted in me showing up to my life somewhere in the middle, unable to connect with myself and others because I was constantly conflicted about who I really was.

Being in integrity with myself means showing up as my true self in every situation. By hiding and attempting to fit in I chose fear and avoidance over being in integrity with myself. I chose to try and mould myself into the patriarchal ideal of a man rather than interrogate my own feelings and think critically about who I wanted to be.

The work of being in integrity with myself happens daily, by bringing my awareness to what my initial reaction is to everyday situations, interrogating that reaction to determine if it's aligned with who I am, and then choosing to respond in a way that's aligned with my true self. This has required a lot of time and energy to do, and the more I do it, the easier it becomes as I move away from default reactions and towards consciously responding from a place of integrity.