In thinking about what to talk about next, the phrase “Patriarchal Misogyny” leapt out at me as something that I think I use very intentionally to mean something specific, but that many readers might see as just “woke buzzwords” or an attempt to make myself sound more like a fancy academic cultural critic when I could have just said something like “a hatred for women,” if I was trying to communicate more direct.
I mean isn’t all misogyny patriarchal?
Well, for the sake of my critique of Donald Trump, I think it is important to talk about a type of misogyny that is deliberately performed socially/politically for the sake of reinforcing some of the most authoritarian patriarchal structures, and the kind of misogyny that stems internally from a hatred of women, even if both types eventually serve patriarchal ends.
For example, when a young male mass shooter targets women indiscriminately, based largely on personal rejections and a sense of lost personal authority rooted exclusively in his masculinity, that kind of violence does inevitably serve patriarchal social, political and domestic structures (which I will get to in a second). However, even when the intention of the shooter is to become some kind of hero for incels and men’s right advocates everywhere, the reality is that these kinds of hyper violent misogynistic acts only really serve to create a literal bogeyman of “why woman should be thankful that the good men in their lives will protect them from these kind of monsters.” This kind of violence absolutely is providing a service to patriarchies everywhere, but it is coming from either a position of zealous devotion to a patriarchal value system, or even a sense of despair at feeling rejected from the promises of one of those value systems.
Patriarchal Misogyny is different in that its perpetrators are not the rank and file followers of patriarchal or misogynistic systems, they are the ones intentionally designing and shaping those systems, even if their reasons for doing so are more personal than actually political commitment to those systems. This is why Donald Trump in particular needs to be called out for his patriarchal misogyny, even if he is often capable of deflecting general accusations of misogyny by pointing out that he is neither the most overtly patriarchal politician, nor misogynistic. Like, Mike Pence is pretty clearly a politician more dedicated to rigid patriarchal domestic and political systems than Trump ever was, but he was also far more cautious and afraid to adopt the kind of overtly misogynistic rhetoric that Trump was in service of those patriarchal systems. Pence would have been an awful president who worked tirelessly to assert his own vision of patriarchy deeper into US politics, but he was never going to be willing to risk completely upending the US political system to assert control over a movement of men willing to weaponize patriarchal misogyny for his own political purposes.
This is why I am directing these blog posts specifically at patriarchal misogyny, and especially the radicalized and weaponized version of it that Trump has fully embraced as both a political tool and as one of the centralized underpinnings of Trumpism 2.0. Because even if it is largely self-serving, and a way for him to deflect legal accountability for acts of sexual violence in his past, his efforts to give it such a powerful and explicit platform (including surrounding himself with other men who have committed similar acts of violence) are either going to be a weak point in his overall drive towards authoritarianism that we must attack…or his platforming of patriarchal misogyny is going to be radical root of his most dedicated and zealous foot soldiers, who will put no persons or legal systems ahead of their messianic patriarch.
Maybe I am way off on this, and you have your own ideas about patriarchy and misogyny you want to share back with me? In future blog posts I intend to dig deeper into how we resist patriarchal misogyny as a weapon of authoritarianism as well as why it is actually a really terrible and unhealthy ideology for anyone to internalize, and how helping young men overcome its appeals will be essential for everyone’s future, but that will all be for next time.