Last night I attended my second session of a Mutual Aid Self/social Therapy group here in Seattle, and since this blog writing project is kind of the thing occupying most of my “non-parenting” brain functions at the moment, I used my time as the narrator (or the role of the person receiving counseling) to talk about how I am feeling about this project, including my excitement and concerns about it, and why it feels like an important use of my time and brain space. I found out about this group by finding a flyer on the ground, so it really was a pretty wild shot in the dark/coincidence, but participation in the group is definitely the first time I feel like I have been taking steps to find a sense of community that isn’t rooted in a work place or family since moving to Seattle, and it feels really important and powerful to me that the group’s purpose is the creation of a collaborative mental health resource.
So what does this have to do with Patriarchal Misogyny? I think isolation is a crucial weapon of Patriarchal Misogyny (PM). Part of Patriarchal socialization as a man is the creation of very limited and constrained spaces for men to express emotions and reflect upon how we process our emotions. Religion and Family are the two official institutions that PM allocates to men for processing emotional experiences and answering questions about the self. These are the spaces where everyone living within a patriarchal society is expected to turn to for questions about their sense of self, their desires, and their understanding of their own sexuality.
Less officially there have always been others, like “locker rooms,” “the workplace cooler,” and various other “fraternal” organizations, many of which present as having philanthropic purposes, but often additionally, or even primarily, serve as male-centric community spaces for the cultural exchange of values and the purpose of identity. I don’t think most men consciously identify these as “community spaces for the cultural exchange of values” but I have first hand experiencing seeing how uncomfortable it can make many cisgendered, heterosexual men to grow comfortable seeing their work and social environments as male-centric, patriarchal and misogynistic spaces, only to react very defensively when those spaces open up to women or come under the spot light of an institutional gaze that doesn’t explicitly value patriarchal authority.
I think there are also the really covert social spaces that PM expects men to make for themselves and for the purpose of policing masculine identity, and these are where a lot of the most intense forms of misogyny are cultivated. This has traditionally been the “hanging with the boys” spaces/time, but also, as general social isolation and alienation has continued to grow (and completely balloon with the pandemic), includes semi private/autonomous digital spaces as well. These are the “what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas” spaces which are meant to be unassailable and insurveilable (to steal a French word)…except of course, by all the other men occupying those spaces.
Lastly, within PM, there are the spaces that must be dedicated to punishing and re-indoctrinating those men who fail to tow the line of patriarchal authority (and the authority of the current and specific patriarch, which can sometimes feel at odds with some competing authorities) and this includes the obvious ones like jails and prisons, but can also include psychiatrical and social institutions focused on the “rehabilitation” of men back into patriarchal society.
What really strikes me as interesting about the potential of Mutual Aid Self/social Therapy (or MAST) is that it is building a real space community dedicated to emotional health and processing that is actively challenging authoritarian structures generally, including the structures of patriarchal misogyny. This doesn’t mean that I think that MAST is incapable of being used for or subverted into a means of identity policing with patriarchal ends, but that seeking out and building mutually beneficial resources for both self and social emotional processing is an act that will undermine patriarchal authority. I think for a lot of self-identified men in the world, just seeking out therapy generally when struggling with issues of emotional connection would be a massive blow to the overt PM of Trumpism, but that Trump is already attacking the mental health resources that would make that possible, and that communities of resistance to PM and Trumpism specifically probably need to be thinking about and investing in creating mental health resources that are not dependent on the state for support. MAST feels like A model for what that could look like.