I want to start with something that might sound strange coming from a therapist. I understand why it feels good. Not to me, not from where I sit, but I’ve spent enough time really listening to people to know that before we can understand why patriarchy persists, we must be honest about what it offers the people it was built to serve. If we just call it evil and move on, we’ll never understand why it’s so hard to uproot. And we need to understand it. Especially right now.
What’s Actually Happening
We are watching, in real time, a coordinated rollback of rights and protections for women, LGBTQ+ people, and anyone who doesn’t fit the narrow definition of who gets to matter. Reproductive autonomy is being stripped away and called freedom. Gender-based violence is being minimized or flatly denied at the highest levels of government. The language of “protection” is being used to justify legislation that controls.
What I keep noticing, as someone who works with people’s inner lives for a living, is that the language being used isn’t the language of oppression. It’s the language of restoration. Of returning to something. Of getting back what was lost. That framing is doing enormous work right now, and it’s worth unpacking.
Why Power Feels Right to the People Who Have It
Patriarchy doesn’t just benefit men materially. It benefits them psychologically. And psychological benefits are incredibly hard to ask people to give up, because they often don’t even know they have them. When you grow up in a world shaped around you, where your needs are centered, your authority assumed, your failures explained away and your successes attributed to your inherent capability, that doesn’t feel like privilege. It just feels like reality. Like how things are supposed to be.
So, when that starts to shift, when women lead, when trans people exist publicly, when you’re asked to share space you always had to yourself, it doesn’t feel like equality arriving. It feels like loss. And loss is one of the most powerful motivators in human psychology. We fight harder to keep what we have than to gain something new. Some men aren’t defending patriarchy because they’ve thought it through and decided women deserve less. They’re defending it because, on a gut level, equality feels like subtraction. Right now, there are very powerful people handing out the language for that feeling, for free.
The Identity Piece
For generations, masculinity has been defined almost entirely by what it isn’t. It isn’t soft. It isn’t vulnerable. It isn’t asking for help or admitting you’re lost. What that leaves is a version of manhood that is basically a list of suppressions: don’t feel this, don’t show that, be strong, lead, win. For a lot of men, that’s not just an identity. It’s the only one they have, and it’s the thing holding them together.
Patriarchal systems, with their clear hierarchies and defined roles, give that identity somewhere to live. They make it feel not just acceptable but righteous. You’re not dominating. You’re protecting. You’re not controlling. You’re leading. The framework makes everything feel justified. When that framework is challenged, when women say “actually, that’s not leadership, it’s control,” it doesn’t just challenge a policy position. It challenges the entire structure a man may have built his sense of self around. People do not dismantle the thing holding them together without a fight.
Why This Political Moment Is So Dangerous
What we’re living through isn’t just a policy disagreement. It’s a backlash, a word that’s lost some of its weight from overuse, so let me try to give it back. A backlash is a specific thing. It happens when a group that has held unchallenged power starts to feel that power become conditional. The response is not just resistance. It’s a kind of controlled panic dressed up as principle.
We saw decades of slow, real progress in reproductive rights, workplace protections, LGBTQ+ visibility, and in how we talk about sexual violence. Then, quietly at first and now very loudly, something organized itself around taking that back. Not because the progress was failing. Because it was working. That’s the part that’s hard to sit with. The rollback isn’t happening because feminism lost the argument. It’s happening because it was winning it, and the people most invested in the old order noticed.
Right now in American politics we are watching men in power say things openly that even ten years ago would have ended careers: jokes about women’s bodies, dismissals of assault allegations with a shrug, legislation that treats women as vessels rather than people. And rather than losing support, many of them are gaining it. That tells us something. Not that people are monsters. It tells us that for a significant portion of the population, something about this feels like correction. Like relief. Like someone finally saying out loud what they’ve been thinking. That is what we need to understand, not excuse but understand, if we’re going to do anything about it.
What Patriarchy Actually Costs
Everything above might read as too sympathetic to the people holding power, so let me be direct. Women and girls are dying. Not as a metaphor. Maternal mortality rates in states with abortion bans are climbing. Women are being denied medical care in the middle of miscarriages because doctors fear prosecution. Girls are being forced to carry pregnancies that resulted from rape. Women are being killed by partners in domestic violence situations at rates that have not improved meaningfully in decades, in a culture that still, quietly, treats this as a private matter.
LGBTQ+ youth, already among the most at-risk populations for depression, anxiety, and suicide, are watching their existence be legislated into illegitimacy. The message being sent to a trans teenager right now, from the highest levels of government, is: you are a problem to be solved, you do not belong here, and we are coming for the people who helped you. Non-binary people, queer women, people of color navigating the intersection of racism and sexism are carrying the weight of systems that were specifically not designed to hold them. When those systems are actively reinforced and celebrated, it is not abstract. It lands in bodies. In mental health. In safety.
Why It Feels Indestructible
Because it isn’t just in laws. It’s in us. It’s in the girl who apologizes before she disagrees, the woman who shrinks in a meeting so the man next to her feels comfortable, the survivor who wonders, still, whether what happened to her was her fault. It’s also in the boy who gets laughed at for crying and learns the lesson, the man who can’t tell his friends he’s struggling because he doesn’t have the language for it, the father who wants to be present and tender with his children and feels, somewhere in his chest, that he isn’t sure he’s allowed.
Patriarchy doesn’t just harm women. It also puts men in a box that most of them never agreed to, and many are quietly suffocating in. It just happens to be a box with more power in it, so the harm is less visible and less urgent. It persists because it’s inside the institutions that shape us: schools, churches, governments, media. It persists because it gets called natural when it is learned. It persists because dismantling it requires people to give up not just power but identity, and that is one of the hardest things any human being can be asked to do.
So What Do We Do with All of This?
What I know, from years of sitting with people while they try to change, is this: nothing changes until it’s seen. Really seen. Not performed, not posted about but seen, in yourself, in the people around you, in the systems you move through every day.
For women and girls and everyone else not served by this system: your exhaustion is real and it is earned. The gaslighting is real. The way the ground keeps shifting under your feet while you’re told you’re overreacting is real. Surviving that, continuing to show up, insisting on your own humanity even when the culture is arguing against it, takes a kind of courage that doesn’t get named often enough.
For men reading this who feel some discomfort: that discomfort is information. It doesn’t make you bad. It makes you someone who is paying attention. The question isn’t whether you were handed a system built for you. You were. The question is what you do with that, now that you can see it.
The system feels indestructible. But systems are made of people. And people, sometimes, change. We have to believe that. Otherwise, what are we doing.