Tag: patriarchy

I would like to see us stop trying to be so damn civil to the people who
are hurting us. I would like for us to stop thinking we need to prove anything to them. They need to prove to us that they can respect our lives enough to make social policy that stops battery. And as long as battery is going on, the woman who is being battered is also being raped. That is the truth from my point of view, and I would like to see us not gloss it over, because every time we do, we tell a lie about what is happening to the woman. And we also make stronger the unspoken assumptions that the sex may be fine, but the battery is something different. The battery is not something different. Possession is the way they’re related.

Andrea Dworkin, Life and Death

You want to make me into a flower? … Before I knew you, already I was a flower. Must I forget that, to become your flower? The one which is your destiny for me.

Luce Irigaray, Elemental Passions, trans. Joanne Collie andJudith Still (New York: Routledge, 2013), 34.

Ultimately I am suggesting that a better way of thinking about patriarchy is as emotional manipulation. Characterizing it as misogyny, or “hatred of women,” increasingly misses the mark because it fails at descriptive precision (4). Hatred seems vague, outlandish, or unrelatable and this makes the accusation easy to dismiss. With the rise of feminism’s influence, patriarchy has sought different techniques, echoing Foucault’s belief that politics use a “sort of silent war to reinscribe that relationship of force.“

The Male Sentimental by Liz Kinnamon (via cgrehan)

Socially, [patriarchy] is the cultural deceit of the system promising men authority, control, and power but denying these at almost every level of his life or, at most, paying off in very small coin. The most glaring exception of this, of course, lies in men’s domination of women and the power relations of the family.

Orr, 1993, 245

The predator wants your silence. It feeds their power, entitlement AND they want it to feed your shame.”

“Our bodies are not the ‘spoils of war’… a trophy to be collected to fuel your ego,” she went on. “It’s OURS!!! It doesn’t belong to you!! And when you take it without permission, it DESTROYS…… like a virus!!

Viola Davis re. Harvey Weinstein