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What does the patriarchy, world hunger and climate change have in common?
The patriarchy is difficult to define in the same way that feminism is due to competing ideologies, but the patriarchy generally refers to society giving disproportionate power to men. Culturally, this will appear in many different ways. For instance, just because women have the chance to earn more than men, it doesn’t mean that they will on average, especially in careers with greater gender discrimination.
There’s a common misconception about the patriarchy: All men uplift and enable the patriarchy. This often disillusions people who view the patriarchy as neglecting intersectionality, particularly class struggles. These complaints against feminism are usually not stated in the way that I did. Instead, people interpret the idea of the patriarchy as calling all men oppressors.
Of course, this isn’t true. In fact, some men receive little of the patriarchy’s typical privileges, particularly queer men. This distinction which allows us to understand patriarchy will then help us understand the contributions of patriarchy on everything from climate policy to world hunger.
Although the world is far from equal rights, the patriarchy will still continue even without direct action from oppressors. The patriarchy perpetuates itself through social roles that men and women are coerced to conform.
This unending structure is a harsh truth, but hopefully it reassures men that not all of them are oppressing women, even if progressive men often involuntarily reap the benefits.
Men who experience a net-benefit from the patriarchy are only experiencing such because they are successfully, and often involuntarily, conforming to the gender roles which society coerces.
To demonstrate the omnipresence of the patriarchy in major social issues, I’ll show how problems not often associated with gender still connect to the patriarchy.
Climate Change
From youth, men are told to show little vulnerable emotion besides anger. This can often come at the cost of compassion and empathy being shamed with terms like “social justice warrior” being directed towards women. Sensitivity is something that discrimination paints as feminine, which leads to “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” being associated with rigid masculine values.
These cold and individualistic attitudes are an opposition to the political and ideological collaboration needed to address climate change. Climate change is in a unique position as a social issue because it is often dismissed due to tribalistic perceptions that the issue will only affect other distant people.
Compassion is gendered versus cold steel logic, but this has a bright side: women lead in climate activism, according to UN Women.
“Policies should build on these successes while also recognizing that women shoulder disproportionate care responsibilities, have fewer economic resources than men, and have lower levels of literacy and access to technology. These inequalities are exacerbated by climate change,” a report by UN Women said.
Roles of care responsibilities making career and leadership prospects difficult for women are key to understanding the limits on political power that women must (and often have) overcome.
Women’s expectations to balance care, their own career interests, and activism is a unique split which makes political change disproportionately difficult for women.
The universality of these traditional roles are underlooked. Care is labor, but it is not paid. Even outside of explicitly traditional roles for women such as in the “tradwife” movement, women are expected to have a nurturing personality in their workplace and relationships. Of course, this would be a good thing if applied in an egalitarian way because then there would no longer be a burden on femininity.
(This is the theme of the song All-American-B—- by the philosopher Olivia Rodrigo)
World Hunger
Unlike climate change, even some of the most individualistic individuals don’t deny the issue’s existence despite selfishly refusing to contribute.
Similar to climate change, for world hunger, women are both disproportionately affected and systemically disadvantaged in politically creating solutions despite all ingenuity.
“Of the 690 million people who are food insecure in the world right now, 60 percent are women and girls,” according to World Food Program USA.
This systemic disadvantage involves both social expectations and differences in pay, if women are paid for their labor at all. As of 2021, every nation has a gender pay gap and discouraging leadership roles is a key part of continuing this, even in societies which have no legal discrimination against women.
When we consider the ultra-rich, year after year, men make up a higher percentage of billionaires, who obviously have the greatest amount of resources for solving a problem of economic inequality such as world hunger. In this sense, the patriarchy affects all economic inequalities and crises.
Conclusion
The patriarchy is an overarching system which oppresses and represses women (and men) through constricting gender roles and direct discrimination. These constricting gender roles affect everything in our world from how we are socialized to determining who has grand political say-so.
Inherently, collaborating to solve climate change or world hunger has nothing to do with gender, but when we analyze the power structures of our world through a feminist lens, it’s clear that the patriarchy is intertwined in all social issues.
