“Boys don’t cry. Man up and grow some balls, you sissy, or are you just gonna cry like a girl?”

More than anything else, the fucking patriarchy hurts and oppresses women. But if we’re going to take in the scope of the thing, we have to look wider than that. Because the fucking patriarchy hurts and oppresses everyone.

Women are inferior, therefore anything a man does that is at all like a woman diminishes him, is something for him to be ashamed of. This has led to some of the most ridiculous stereotypes, since the ideal woman is clean, well-dressed, and able to do all the cooking and cleaning on top of whatever else everybody is doing, the stereotypical man is slovenly, unwashed, and lazy. I can speak to this one from personal experience, when I go out in public clean, well-groomed and stylishly dressed, it’s almost certain that someone will assume I’m gay.

Gender roles are silly things. The idea that your sex is also a job, that it comes with responsibilities specific to it, is an old one. It can be found all over the world, but no two cultures seem to agree just which duties are “manly” and which are “womanly”. There’s no practical reasons for them, we could easily just ignore these tired old social conventions and be who we like, except we still have this ghost of a dinosaur telling us to conform, conform, conform.

Conformity is a powerful force in the human psyche. When someone refuses to conform they’re ostracized, demonized, and frequently targeted for violence. The fucking patriarchy survives on conformity, and has mechanisms to defend itself from iconoclasts.

Another short post, I’m sicker today than I was yesterday. At this rate I’m going to have to stretch this out. Maybe that’s for the best, talk about something else tomorrow and get back to this subject. I’ll think about it later, for now I’m going back to bed.