Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution by Laurie Penny

and every day more men and boys are making that choice. The question is – will you be one of them?
    NAMING PATRIATCHY
    For many centuries, money, power and the ability to create large amounts of random bloody carnage has been concentrated in the hands of a few white European men, usually the richest and most well connected. Between them, these men represent only a fraction of the total male population, and yet every man and boy is expected to aspire to be just like them, and every woman is expected to aspire to be in their company. There’s a simple word for this system. The word is ‘patriarchy’. ‘Patriarchy’ does not mean ‘the rule of men’. It means ‘the rule of fathers’ – literally, the rule of powerful heads of household over everybody else in society. Men further down the social chain were expected to be content with having power over women in order to make up for their lack of control over the rest of their lives. 
    The word ‘patriarchy’ is a particularly hard one to hear, describing as it does a structure of economic and sexual oppression centuries old in which only a few men were granted power. Patriarchy: not the rule of men, but the rule of fathers and of father figures. Most individual men do not rule very much, and they never have. Most individual men don’t have a lot of power, and now the small amount of social and sexual superiority they held over women is being questioned. That must sting. Benefiting from patriarchy doesn’t make you a bad person, although it does very little to help you be a better one. The test of character, as with everyone who finds themselves in a position of power over others, is what you do with that realisation.
    Patriarchy, throughout most of human history, is what has oppressed and constrained men and boys as well as women. Patriarchy is a top-down system of male dominance that is established with violence or with the threat of violence. When feminists say ‘patriarchy hurts men too’, this is what we really mean. Patriarchy is painful, and violent, and hard for men to opt out of, and bound up with the economic and class system of capitalism. I’ve found that when I speak to men about gender and violence, the word ‘patriarchy’ is one of the hardest for them to bear.
    Modern economics creates few winners, so a lot of men are left feeling like losers – and a loser is the last thing a man ought to be. Women don’t want to be with losers. Losers aren’t real men, desirable men, strong men, and if neoliberalism is creating more losers, it must be because men aren’t being properly appreciated, and it’s probably the fault of feminism, not fiscal mismanagement. Neoliberalism may have set up vast swathes of people to fail, but the real problem cannot be a crisis of capitalism, so it must be a crisis of gender.
    Across the global north and south, people are realising how they have been cheated of social, financial and personal power by their elected representatives and unelected elites – but young men still learn that their identity and virility depends on being powerful. What I hear most from the men and boys who contact me is that they feel less powerful than they had hoped to be, and they don’t know who to blame.
    MASCULINITY IS CRISIS
    It’s a hot August night and significant parts of London are on fire. For three hours, we’ve been holed up in the front room of my boyfriend’s shared house watching Croydon burn, waiting for the sounds of breaking glass and howling sirens to come closer up the high street. It is the third night of the English riots, and all over the city, young men and a few young women have come out to loot shops and fight the police, organising online, swarming out of the inner-city areas that TV cameras only visit when there’s been a shooting, which in this case, there has – a young father shot dead at point-blank range by police in Tottenham. These young people come from areas where police harassment is a daily