Undoing patriarchy

A few months ago, I had the privilege of participating in two interactive dialogue sessions of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women on behalf of the Philippine government – the first was on Poverty Eradication, Social Protection and Social Services, while the second focused on Freedom from Violence, Stigma and Stereotypes.

As inspiring and informative as they were, the sessions also served to drive home how much work there is yet to do for women to be safe and supported, to be treated as true equals and as fully human. The sessions highlighted many of the same age-old problems, such as the disproportionate burden of unpaid work handled by women, the “dependency trap” which undermines the voice and freedom of women and the need for greater inclusion of women in access to finances and government programs.

The most harrowing issue, however, continues to be how violence against women and girls continues to be one of the most pervasive human rights violations, and how rapid technological advancements, while in some ways empowering women, have also introduced new risks that individuals and governments are ill-prepared to deal with.

The Femicides in 2023 UN report, released on last year’s International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, revealed that on average a woman or girl is killed every 10 minutes by someone close to her. The perpetrator frequently has a pattern of violence that the State ignored: in femicide cases where the victim had been subject to previous forms of violence, it was shown that in only seven percent of these cases had the perpetrator been issued a restraining order. The threats to the lives of these women were predictable, and that means their deaths were preventable, which makes those deaths all the more tragic – and the need for government action all the more imperative and urgent.

A woman or girl is killed every 10 minutes by someone close to her.

The data is compelling and we must act now.

The discussions highlighted several successful government strategies, but what they seemed to have in common was that they were whole-of-government, national-level action plans. Violence against women is so wide-spread, so multifaceted, so entrenched in our societies that nothing short of a full government effort, a multisectoral approach, one that engages both men and women, will be able to address the problem of violence against women. This has been the case in the programs in Australia, Fiji and South Africa that have seen some success.

But what should the aim of such a program be? In my opinion, it must be to target the root cause of this violence and of the mental and psychological framework that enables and sustains this violence. When you dig deep enough into violence against women, you will almost always find fanatical belief in a gender binary that equates men and male-associated traits with superiority and women and female traits with inferiority. A mindset where masculinity is the norm, the default and anything feminine is deviant, except as it supports and is subordinated to men. Where men, to get ahead, must be more controlling, more unemotional and more violent. Where women, to survive, must be more submissive, more devoted and must remain silent.

It’s important that we name this mindset, and it has in fact gone by many names, such as “macho” culture, but the one I think encapsulates it best is the patriarchal mindset, or patriarchal culture.

In their book “Why Does Patriarchy Persist?” Carol Gilligan and Naomi Snider define patriarchy as a culture, a hierarchy, where human capacities are seen in a binary of masculine or feminine, with privilege given to the masculine. Under the patriarchy, some men are above other men, but all men are above any woman – where only men are allowed to have selves while women must be selfless. Patriarchy is a rigid set of rules and codes which attempts to shape how men and women act and what they believe to be their ideal selves. It weaponizes shame and guilt to preserve an artificial hierarchy – in other words, to justify an unjust inequality.

The ability to empathize with one another, or to voice our dissent or to listen to others… these are some of the first things that a patriarchal society strives to take away, by marking them as “feminine” and inferior. When we cannot talk, we cannot understand one another, we cannot have sympathy for each other. When we cannot talk, we cannot fix things – we may even become so emotionally detached that we lose our desire to fix things – and thus we cannot change things. And patriarchal culture wins by keeping everything the same.

The same world where a woman or girl is killed every 10 minutes by someone close to her.

We can and must break free from this cycle. We must recognize the violence perpetuated by patriarchal culture and say enough! We must understand that the violence comes in many forms: physical violence in the homes of women and mental violence in the minds of our youth – both boys and girls – stripping them of their capacity to see caring and communication as good things.

We must encourage our girls to speak their truths and teach our boys to allow themselves to feel. We must demand that the government turn its full attention to uprooting the idea that women or the “feminine” are in any way inferior to men, with a whole-of-government national action plan which clearly targets the cultural root of gender inequality. We must make a sustained effort to teach that which patriarchy and tyranny fear the most: empathy for the other.

We must, in short, change the world.

For a world with this much violence against the bodies and selves of women, this much violence done to the capacity for empathy of men, is a world which cannot be allowed to stand.

This May, we vote for new leaders of the country, from our cities to our Senate. Make your voices heard – and place into office those who can listen, who can care and who are committed to doing more than maintaining the unacceptable status quo.