As a male feminist, I recently read a question that says that “How are working-class men part of patriarchy when they don’t hold institutional power?” with a mixed emotions of warmth and weariness.
Warmth, because it is a question I have always hoped to find a final answer to.
Weariness, because I always feared the answer would be predetermined based on my gender identity as a man.
As someone who learnt feminism from my contact with socialist activism, this is a common question. It’s a question I’ve heard countless times, and it is posed, more often than not, by people who mistake being harmed by a system for being outside it.
I am sometimes one of those people who forget that patriarchy is not a club, but a code. It is a code that a lot of other codes flow from, from bro code to dress codes.
Patriarchy isn’t a formal membership club where you’re conscious of your participation every time you participate.
It’s more like an operating system.
It comes with the computer, and it’s not a software you have to download after buying the computer. It is an inherited architecture of power that scripts our relationships, beliefs, and behaviors. It doesn’t require your consent. It doesn’t care about your intentions. And you don’t have to understand it to help enforce it.
That’s why working-class men, while brutalized by capitalism, state violence, and elite neglect, can still participate in patriarchy. They may not author the script, but they often perform it.
But the truth is that privilege sometimes hurt the privileged, and participation in patriarchy is not always a privilege.
For someone who was raised as a man to benefit from patriarchy, I almost don’t see any real ‘benefits’ of perpetrating patriarchy. When I say real ‘benefits’, I mean needs that fall on the GROWTH side of the Maslow pyramid, not the needs on the DEFICIENCY side of the pyramid, like survival, security, love/belonging, and self-esteem needs.
On the deficiency side, it’s clear that patriarchy exists to cater more to the needs of men than to the needs of women. But I think despite this separation, all of these needs and benefits can be defined as power, and can be defined as patriarchal privilege.
This is to say that on GROWTH NEEDS (the main needs for human evolution), patriarchy favors nobody – man or woman, but on DEFICIENCY NEEDS, patriarchy is truly beneficial to men and harmful to women.
So yes, patriarchy exists in our daily interactions, and it is not just restricted to the policies of our political systems and institutions.
Power is diffused, and it is not always centralized. Patriarchy doesn’t just live in parliaments and boardrooms. It can thrive in households, memes, WhatsApp groups, songs, sermons, and jokes.
So when a working-class man demands emotional servitude from women, mocks queer people to maintain dominance, or replicates entitlement in intimate relationships, he’s not just a victim of patriarchy. He’s also its courier. Yes, he’s marginalized by class. Yes, he’s hurting. But being oppressed does not cancel out the ability to oppress or pass on oppression.
This applies to women too. Systems are not either/or. They are both/and.
For example, historically, white women have often benefited from patriarchy, especially through their proximity to white male power.
Some will ask; “Does that make them part of the patriarchy too?”
Yes.
Not because they run it, but because many have chosen to uphold it in exchange for racial privilege. From exclusionary suffrage movements to racialized domestic labor hierarchies to present-day carceral feminism, many white women have reinforced patriarchal structures, especially when it protected their place in the racial order.
Many rich women also do this. That’s not just “benefiting.” That’s participation.
So who is running this shitshow called patriarchy – white men? Men, generally? Everybody?
My answer is ANYONE AND EVERYONE.
We are not simply “oppressors” or “oppressed.”
Each of us reflect and reproduce the structure of the system in miniature unless we deliberately work to transform it.
Your radical uncle who rails against billionaires but beats his wife? The feminist activist who campaigns for Palestine but silences Black Trans voices? The man deconstructing masculinity while still struggling to hear women?
We are the ones who allow systems to reproduce. But we are also the ones who can make it possible for systems to change. Reality holds opposites, not as contradictions to be erased, but as inseparable components of a single system.
This means that the oppressed can oppress, the wounded can wound, and the beneficiary can also be exploited. These are not paradoxes. They are material conditions. To see clearly, we must stop demanding simplicity from complexity.
So… Who’s Part of the Patriarchy?
If you live inside it, you’re part of it.
That’s not an accusation. It’s a starting point.
The real question isn’t Am I part of it?
It is What am I doing with my part?
It is am I enforcing it?
Am I disrupting it?
Am I silent when I should speak?
Am I centering comfort over justice?
Participation is inevitable, sometimes. But complicity is a choice. So is resistance.
The message here is to avoid simplistic villain/victim binaries, based on identities, but it does not erase the fact that working class men can ‘benefit’ from the patriarchy and uphold it with violence, even as they are also oppressed by the same system.
They have a power and privilege within the patriarchy because of their gender, and when we talk about everyone’s complicity in patriarchy, it is not without this proper distinction because we risk equating unequal power dynamics.
We cannot deny the fact that most men knowingly perpetrate the patriarchy because they know the ‘benefits’, and most men are sometimes against feminism because they see those ‘benefits’ being taken away.
But as a man or woman, if you’re ready to choose differently, that’s good.
We are the society. We are the system. We are the Patriarchy. Patriarchy will continue to exist if people do not want to break free from it, or are only hating one part of it and enjoying the other where it seems to ‘benefit’ them.
The resistance to patriarchy needs you, no matter your gender identity.
It needs you, even if this society raised you as a man. It needs you. Not as a guilt-stricken ally, but as a co-creator of something better.
Because no one is free until all are free.
And no system is eternal, not even the patriarchy.
Written by Omole Ibukun
