Nina Power
In recent years, “patriarchy” has been dug-up and reanimated as a term to describe the supposedly poor behavior of men. It now functions as a sneer-word, one of the many used as a shorthand for indicating the right stance to be assumed by progressive-minded folk everywhere.
Yet there is something ironic in attributing our social ills to an excess of paternal authority. According to the US Census Bureau, 1 in 4 children live without a father of any kind (biological, step, or adoptive), a situation the National Fatherhood Initiative suggests is a factor in “nearly all social ills.” Fathers, where they are depicted in mainstream culture, veer between inept and pathetic at one end, unable to solve basic household tasks, and, at the other, violent, alcoholic, and abusive, consumed by impotent rage, railing against the universe and harming women and children.
Despite claims to the contrary, we do not live in a patriarchy. A patriarchy would require men taking responsibility for their families and for society at large. Instead, we live in an infantilized culture in which men and women are more like brother and sister, contending against each other in a condition of perverse equality. Two crucial texts for understanding this predicament are Alexander Mitscherlich’s 1963 book, Society Without the Father, and Juliet Flower MacCannell’s The Regime of the Brother: After the Patriarchy, from 1991.
As men and women become indistinct—a tendency created by the desegregation of sex-based spheres amid the rise of industrial society—the two sexes largely perform the same jobs, enjoy the same types of culture, and compete along similar lines in sex, military life, and other physical activities (most evident today in the spectacle of men competing in, and dominating, women’s sports).
Misterlich, a German psychologist, was prescient in observing that the collapse of the paternal function would result in an increasingly bureaucratic nanny state. He wrote: “A structural characteristic of our competitive society is a combination of envy with an appetite for dependence, which as a result of the advent of the administered masses has superseded the old ideal of rivalry with the father.” The last two years of mass support for highly authoritarian measures in the name of Covid safety attest that many would prefer to be told what to do by an anonymous technocracy than their older relatives, male or otherwise.
The French Revolution championed liberty, equality, and fraternity. But while we are well-accustomed to discussing the first two ideals, the last, fraternity, has received relatively little attention. It is the figure of the brother, more than the dream of equality or liberty, that truly defines the post-revolutionary era. As MacCannell, a feminist scholar, put it, “what we have in the place of the patriarchy is the Regime of the Brother.”
Under the Regime of the Brother, sexual difference is eliminated, and men and women alike are assimilated into a masculine ideal of fraternity. This has played out to the point of absurdity in the 30 years since MacCannell wrote her book. Women are expected to work, think, act, and love like men. Meanwhile, the brotherly tendency “to exercise power without responsibility” has replaced any paternal role.
We live in the era of the domineering, hedonist brother who seeks to erase sexual difference, and thus women. Real fathers and mothers are diminished. Men and women are forced to compete for jobs and for sexual partners in increasingly similar ways. Sexual difference has been recoded as an “identity” unmoored not only from biology, but also from established patterns of heterosexual courtship. I recall when many felt that dating apps would never make the transition from gay men to straight women. And yet here we are.
Complaints about patriarchal men are ironic, because they take aim not at the effects of patriarchy, but at those of its absence. The frat boy, the porn-addled young man who acts caddishly and frivolously, isn’t a father figure, but literally a “brother.” The more women act like brothers, the more uncanny our social and sexual relations become.
Men are no longer encouraged to be protective of themselves, of women or children, or of their communities. When masculinist writers suggest that men should take responsibility, they are dismissed by liberal critics as “right-wing” or worse. These attacks should be ignored if we are ever to fully reconfigure a form of life that permits the celebration of the beauty of sexual difference, and the roles of fathers and mothers. We celebrate an image of freedom that may be the logical consequence of revolutionary ideas of equality, but in doing so, we have left millions of people without meaning and positive social values.
By dismantling patriarchy, we have lost some things of value: the protective father, the responsible man, the paternalistic attitude that exhibits care and compassion, rather than simply placing constraints on freedom. This has resulted in a horizontal, competitive society that suits consumer capitalism very well, one in which there is no power outside the market and state. Those who oppose injustice should think twice before denouncing patriarchy.
In recent years, “patriarchy” has been dug-up and reanimated as a term to describe the supposedly poor behavior of men. It now functions as a sneer-word, one of the many used as a shorthand for indicating the right stance to be assumed by progressive-minded folk everywhere.
Yet there is something ironic in attributing our social ills to an excess of paternal authority. According to the US Census Bureau, 1 in 4 children live without a father of any kind (biological, step, or adoptive), a situation the National Fatherhood Initiative suggests is a factor in “nearly all social ills.” Fathers, where they are depicted in mainstream culture, veer between inept and pathetic at one end, unable to solve basic household tasks, and, at the other, violent, alcoholic, and abusive, consumed by impotent rage, railing against the universe and harming women and children.
Despite claims to the contrary, we do not live in a patriarchy. A patriarchy would require men taking responsibility for their families and for society at large. Instead, we live in an infantilized culture in which men and women are more like brother and sister, contending against each other in a condition of perverse equality. Two crucial texts for understanding this predicament are Alexander Mitscherlich’s 1963 book, Society Without the Father, and Juliet Flower MacCannell’s The Regime of the Brother: After the Patriarchy, from 1991.
As men and women become indistinct—a tendency created by the desegregation of sex-based spheres amid the rise of industrial society—the two sexes largely perform the same jobs, enjoy the same types of culture, and compete along similar lines in sex, military life, and other physical activities (most evident today in the spectacle of men competing in, and dominating, women’s sports).
Misterlich, a German psychologist, was prescient in observing that the collapse of the paternal function would result in an increasingly bureaucratic nanny state. He wrote: “A structural characteristic of our competitive society is a combination of envy with an appetite for dependence, which as a result of the advent of the administered masses has superseded the old ideal of rivalry with the father.” The last two years of mass support for highly authoritarian measures in the name of Covid safety attest that many would prefer to be told what to do by an anonymous technocracy than their older relatives, male or otherwise.
The French Revolution championed liberty, equality, and fraternity. But while we are well-accustomed to discussing the first two ideals, the last, fraternity, has received relatively little attention. It is the figure of the brother, more than the dream of equality or liberty, that truly defines the post-revolutionary era. As MacCannell, a feminist scholar, put it, “what we have in the place of the patriarchy is the Regime of the Brother.”
Under the Regime of the Brother, sexual difference is eliminated, and men and women alike are assimilated into a masculine ideal of fraternity. This has played out to the point of absurdity in the 30 years since MacCannell wrote her book. Women are expected to work, think, act, and love like men. Meanwhile, the brotherly tendency “to exercise power without responsibility” has replaced any paternal role.
We live in the era of the domineering, hedonist brother who seeks to erase sexual difference, and thus women. Real fathers and mothers are diminished. Men and women are forced to compete for jobs and for sexual partners in increasingly similar ways. Sexual difference has been recoded as an “identity” unmoored not only from biology, but also from established patterns of heterosexual courtship. I recall when many felt that dating apps would never make the transition from gay men to straight women. And yet here we are.
Complaints about patriarchal men are ironic, because they take aim not at the effects of patriarchy, but at those of its absence. The frat boy, the porn-addled young man who acts caddishly and frivolously, isn’t a father figure, but literally a “brother.” The more women act like brothers, the more uncanny our social and sexual relations become.
Men are no longer encouraged to be protective of themselves, of women or children, or of their communities. When masculinist writers suggest that men should take responsibility, they are dismissed by liberal critics as “right-wing” or worse. These attacks should be ignored if we are ever to fully reconfigure a form of life that permits the celebration of the beauty of sexual difference, and the roles of fathers and mothers. We celebrate an image of freedom that may be the logical consequence of revolutionary ideas of equality, but in doing so, we have left millions of people without meaning and positive social values.
By dismantling patriarchy, we have lost some things of value: the protective father, the responsible man, the paternalistic attitude that exhibits care and compassion, rather than simply placing constraints on freedom. This has resulted in a horizontal, competitive society that suits consumer capitalism very well, one in which there is no power outside the market and state. Those who oppose injustice should think twice before denouncing patriarchy.
