The Empty Tomb of the Patriarchy

And why the liberal/progressive cosmology is dying.

When the exceptionalist claims of Christianity in Europe were besieged by Arabic and Islamic religious beliefs, and thanks to them, the arrival of previously “lost” Greek philosophical and magical texts, the Church merely doubled down on their dogmatic positions. This led to the demon hysteria, the witch trials, the splintering of Christianity into Protestants and Catholics, and ultimately to the birth of the “secular” cosmology that midwifed capitalism into the world.

Something similar is happening now with the exceptionalist liberal/progressive cosmology. The more evidence mounts that it’s gotten it all wrong about men and women, and that the “systems” it believed were causing all the problems in society never even existed, the more dogmatic and rigid it becomes. And that’s why we see such hysteria about “anti-science” and the dangers of the “manosphere.”

I.

A recent article from

Vincent Kelley

, who is someone I’m always surprised many more people aren’t subscribed to (go do so, really), got me to finally get the balls to write about something I’d long put off.

You’ll note I used the word “balls” in that first paragraph. I’m pretty sure that a deep and full search of any of my writing (excluding my esoteric erotic fantasy novella, The Provisioner) would yield close to zero results of such a reference to male gonads, except for one exception. That exception would’ve been sometime while I was writing Here Be Monsters and stumbled upon one of the most mind-boggling truths about the abyss in perception between Republican-captured Americans and Democrat-captured Americans regarding Trump’s notorious statement, “grab her by the pussy.”

That statement, of course, is what triggered the mass liberal feminist protests in Washington against Trump, hundreds of thousands of women wearing “pussy” hats in protest of a man they saw as the newly-crowned scion of the Patriarchy. I was there but not there, meaning I was in Washington, D.C., to protest with some anarchist friends that day, but I wasn’t part of the women’s march. It’s a long story, and that’s not actually the story anyway.

What the story is, at least for our purposes, happened a few years later. I was talking to a woman I knew to be quite conservative and to have voted for Trump, and I also knew her not to be quite the complete idiot everyone made Trump voters out to be. We were talking about Trump, and also about her Christian faith, and I asked her, because it never made any sense to me otherwise, “How do you square Trump’s ‘pussy’ remark with your morality?”

She laughed, shook her head, and gave me the kind of look that meant she felt some degree of embarrassment for me. “Have you really never heard the expression, ‘grab him by the balls?’”

She didn’t need to explain any further, as I immediately understood. For her and probably millions like her, what Trump had done was to merely re-gender a common idiom, while for all the angry people, what he’d done was tantamount to bragging about rape.

Certainly, each side believed the other to be missing something so obvious that there must be some intellectual fault, maybe even mental illness, causing the other to conclude differently. But such a vast difference between the two perceptions is better explained as a difference in cosmologies. That is, there were two separate worlds (or more accurately, worldings), and each lived in one but not the other, and so neither could really understand what the other was really talking about, let alone how they came to the conclusions they did.

Now, we can certainly argue that the context of Trump’s phrasing certainly makes it seem like he was bragging about assaulting women, rather than engaging in the kind of pointless and crass banter heard more often in locker rooms. That, anyway, was the conclusion of those millions of women wearing pussy hats in Washington D.C., and it’s a fair conclusion. But at the very same time, millions of people took his comments as something else completely, and while it’s comforting to just dismiss them all as “evil” or “ignorant,” that doesn’t get us anywhere close to the truth of the matter.

II.

What I mean by different cosmologies is best understood through the lens of religion. Someone who lives in a world in which every living thing has its own spirit and consciousness (an animist) will approach events and things in a wholly different way from someone who believes a singular god created the entire world for humans’ use. A forest to the first person will seem like a vast society of living beings which must be negotiated with if you’d like to use something in it, while to the second, it will seem — at best — a beautiful example of God’s creation to make responsible use of, but regardless not something you need to ask permission of to enter or to exploit.

These are different cosmologies, not just different religious views, and these cosmologies lead them to see really-existing things (like a forest) in very different ways.

Political cosmologies operate in the very same way as religious cosmologies. They’re both complex systems of belief describing what humans and the rest of the world are and, therefore, how everything does and should relate to each other. In an explicitly religious cosmology, gods (or a singular god) set the model and rules for those relationships, and priests or prophets reveal these models and rules to society. In a “secular” political theology, the models and rules are natural principles (universal human rights, equality, etc) revealed by jurists and philosophers who generally don’t bother answering the question of where their revelations are actually coming from.

Now, back to Trump’s “grab her by the pussy.” Those who took that statement as a celebration of sexual assault inhabit a political cosmology that I’ll call the liberal/progressive cosmology. That cosmology has beliefs about the world that look remarkably religious, even though most would never describe them that way.

That blindness can be laid at the feet of what’s called exceptionalism. In exceptionalism, a thing, idea, or situation is wholly unique and cannot be compared to otherwise similar things. American exceptionalism, for example, is the belief that the United States is a special and unique case among nations and thus cannot be compared to other nations. So, though every other imperial power has eventually collapsed, America won’t, because it’s a different kind of imperial power (or isn’t really an imperial power at all), despite all the evidence to the contrary.

The liberal/progressive cosmology is likewise exceptionalist, especially when it comes to its religious features. But it only takes a little artful storytelling to reveal these features. Particularly relevant is the invisible, evil, ancient, transhistorical force it believes shapes all relationships between men and women. Not only does it shape them, but it also inhabits the behavior and actions of men, specifically, in a way that forces them to constantly reproduce it, with the goal of ensuring it continues to be a dominant force from which women cannot escape.

They even have a name for this dark force: “Patriarchy.”

Within the liberal/progressive cosmology, Patriarchy is treated as a kind of malicious god, or the demiurge, or even Satan, that has controlled human societies from at least the very birth of civilization and agrarianism¹. Like the evangelical Christian’s devil, though it’s invisible, it’s also everywhere, constantly manifesting itself in countless examples. Some of its manifestations are truly horrific, as when a woman is raped or beaten by a man. Other manifestations leave less evidence, as when a woman is paid less than a man for the same job or is not elected President of the United States. It’s even said that men suffer from the Patriarchy’s omnipotent malevolence, which is why they have such high suicide rates.²

Sure, most wouldn’t call Patriarchy a god or the devil. Instead, it’s usually described as a “system,” without noticing what we’re actually saying when we use that word. But “system” first came into English as a term specifically used to describe an arrangement or organization of rules and processes created by, arising from, or held together by some divine force, which was also its sense in ancient Greek.³ So, whether we call Patriarchy a “system” or “an ancient malevolent divine force,” we’re essentially saying exactly the same thing.

So, some of us inhabit a cosmology in which there’s an evil god/force/system called Patriarchy that is the cause of women’s suffering and needs to be fought. Others live in a cosmology where there’s no such god or system, and the immediate response of the former group to this latter group is to believe they’re part of the problem. And, of course, this latter group believes something quite similar about the former.

Each of these political theologies or cosmologies — or, fuck it, let’s just call them “religions” — sees foundational matters such as sexual differences in a different way, too. Each comes to different conclusions about what men and women are, what they need, and what they’re good at and bad at. In particular, though they agree that men are more prone to physical aggression, they disagree on why this is the case and, therefore, what can or should be done about it.

In the liberal/progressive religion, men have all these bad traits because of the Patriarchy. Boys raised in patriarchal societies are taught to suppress their emotions, to favor domination and violence over cooperation and empathy, and are rewarded when they exhibit the traits favored by this dark god. They then grow up into men who reproduce these traits and pass them down to their sons.

For those who aren’t within this religion, men are like this because these are traits inherent to men. In other words, there’s something innate (biological or at least physical) within maleness that leads men towards overt physical aggression, and thus it’s something that cannot be changed without changing the nature of men themselves.

Oddly, this second view is the general cosmology of quite a few very different political and religious frameworks. Many Christians, for example, would hold this second view, adding only that this is how God designed sexual difference (or, perhaps, this difference was a result of the Edenic fall). Pre-Butlerite feminism (that is, feminism that believed sexual difference was a physical reality) also believed men were innately more prone to physical aggression and argued women needed stronger laws to protect them from that aggression. And it’s generally what most of the so-called “manosphere” believes.

III.

That brings me finally back to Vincent Kelley’s article. In it, he describes a failed plan by Democratic Party operatives in the United States to manufacture a liberal version of Joe Rogan in order to elicit more support for their politicians from men. Their hope was to create a progressive alternative to the “manosphere,” which is a label applied to a loose grouping of podcasters, video makers, theorists, and populist influencers who reject the liberal/progressive cosmological beliefs about men and women.