It Was Never Just About Men

What patriarchy actually is, why it runs everything, and what we do about it

You know that feeling when something has been bothering you your whole life and you finally get the word for it? Like you knew something was wrong, you just couldn't pin it to the wall?

That's what happened when we stopped calling patriarchy a "man problem" and started calling it what it actually is: a power structure. The original one. The one everything else got built on top of.

Stay with me, because this is the conversation that changes how you see every other conversation.

It's not about men. It's about who gets to be on top.

Patriarchy is not your ex-husband. It's not your overbearing father. It's not even that one boss who took credit for everything you built. Those people are symptoms. Patriarchy is a political and social system that insists that certain beings are inherently dominating, superior to everyone deemed weak, and endowed with the right to rule over others, and that logic does not stop at gender. It never did.

Historian Gerda Lerner tells us it has never been simply about men having power over women. It has always also been about hierarchies among men, and those two things are integrally linked. The man at the bottom of the economic ladder and the woman at the top of the corporate ladder are both inside this architecture. They just experience it differently.

Here's the kicker: the perpetuation of patriarchy is not really a matter of gender. It's a matter of assimilated power dynamics and long-internalized oppressions, a system powered by colonialism and made permanent by capitalism.

Read that again. Powered by colonialism. Made permanent by capitalism. This is not a gender story. This is a governance story.

The Blueprint Was Always Showing

They built the whole house on this foundation.

Once you normalize the idea that some people are born to rule and others are born to serve, you have the blueprint. You run it on gender first. Then you run it on race. Then on class. Then on land. Then on whole nations.

Gerda Lerner puts it plainly: successful groups of men didn't just destroy their male opponents, they learned how to enslave or subordinate them systemically, which is exactly how slavery and colonialism got built. The plantation owner and the patriarch in the household are not metaphors for each other. They are the same logic wearing different clothes.

Bell Hooks called these "interlocking systems of domination," and she was clear that capitalism, racism, and patriarchy reinforce and sustain each other. They are not three separate problems. They are one machine with three gears. You cannot fix one gear and leave the others spinning.

Racism and patriarchy are not side effects of capitalism. They are instruments of it.

That is why every "issue" feels connected to every other issue. Because they are.

How it replicates itself.

Bell Hooks explains how patriarchy gets installed in children from an early age. At school, they are told men hold power. At church, they are taught that God is a man who created and ruled over the world. By the time we are old enough to question it, we have been living inside it so long it feels like air.

We need to highlight the role women play in perpetuating and sustaining patriarchal culture, because patriarchy is a system that women and men support equally, even if men receive more rewards from that system.

That is not a criticism. That is a diagnosis. You cannot shame someone out of conditioning. You have to name it first. You have to see the architecture before you can stop running the software.

The harm lands on your body.

This is why the cove exists.

Hooks insisted on the importance of naming these oppressive systems, using precise language to help us define our reality and accept that all of these things are functioning simultaneously at all times in our lives.

That is what we do at this table. We name it. We count the cost. We refuse to keep calling a structural injury a personal failure.

When you're exhausted, that is not weakness. That is the designed outcome of a system that needs you too tired to organize. When your voice gets talked over, that is not a personality clash. That is hierarchy enforcing itself in real time. When your work gets undervalued, underpaid, or uncredited, that is not bad luck. To understand what's happening to us today, we have to look at the history, marked by violence against people and their bodies, their knowledge, their languages, their ways of living, and their relationship with their own land.

The harm lands on your body. It lands on your paycheck, your health, your sleep, your safety. It is personal in that sense. But it did not originate with you, and it is not yours to fix alone.

So what do we do with this?

We start by refusing to shrink the problem back down to a personal one. As Berta Cáceres, the Honduran Indigenous activist and Goldman Prize winner called us before she was assassinated for her work: we must concretely dismantle capitalism, patriarchy, discrimination, and racism. Not manage them. Not accommodate them. Dismantle them.

That work starts here, at this table, in this cove, among women who are done pretending that what is happening to us is our fault or our imagination.

We name the system. We map the harm. We refuse to individualize what was always structural. And we do it together, because that is precisely what the architecture was designed to prevent.

The ground is ours. It always was.

Now we know why they worked so hard to make us forget it.

With love, Kim

Written for the women who always knew something was wrong and are done waiting for permission to say so.

Join us in The COVE HERE.