Bell Hooks already did this better than I ever could. Hate is ingrained in patriarchy; a system designed to put men and women at odds, rather than finding workable common ground. We also know that the male experience is a treacherous one that often involves early death, substance abuse and rampant violence. For Bell Hooks, this is not an excuse, but it is a useful explanation and means of understanding. And men are not born with this, it’s Maybelline. Systemic Maybelline. And this systemic disdain for women emerges in many ways.
I was 13, the first time an adult man put his hands on my ass. I told my mother and she told me it didn’t happen. It was one of my father’s colleagues. I told my father, him and the man walked outside. Only my father walked back in, and I never saw that man again.
I grew up in a mostly white, mostly middle class suburb, and my mother loved to pretend to throw 60s socialite parties like her mother had done when pop-pop still worked in academia. It was a gaudy display of modern values. A ‘bring out the finest china’ event. She’d make my dad pull out the middle leaf and set out a charcuterie board that, in this economy, would have cost a couple hundred dollars at least. Then she would order us around the house to tidy, to make sure the house looked cold, dead and sterile enough to convince any passersby that no one actually lived there.
Then something interesting would happen. My father would greet the first few guests, then as more arrived he would let mom and the other guests do the work for him. He would disappear in half hour segments to do this or that. Sometimes I would follow him, and he would always gladly bring me along to tinker, away from the yapping of the upper crusts.
My father existed between two paradigms. He was raised blue collar by mechanics, but he was sharp and got himself an serious position at Northrop out of highschool. Then they paid for his college for Engineering and Computer Science. He was not the smelly science nerd. He was good looking, funny and sociable, all because he lived in both worlds. He was also a car guy. He loved his old junk, in fact, when he wasn’t taking orders from mom, he was almost always under the hood or chassis of his old Impala, which is where I learned the simple joys of fixing something broken.
What my father never said was that the socialite party was not for women, it was for men. It was for men with something to prove. We chortle now about the general knoblessness of men with clean, lifted trucks with racketty exhaust systems, but the dinner party was the first iteration of this. Come see my home, come see the fruits of my labors, come see where we are on the social hierarchy. My dad probably could have never put this into words, but my dad was no patriarch, he was just a man doing his best with a strong moral compass and no vernacular for the things he didn’t like or didn’t understand. My mother, on the other hand, god bless her, was often more patriarchal than he was. She wanted him to want to be the 1950s suburban upper middle class man. So desperately, in fact, that half the time she did the job for him. I consider that when I am dating. I know my mother’s genes are mine. I am vigilant about this, but sometimes even I slip.
Now, it might be a red flag to some, but my father taught me how to box, how to fix cars, how to skateboard, even. The undiscerning reader might say “Your dad just wanted boys”. But I think this is incorrect. Under patriarchy, men are humans. Women things are silly and trite and vain, but men things are human things. My father never wanted a boy, at least he never expressed that or made me feel that way, my father wanted me, and me is what he got. And maybe without knowing it, he wanted me to be a human being more than he wanted me to be a daughter. In fact, humanity was so important to him that it lead to my parents eventual divorce. I love my mother, I always will, and I don’t mean to be so critical of her. But as everyone knows, women have complicated relationships with their mothers. What should be mutual adoration, respect and love is often times twisted by the manipulation and cruelty of vicarity. I don’t mean it in a Freudian sense when I suggest that mothers want to be their daughters, I mean that for most women, something was always out of reach, and they don’t know how to teach their daughters to achieve that thing. This is as much an existential problem as a patriarchal one. Both are invisible. Both exert a degree of mind control. Many women don’t know that they want to escape the patriarchy, they just know they need something to be different. Without knowing what invisible force rules their life, they fall into the trap of becoming the thing they secretly disdain. My mother used to say that beauty was a way out of a situation you don’t want to find yourself in. And beauty is pain.
I think about the guy who slapped my ass at the family house party a lot because it makes me think about my mother’s response. “That did not happen.” her words, verbatim. What I realized was that she was not telling me that the actual event didn’t occur. She was telling me to contextualize it differently. Live as if it didn’t, because it’s going to happen again, and probably a lot. And unless you want to end up like a crazy bag lady, yammering to herself and making families cross the street when they see her coming, you’d better live life like that doesn’t happen. On the other hand, my father took care of it. I don’t know what he did, I don’t know if that guy is dead or what, I don’t particularly care, but my father’s humanity was on full display.
Humanity is power.
I remember a time when it was unpopular for boys to say “you don’t need all that makeup” it was perceived as condescending and rude. In many cases it probably was. However, I also think that for some men there is a desperate attempt to see women as human beings. Because to whatever extent much of fashion and makeup and woman culture is produced by men for the male gaze. Now, the savvy collegiate girl all done up in all the right ways can say that she’s doing it for herself, but that’s the trick of womanhood. It’s not like we actually do anything for ourselves. Beauty is pain. Someone can say that’s the prosocial instinct, but taken to a point, the prosocial instinct can make a person an infinite regress, hollow, nothing, a performance without a performer.
This is why I am hyper critical of fathers who treat their daughters like princesses. These are patriarchs. These are the men who hate their daughters because they don’t even think they are real. Certainly, they love their daughters, but they don’t want to know them, they don’t want to understand them, they don’t want to think of them as people. They love their daughters like they love gabbing about their nagging wives around the water cooler. It’s the show that they love. My father didn’t treat me like a princess, he treated me like a person. It was my mother who wanted me to be less than real. This was not her fault. It was how she was raised, it was the patriarchy’s invisible influence, it was the conspiracy of the universe that brought her into being. And it was the inability to address her own womanhood as personhood that made a monster of her, it made her a queen. But she was not a queen. She was a person who lived a half-life because she couldn’t escape her chains.
It’s wretched to think, but it seems true that the men who hate us often times aren’t even men. They are our mothers. We love our mothers, and presumably they love us. But I think more often than not that our mothers don’t know how to love us, in the same way Bell Hooks says men don’t know how to love women. Women who are the bastions of patriarchy do not know how to love, only that they are supposed to. But love is a human emotion, not the hot air of a hole, where a person should be. And those who cannot love cannot be human. That’s the tragedy of our mothers: sometimes they weren’t even people at all.
Note: I’m just a boy.