The modalities of patriarchal "thinking"

Patriarchy is a system that punishes women for breaching (or merely seeming to breach) gender roles. The structure of patriarchal thinking -- its "unconscious" as it were -- is hidden from general awareness.

Let me try to bring it to light. A patriarch is someone who is incapable of complex thought. His or her mode of thinking is entirely based upon binaries, dichotomies, the simple on-off switch of "Yes" or "No."

Let me put forwards two quintessentially patriarchal formulas:

1. "You are not what you seemed to be."

2. "You are not behaving according to your nature."

On these two principles is established the bulwark of patriarchal hostility to women as natural, free beings -- for patriarchy is nothing if it is not anti-nature.

Let us consider the first principle, whereby women are made responsible for patriarchal male perceptions, including, and above all, the errors in those perceptions. To be what one appears to be is the unwritten law that women are obliged to follow. At the same time, "what one seems to be" is hard enough to discern, for one must place oneself outside of oneself to begin with, in order to try to imagine how one might appear to be to somebody other than oneself. The patriarchal injunction is for women to objectify themselves, so as to become pure patriarchal OBJECTS (but not SUBJECTS!) -- in other words, what they "seem" to be.

The second of these principles of patriarchy is one that most operates according to an OFF and ON switch. Here is how that functions. To begin with, let us presume that I am only obliged to pay attention to you insofar as you are functioning "according to your nature". The minute that your actions fail to correspond to that which I take to be your true, essential "inner nature", I am release from all obligations to you at all. Effectively, you will cease to exist for me. So it pays to learn one lesson: if you have something that you really want to say, then please say it according to your "inner nature". Either that, or I will flick the mighty OFF-switch in my mind, causing you to really seem to cease to exist.

The second principle works pragmatically for patriarchs, since it trains women to comply with certain arbitrary modes of thinking and expressing themselves, under the threat of not being heard at all. The first principle effectively reinforces the second mode of emotional blackmail, by trying to impose a guilty conscious on women whose identities have been mistaken by a patriarch. They are charged with wilful deception -- even though the failure to perceive correctly in the first instance originated in the mind of the patriarch himself.