Why Does Patriarchy Persist?

notes from the book by Carol Gilligan and Naomi Snider

I wasn’t mad about the style of the book, it lacked coherence to me, and then I found the more recent book “In a Human Voice” which I loved (notes here and here) and so I never recorded my notes on this book. Here it is, and reading the notes again proved very helpful! (thanks Stela)

The TL;DR is that patriarchy, I suppose like any entrenched system, provides psychological protection from what we fear the most as humans: loss of connection and rejection. The irony is that patriarchy causes that loss of connection and rejection.

Another TL;DR is the three discoveries:

1. It is trauma, not development, that separates reason from emotion
2. Pathological defences against loss (basically being a psycho) is the patriarchal ideal
3. Patriarchy subverts the capacity to repair relationship, by shaming the human capabilities that are vital to reach across the boundaries of conflict and difference.

page 8: In essence, we question: does patriarchy also have a psychological function, protecting us from emotions and knowledge that have come to feel dangerous or unbearable, and is this in part why we continue to embrace it?

page 10: why a set of cultural rules and assumptions that are psychologically incoherent and harmful has such a powerful grip on the psyche? … Where is the resistance?

page 10: patriarchy steels us against the vulnerability of loving and by doing so, becomes a defense against loss. In this light, we suggest that forces outside our awareness may be driving a politics that otherwise appear inexplicable to many people.

I think patriarchy, like a parasite, takes hold on an injured soul. And then, to ensure the survival of the host, maintains that injury and inflicts it on others. So the catch is, how to heal the souls. You need to heal, in a sea of other parasites (the demagogues ready to spit out their patriarchy talons). It’s tough.

page 11: Any dismantling of patriarchy poses a threat not simply to status and power, but to psychological defenses that protect us from what have become some of our deepest fears and most shameful desires.

page 12: trust in relationships hinges on the discovery that ruptures can be repaired. 

So, how do we build trust? This is the core of my curiosity project.

page 12: the patriarchal construction of what it takes to be an honorable man or a good woman—correspond to what the psychologist John Bowlby identifies as pathological responses to loss; namely, emotional detachment and compulsive caregiving.

page 13: patriarchy is at once a source of lost connection and a defense against further loss, a source of trauma and a defense against trauma

page 14: patriarchy persists in part because it forces a betrayal of love and then renders the loss irreparable.

I mean, as a biologist, that is a damn good infection mechanism, amiright?

page 16: Either way, she would lose relationship, either by saying what she was feeling and thinking and thus becoming someone no one would want to be with, or by not saying what she was feeling and thinking and thus becoming someone other than herself. The loss of connection was seemingly inescapable. Hence the crisis.

Here they talk about the crisis of relationship, the crisis of connection, but I wonder if this can also be applied to the crisis of expertise.

page 16: It is important to emphasize this distinction between relationship and “relationships,” between the experience of connecting and the appearance of connection,

page 17: the codes of a masculinity contingent on the suppression of empathy and the hiding of vulnerability necessary for claiming superiority … being a man means being self-reliant, emotionally stoic and independent.

page 22: feminine selflessness and masculine detachment

page 22: Why was the path of development converging so precisely with a story of traumatic loss?

Again, they talk about social development, but I wonder about our technological development, economic development, that has also converged so precisely with traumatic loss of our natural resources, of our relationship with nature, of our overall quality of life.

page 22: culturally scripted and socially rewarded.

page 23: We needed to understand the connection between the psychology of loss and the politics of patriarchy.

page 25: the resistance to losing connection is also a resistance to “forgetting your mind.”

page 25: This voice of healthy resistance was the “different voice.” (referring to her 1974 book title) A key discovery of the research on development lay in the recognition that this “different” voice is a quintessentially human voice, a cadenced, relational voice. A voice that joins thought and emotion, mind with body, self with relationship.

page 26: self and relationship are interdependent.

The path of development then becomes a path of resistance

the healthy resistance becomes a form of political resistance: a protest against the culture of patriarchy

political resistance can give way to what clinicians recognize as psychological resistance. That is, a political resistance can give way to repression, dissociation, and disavowal of what has come to feel too painful or shameful to hold in awareness. With this move from political to psychological resistance, the impetus to bring about change in the world is lost, and the focus turns instead to fitting oneself into the prevailing order of things.

page 29: the hero legend as dangerous, encouraging men to cover their vulnerability with violence

the psychoanalytic literature on loss – John Bowlby

page 30: Bowlby shifted the framework by depicting attachment as an innate human desire that persists throughout the life-cycle, and detachment—from self and from others—as a maladaptive response to the experience of lost connection.

our capacity for relationship is our greatest source of strength and integral to our survival

when the pressures of accommodation become too much, a healthy resistance can give way to a form of psychological resistance—a disconnection from self and others

page 31: three stages of loss response: protest, despair, and detachment. In subsequent work he observed that detachment takes two forms: compliant relatedness (termed by Bowlby anxious attachment/compulsive caregiving), or relational avoidance and emotional detachment (labelled avoidant attachment/compulsive self-reliance).

page 32: From this perspective the child–parent relationship sets a template for a more nuanced understanding of the difference between hierarchy and equality, authoritarianism and democracy, an understanding based on the level of responsiveness and presence rather than sameness of treatment.

page 32: efforts to re-establish contact: anger—often expressed as reproachful and punishing behavior—“acts to promote, and not to disrupt, the bond.” However, when protest fails to effect reconnection, this anger of hope gives way to a dysfunctional anger—“the anger of despair”: a “deep-running resentment” leading to the cold “malice of hatred.” This anger laced with resentment and hatred becomes a threat to relationship and so tends not to be expressed directly against the person responsible for the loss, but to be repressed, redirected against the self or projected onto others—typically someone weaker.

page 33: The loss of connection is reflected in the shift from the “anger of hope” to the “anger of despair”—a shift that occurs when trust that the loss can be repaired is shattered.

when connection is still not restored, despair gives way to detachment. 

The dissociated patient is attempting to stay enough in relationship with the human environment to survive the present while, at the same time, keeping the needs for more intimate relatedness sequestered but alive

Once detachment sets in, we disavow and disconnect from our need for care and human connection, and as we turn away from relationship we can compensate for the loss by becoming increasingly self-centered and more concerned with objects than with people—a strategy Bowlby termed “compulsive self-reliance.” … the detached person holds on to their desire for love and the pain of loss, but relegates these feelings to their unconscious, so they become a sort of haunting, casting a ghost-like shadow over their ability to form relationships.

page 34: He sees that when protest is thwarted or fails to bring about reconnection we lose trust in the reliability and reparability of human connection. 

It’s a demonstration that hopeless longing has become too painful to pursue.

In a 1979 paper entitled “On Knowing What You Are Not Supposed to Know and Feeling What You Are Not Supposed to Feel,” Bowlby describes how in environments where children are pushed away and pressured not to express—or even feel—distress following separation, they will “shut away all the feeling they have about their loss.” Detachment thus takes two forms: an external disconnection from others, which is driven by an internal disconnection from the full spectrum of emotions

page 36: unacceptable and increasingly risky and seemingly futile desire for connection is transformed into an acceptable desire for the things that will make him “look hot”

page 37: detached individuals, trapped in a barren emotional landscape, by their very detachment inflict on others the experiences of neglect and rejection they themselves had set out to shield themselves against.

It is in the work of psychiatrist James Gilligan and his theorizing on the causes and prevention of violence that we see most deeply into these links between loss and shame and manhood and violence.

This is what terrifies me. Trying to fix this could literally get you killed. And so what do we do? “compulsive caregiving”, apparently:

page 37: Rather than avoiding or detaching from relationships, the anxiously attached cling to others, often with excessive submissiveness and engaging in what Bowlby termed “compulsive caregiving” as a substitute for actual relationship. Anxious attachment as a form of “compliant relatedness” is characterized by a restriction of initiative and a ban on freedom of expression

page 38: In order to achieve this seemingly protective state of oneness, anxiously attached children compromise their autonomy, their desire to play and to explore, alongside any independent thoughts and feelings. Knowledge and desires which have been treated as impermissible and feelings which have been received as dangerous come to be shielded not simply from the world but also from their own conscious awareness

page 39: In the poignant words of psychoanalyst R. W Fairbairn, “it is better to be a sinner in a world ruled by God than to live in a world ruled by the devil.”

page 40: At worst, we face violent reprisals. Reprisals which are then justified as legitimate responses to our failure to charm, or for our being too aggressive, too sexual, too much. Reprisals which we are paradoxically told we could have avoided if only we had been more assertive, as if knowing and protesting were not the very acts that imperil our relationships and thus, if not our survival, our chances for advancement. The contradiction is astounding: a woman is blamed for simultaneously being too assertive (too demanding, too aggressive, in a word, selfish) and not assertive enough (why didn’t you walk away or fight back, she is told). Both reinforce the illusion that the world is fair, patriarchy is a thing of the past, and it is individuals who are lacking. This is precisely the dynamic, the blaming of individuals for systemic injustice, that led three radical black women organizers to initiate the Black Lives Matter movement.

But then we blame white male individuals for system injustice too? This can’t be a good way forward.

page 41: the feminine imperative to care selflessly for others acts as a barrier to relationship, since it forces the woman to absent herself. 

page 41: I have come to reflect on all the various ways in which I and other millennial women—whether explicitly or implicitly—have been told and continue to be told that by meeting the needs of others in a way that negates our own needs, we will have our needs met by them, and that the sense of self we have compromised in order to have these “relationships” can be rediscovered through the love and recognition of a more powerful other

page 41: women are still told, albeit in more subtle ways, that the pleasures they deny themselves can be experienced vicariously through their spouse and/or children, or the other people and causes to which they “selflessly” commit

(and then I would add that men are also told this, through money, status, power)

page 42: Relationships of mutuality—the cornerstone of intimacy—are thus exchanged for relationships of complementarity, relationships where each person unconsciously seeks to find in the other the thing they cannot admit to or accept in themselves.

In order to remain the container for men’s vulnerability and dependence, women must relinquish their capacity to take care of themselves

page 42: Women’s moves toward freedom can thus reawaken feelings men have experienced as shameful—desires for love and tender compassion that they have had to conceal in becoming men. …  they may also reveal how women have served as the containers and concealers of needs that men have felt forced to disavow.

page 42: In summary, Bowlby’s work shows that the experience of despair—the loss of trust in the possibility of relationship following an experience of separation—can lead to two defensive patterns: symbiosis-like attachment and detachment from relationship, what we have called pseudo-relationships and pseudo-independence. These defensive styles of relating, moving from the fused and enmeshed to the distant and detached, are ultimately concerned with defending against the same unbearable threat of irreparable loss. Both defenses rest on the sacrifice of authentic connection as protection against the pain of a loss that has come to seem inescapable. Hence the willingness to give up relationship for “relationships.” Hence the connection between the psychology of loss and the persistence of patriarchy.

With this in mind, we come to our three discoveries.

So if I translate this to our relationship with nature, we can see that there is both forms of symbiosis-like attachment and detachment from relationship here too. There is the hippie weirdness, the tree-hugging veganism as pseudo-relationships, and the engineering pseudo-independence of resource exploitation. Ha. This feels like a breakthrough.

The three discoveries

page 43:
Discovery #1: The move from a healthy resistance to political resistance to psychological resistance or dissociation tracks the move from protest to despair and detachment. The conclusion seemed obvious: the initiation into patriarchy entails a confrontation with loss.
The mechanism is through establishing a gender binary: by splitting reason (masculine), along with mind and thought, from emotion and feelings (feminine), interrupts what Damasio, LeDoux, and other neuroscientists have shown to be the vital connections between our thoughts and our emotions—connections that, in the absence of trauma, are neurologically set. It is trauma, not development, that separates reason from emotion, as Damasio explains in his book Descartes’ Error.

page 45:
Discovery #2: The two forms of detachment that Bowlby describes as pathological defenses against loss are … the patriarchal ideals of manhood and of womanhood. Anxious attachment or compulsive caregiving is the pseudo-relationality of the selfless good woman, and detachment or compulsive self-reliance is the pseudo-independence of the heroic man.

page 46: It has been easier for many to hear the “different voice” as a woman’s voice rather than to recognize it as a human voice that comes to sound “feminine” once patriarchy sets in; easier to dismiss [Gilligan’s] work as essentialist and thereby to overlook the cultural critique that stands at its core. 

page 47:
Discovery 3. The gender roles of patriarchy, its codes and scripts of masculine honor and feminine goodness, ensure the move from protesting to detaching by subverting the capacity to repair relationship. They shame the human capabilities that are vital to repairing ruptures in connection, and by doing so disable our ability to stay in relationship and to reach across the boundaries of conflict and difference.

page 47: Bowlby’s work shows us that the point where the psyche stops resisting the loss of connection, the point at which we sacrifice relationship for “relationships,” is the moment when protest seems hopeless and loss inescapable. One only protests when there is hope of repair; without this, a healthy resistance which has taken on characteristics of a political resistance gives way to despair and then to detachment.

page 49: We add to Mary Beard’s comprehensive exploration of the cultural forces that attack, demean, and silence women a psychological dimension: it is the voice of protest, the voice of angry hope that must be silenced for patriarchy to continue.

page 49: While men have been given much more leeway to speak in the public sphere, their voices—the things they are permitted to say and the way in which they are allowed to say them—have also been subjected to cultural restrictions; specifically their ability to express anything deemed feminine, most notably their vulnerability and desire for connection.

page 50: What Bowlby describes as a functional anger—the anger of hope that in the face of loss fuels the effort to repair—is a protest against losing relationship, an expression of healthy resistance. But it is anger—and the challenge is to hear the hope in the protest.

page 50: aggression and a concern with status and respect is often a cover for sadness and a concern with intimacy and betrayal.

page 51: The tragic irony is that defenses against loss further undermine our capacity for connection and repair

The book after this was “Darkness Now Visible: Patriarchy’s Resurgence and Feminist Resistance”. It received great reviews, but not having read it, I think it analyses things more. I want to know what’s next, how do we fix this. This is where her association and ways of listening comes in, which I believe has been converted to a technique through the deep canvassing approach. … and that is where Sci-Curious goes.