The Best Thing You Can Do to Thwart Toxic Patriarchy

If you’re like me, you’re tired of living under a patriarchy guided by the most toxic expressions of masculine values. As a result, you may be frustrated by the lack of progress on issues in your workplace, your community, and the world. Unfortunately, instead of resolving root causes, those in power use dominance, destruction, and oppression to extract benefits only for themselves, to the exclusion of everyone else.

In your personal life, you might also be fed up with being constrained and devalued as a woman, as you are boxed in by stereotypical assumptions of what you should look and act like due to your gender. While these dogmatic assumptions by the patriarchy can constrain your expression of both male and female traits and values, females get a double whammy; patriarchal culture punishes females for expressing the “lesser” traits and values of the Feminine as well as for exhibiting valued masculine behaviors while inhabiting a female body. You can’t win. (In contrast, have you noticed that when males exhibit feminine values like being a nurturing parent, they get extra credit or kudos?)

Because the Masculine, in mostly its toxic form, has dominated ours and many other societies for 4000 years or so, you might not realize that it wasn’t always that way. We think it’s the way it has always been. Not so. Throughout human history and until about 3000 BCE in Western civilization, many cultures valued and even worshipped the Feminine. There is even archeological evidence that many notable societies valued both the Masculine and Feminine without elevating one over the other. But a shift away from honoring the Feminine and elevating the Masculine occurred around 2000-3000 BCE.

Today, you may have heard people justify the overemphasis on masculine values and behaviors by pointing to the “great” advancements in industry and technology brought about by domination, extraction, oppression, and destruction of anything and anyone in the way of this “progress”. But it’s not necessarily true that the linear, “our way or the highway” history of American and other Western cultures and technology has made us necessarily better, stronger, and more intelligent.

The result has been to make a few very rich and many people poor, all while destroying the environment that we depend on for life. Instead, a greater feat would have been to accomplish great things without destroying whole cultures of people and our environment along the way. Such progress would have been possible had our leaders valued the interplay of the Masculine and the Feminine on an equal footing.

Why do our leaders cling to the attributes of toxic masculinity as a standard way of operating? Besides the fact that old habits die hard, the greedy few who have amassed a great amount of power are not going to let go of control if they can help it. Can’t you just hear their little fingernails screeching loudly on the cosmic chalk board and they try to hold on?

Like me, you may be looking for a way to elevate the status of feminine values and characteristics to allow greater acceptance for expressing your own unique blend of all your traits -- both masculine and feminine. After all, more intentional interplay between the Masculine and the Feminine will create better decisions in the world that will save our environment and us along with it.

So what can you do to thwart the patriarchy and help bring about a rebalancing of the Masculine and the Feminine? Stop waiting for others to do more. Real change starts with doing your own inner work.

o Question your assumptions about what’s masculine and what’s feminine as well as how these energies express through all individuals, including yourself.

o Get clear about and honor your own masculine and feminine traits and values to find your truth and to create your most, uniquely wild and free expression of your genius.

o Accept that the masculine and feminine values and traits are two sides of a polarity requiring a healthy interplay between them. Together, they are important for creating the sustainable, abundant, and healthy environment we want for ourselves and for future generations.

Regardless of your sex, you are most likely you own unique blend of feminine and masculine characteristics in spite of pressures from society to reflect your outward packaging. During the past 50 years, American society has slowly made progress around this notion, and we need more of it. Real change will come when more people like you and me get ourselves in order first through our own personal development. It’s time to become the change.