by Bruce Kokopeli and George Lakey

Masculine sexuality involves the oppression of women, competition among men, and homophobia (fear of homosexuality). Patriarchy, the systematic domination of women by men through unequal opportunities, rewards, punishments, and the internalization of unequal expectations through sex role differentiation, is the institution which organizes these behaviors. Patriarchy is men having more power, both personally and politically, than women of the same rank. This imbalance of power is the core of patriarchy, but definitely not the extent of it.

Sex inequality cannot be routinely enforced through open violence or even blatant discriminatory agreements – patriarchy also needs its values accepted in the minds of people. If as many young women wanted to be physicians as men, and as many young men wanted to be nurses as women, the medical schools and the hospitals would be hard put to maintain the masculine domination of health care; open struggle and the naked exercise of power would be necessary. Little girls, therefore, are encouraged to think “nurse” and boys to think “doctor”.

Patriarchy assigns a list of human characteristics according to gender: women should be nurturant, gentle, in touch with their feelings, etc.; men should be productive, competitive, super-rational, etc. Occupations are valued according to these gender-linked characteristics, so social work, teaching, housework, and nursing are of lower status than business executive, judge, or professional football player.

When men do enter "feminine" professions, they disproportionately rise to the top and become chefs, principals of schools, directors of ballet, and teachers of social work. A man is somewhat excused form his sex role deviation if he at least dominates within the deviation. Domination, after all, is what patriarchy is all about.

Access to powerful positions by women (i.e., those positions formerly limited to men) is contingent on the women adopting some masculine characteristics, such as competitiveness. They feel pressure to give up qualities assigned to females (such as gentleness) because those qualities are considered inherently weak by patriarchal culture. The existence, therefore, of a women like Indira Gandhi in the position of a dictator in no way undermines the basic sexist structure which allocates power to those with masculine characteristics.

Patriarchy also shapes men’s sexuality so it expresses the theme of domination. Notice the masculine preoccupation with size. The size of a man’s body has a lot to say about his clout or his vulnerability, as any junior high boy can tell you. Many of these schoolyard fights are settled by who is bigger than whom, and we experience in our adult lives the echoes of intimidation and deference produced by our habitual “sizing up” of the situation.

Penis size is part of this masculine preoccupation, this time directed toward women. Men want to have large penises because size equals power, the ability to make a woman “really feel it.” The imagery of violence is close to the surface here, since women find penis size irrelevant to sexual genital pleasure. “Fucking” is a highly ambiguous word, meaning both intercourse and exploitation/assault.

It is this confusion that we need to untangle and understand. Patriarchy tells men that their need for love and respect can only be met by being masculine, powerful, and ultimately violent. As men come to accept this, their sexuality begins to reflect it. Violence and sexuality combine to support masculinity as a character ideal. To love a women is to have power over her and to treat her violently if need be. The Beatles’ song “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” is but one example of how sexuality gets confused with violence and power. We know one man who was discussing another man who seemed to be highly fertile – he had made several women pregnant. “That guy,” he said, “doesn’t shoot and blanks.”

Rape is the end logic of masculine sexuality. Rape is not so much a sexual act as an act of violence expressed in a sexual way. The rapist’s mind-set- that violence and sexuality can go together – is actually a product of a patriarchal conditioning, for most of us men understand the same, however abhorrent rape may be to us personally.

In war, rape is astonishingly prevalent even among men who “back home” would not do it. In the following description by a marine sergeant who witnessed a gang rape in Vietnam, notice that nearly all the nine-man squad participated:

They were supposed to go after what they called a Viet Cong whore. They went into her village and instead of capturing her, they raped her- every man raped her. As a matter of fact, one man said to me later that it was the first time he had ever made love to a woman with his boots on. The man who led the platoon, or the squad, was actually a private. The squad leader was a sergeant but he was a useless person and he let the private take over his squad. Later he said he took no part in the raid. It was against his morals. So instead of telling his squad not to do it, because they wouldn’t listen to him anyway, the sergeant went into another side of the village and just sat and stared bleakly at the ground, feeling sorry for himself. But at any rate, they raped the girl, and then, the last man to make love to her, shot her in the head.
[Vietnam Veterans Against the War, statement by Michale McClusker in The Winter Soldier Investigation: An Inquiry Into American War Crimes.]

Psychologist James Prescott adds to this account:

What is it in the American psyche that permits the use of the word “love” to describe rape? And where the act of love is completed with a bullet in the head! [Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, November 1975 p17]

Masculinity Against Men: The Militarization of Everyday Life

Patriarchy benefits men by giving us a class of people (women) to dominate and exploit. Patriarchy also oppresses men, by setting us at odds with each other and shrinking our life space.

The pressure to win starts early and never stops. Working-class gangs fight over turf; rich people’s sons are pushed to compete on the sports field. British military officers, it is said, learned to win on the playing fields of Eton.

Competition is conflict held within a framework of rules. When the stakes are really high, the rules may not be obeyed; fighting breaks out. We men mostly relate through competition, but we know what is waiting in the wings. John Wayne is not a cultural hero by accident.

Men compete with each other for status as masculine males. Because masculinity equals power, this means we are competing for power. The ultimate proof of power/masculinity is violence. A man may fail to “measure up” to the macho stereotype in important ways, but if he can still fight successfully with the person who challenges him on his deviance, he is still all right. The television policeman Baretta is strange in some ways: he is gentle with women and he cried when a man he loved was killed. However, he has what are probably the largest biceps in television and he proves weekly that he can beat up the toughs who come his way.

The close relationship between violence and masculinity does not need much demonstration. War used to be justified partly because it promoted “manly virtue” in a nation. Those millions of people in the woods hunting deer, in the National Rifle Association and cheering on the bloodiest hockey teams are overwhelmingly men.

The world situation is so much defined by patriarchy that what we see in the wars of today is competition between various patriarchal ruling classes and governments breaking into open conflict.

Violence is the accepted masculine form of conflict resolution. Women at this time are not powerful enough in the world situation for us to see mass overt violence being waged upon them. But the violence is in fact there; it is hidden through its legitimization by the state and by culture.

In everyday middle-class life, open violence between men is of course rare. The defining characteristics of masculinity, however, are only a few steps removed from violence. Wealth, productivity or rank in the firm or institution translate into power-the capacity (whether or not exercised) to dominate. The holders of power in even polite institutions seem to know that violence is at their fingertips, judging from the reactions of college presidents to student protest in the 1960’s. We know of one urban “pacifist” man, the head of a theological seminary, who was barely talked out of calling the police to deal with a nonviolent student sit-in at “his” seminary.

Patriarchy teaches us at very deep levels that we can never be safe with other men (or perhaps with anyone!) for the guard must be kept up lest our vulnerability be exposed and we be taken advantage of. At a recent Quaker conference in Philadelphia, a discussion group considered the value of personal sharing and openness in the Quaker Meeting. In almost every case the women advocated more sharing and the men opposed it. Dividing by gender on that issue was predictable; men are conditioned by our life experience of masculinity to distrust settings where personal exposure will happen, especially if men are present. Most men find emotional intimacy possible only with women, many with only one woman; some men cannot be emotionally intimate with anyone.

Patriarchy creates a character ideal – we call it masculinity – and measures everyone against it. Many men as well as women fail the test and even men who are passing the test today are carrying a heavy load of anxiety about tomorrow. Because masculinity is a form of domination, no one can really rest secure. The striving goes on forever unless you are actually willing to give up and find more secure basis for identity.

Masculinity against Gay Men:
Patriarchy Fights a Rear Guard Action

Homophobia is the measure of masculinity. The degree to which a man is thought to have gay feelings is the degree of his unmanliness. Because patriarchy presents sexuality as man over women (part of the general dominance theme), men are conditioned to have only that in mind as a model of sexual expression. Sex with another man must mean being dominated, which is very scary. A nonpatriarchal model of sexual expression as the mutuality of equals doesn’t seem possible, the transfer of the heterosexual model to same-sex relations can at best be “queer” at worst, “perverted.”

In the recent book Blue Collar Aristocrats, by E. E. LeMasters, a working class tavern is described in which the topic of homosexuality sometimes comes up. Gayness is never defended. In fact, the worst thing you can call a man is homosexual. A man so attacked must either fight or leave the bar.

Notice the importance of violence in defending yourself against the charge of being a “pansy.” Referring to your income or academic degrees or size of your car is no defense against such a charge. Only fighting will re-establish your respect as a masculine male. Because “gay” appears to mean “powerless,” one needs to go to the masculine source of power – violence – for adequate defense.

Last year, the Argentinian government decided to persecute gays on a systematic basis. The Ministry of Social Welfare offered the rational for this policy in an article in its journal, which also attacked lesbians, concluding that they should be put in jail or killed”

As children they played with dolls. As they grew up, violent sports horrified them. As was to be expected, with the passage of time and the custom of listening to foreign mulattos on the radio, they became conscientious objectors.
[El Caudillo, February 1975, excerpted in Peace News, July 11, 1975, p 5]

The Danish government, by contrast with Argentina, has liberal policies on gay people. There is no government persecution and all government jobs are open to gays – except in the military and the diplomatic service! Two places where the nation-state is most keen to assert power are places where gays are excluded as a matter of policy.

We need not go abroad to see the connections between violence and homophobia. In the documentary film Men’s Lives, a high school boy is interviewed on what it is like to be a dancer. While the interview is concluded, we see him working out, with a very demanding set of acrobatic exercises. The boy mentions that the other boys think he must be gay. “Why is that?” the interviewer asks. Dancers are free and loose,” he replies; they are not big like football players; and “you’re not trying to kill anybody.”

Different kinds of homosexual behavior bring out different amounts of hostility, curiously enough. That fact gives us further clues to violence and female oppression. In prisons, for example, men can be respected if they fuck other men, but not if they are themselves fucked. (We use the word “fucked” intentionally for its ambiguity.) Often prison rapes are done by men who identify as heterosexual; one hole substitutes for another in this scene, for sex is in either case an expression of domination for the masculine mystique.

But for a man to be entered sexually, or to use effeminate gestures and actions, is to invite attack in prison and hostility outside. Effeminate gay men are at the bottom of the totem pole because they are most like women, which is nothing less than treachery to the Masculine Cause. Even many gay men shudder at drag queens and vigilantly guard against certain mannerisms because they, too, have internalized the masculinist dread of effeminacy.

John Braxton’s report of prison life as a draft resister is revealing on this score. The other inmates knew immediately that John was a conscientious objector because he did not act tough. They also assumed he was gay, for the same reason. (If you are not masculine, you must be a pacifist and gay, for masculinity is a package which includes both violence and heterosexuality.)

A ticket of admission to masculinity, then, is sex with women, and bisexuals can at least get that ticket even if they deviate through having gay feeling as well. This may be why bisexuality is not feared as much as exclusive gayness among men. Exclusively gay men let down the Masculine Cause in a very important way – those goys do not participate in the control of women through sexuality. Control through sexuality matters because it is flexible; it usually is mixed with love and dependency so that it becomes quite subtle. (Women often testify to years of confusion and only the faintest uneasiness at their submissive role in traditional heterosexual relationships and the role sex plays in that.)

Now we better understand why women are in general so much more supportive of gay men than nongay men are. Part of it of course is that heterosexual men are often paralyzed by fear. Never very trusting, such men find gayness one more reason to keep up the defenses. But heterosexual women are drawn to active support for the struggles of gay men because there is a common enemy- patriarchy and its definition of sexuality as domination. Both heterosexual women and gay men have experienced first hand the violence of sexism; we all have experienced its less open forms such as put-downs and discrimination, and we all fe4ar its open forms such as rape and assault.

Patriarchy, which links characteristics (gentleness, aggressiveness, etc,) to gender, shapes sexuality as well, in such a way as to maintain male power. The Masculine Cause draws strength form homophobia and resorts habitually to violence in its battles on the field of sexual politics. It provides psychological support for the military state and is in turn stimulated by it.