I fell behind a bit but all caught up now.

Most of my own experience with patriarchy was of the psychological kind. My mom made it a point to my dad that he was not to beat me as violently as was described in chapter two. Not that it freed me from the occasionally slap, but my dad early on would threaten to beat me with a belt or a chancleta (oh boy do we as latinos love joking about “la chancleta”).

I think Hooks makes a good point about how both the men and women of the family contribute to the maintenance of the patriarchy. As much as my mom loved us she would still do the “big boys don’t cry” type stuff. Even now anytime she hears about how one of my cousin’s sons has a tendency to throw sobbing fits when things don’t go his way she’ll say “he’s too old to be crying like that”.

Also religion in my mom’s side of the family is definitely used as a justification for reinforcing gender norms and male dominance. Not that long ago I had posted about a small family gathering where the man that is dating my cousin went through all of the tropes of patriarchal dominance (the man is the ruler of the house, women’s place in the family is to support her man, among queerphobic points) and all of the women present added their voices in support of what he was saying aside from my mom. My mom mostly stayed quite, but I know she really felt like the way they were talking was problematic. Its a bit at odds with her religious beliefs, but she at the very least believes in more equality in the home, even if, as I mentioned before, she reinforces some of the very ideas of patriarchy expressed here.

Going back to the point of psychological patriarchy, for most, if not all of my youth, my dad never really expressed much affection for me. that changed a bit with my brother, who he used to be more expressive with. But he still would say things that would make me, and probably my brother, about what it meant to be a man. One thing that has always stuck out to me was this story about my older half brother that he’d always tell us. It was about how one day he came home and found him and his friend practicing a dance or something along those lines. When he found him he told him that he wasn’t going to have his son influenced by him and kicked him out of the house. I honestly don’t know what exactly was the cause. Whether it was just that there may just have been that he didn’t want him to be “street/ghetto” or if it was some homophobia, but the story always stuck with me. I’ve never invited a friend over to my home and my brother has just once or twice. Add to that the general mistrust that the media creates in each other, which usually pushed my mom to emphasize that we shouldn’t just go anywhere that our friends invited us, and my possible neurodivergance, and it made for a childhood where I generally didn’t really connect with people.

There was always this conflict in my mind between being emotionally expressive and “thinking before I spoke” as one well meaning teacher once told me. I learned to keep my feelings to myself. The talk about disassociating and disconnecting in this chapter really struck a nerve with me because I had a period during high school where I completely isolated myself. My friends would often tell me to stop eating by myself during break and while I would join them for a day or two I would go back to isolating. High school was also the first time I had someone tell me I have “school shooter vibes”. And I always laugh it off, even to this day, but thinking about it hurts because I don’t really hold ill will towards my peers like that. I also have a former co-worker that I still hang out with from time to time that always complements me on my “emotional control” and I fucking hate it. He watches videos and other manosphere stuff and I fucking hate that he looks up to me for that reason. Truth is I’m just masking my emotions. And it eats me up inside that at my age I don’t really know how to properly express myself.

Well. Not so much that as much as I always hesitate to express myself because as Hooks pointed out, I just grew up in an environment where patriarchy enforces the idea of the emotionless male. Whether it was my parents or my friends and peers, its something that is always present and always propagating itself.