Warning: contains discussions of violence (including sexual violence), racism

The inferiority of women is a fundamental philosophy of almost every piece of media you have ever consumed, of almost every person who has ever wielded power over you. If you like someone who has had success in a culture dominated by this philosophy, they are probably agents of it in some way.

My favourite film used to the The Fifth Element, until I learned that the director, Luc Besson, had been accused of rape in 2018 (a case which has since been dropped. A further eight women have accused Besson of sexual abuse). It was only at that point that I learned that the then thirty-seven-year-old married director had an affair with the then twenty-one-year-old star of his film, Milla Jovovich, at the time when he was her boss. It’s not a surprising tale to hear.

The same stories with different men and superficially different types of abuse are so prevalent it's hard to pick a few to mention here - Joe Biden, Donald Trump, George H.W. Bush, Andrew Cuomo, Prince Andrew, Jeffrey Epstein, Harvey Weinstein, Woody Allen, Roman Polanski, David Bowie, Jimmy Page, Justin Beiber, and Cristiano Ronaldo have all been the subject of public sexual abuse allegations. And a special fuck you to Joss Whedon. Many ‘content creators’ abuse women in their spare time.   

Those that don’t aren’t unaffected by the philosophy of women’s inferiority. They still subscribe to it in some form and propagate it in their work. I grew up with romantic comedies where a dominant trope was the man manipulating the woman to be physical with him, then not even saying sorry at the end when it turns out she now loves him and all is forgiven. Again the list is too long to include here, but examples that come to mind are You’ve Got Mail, 10 Things I Hate About You, She’s All That, and How To Lose A Guy in 10 Days. 

I love 10 Things I Hate About You. That love is proof that I carry the patriarchy with me; I subscribe to it in some way. If I didn’t, the premise of the film, a man convincing another man to pay a third man to date a woman so the first two men can date another woman, would be entirely unpalatable. The patriarchy is inside me, it’s a part of so much of how I think and feel and behave. 

I believe that there is no separating the way a man thinks about women from the way he writes about women, or the way he talks about women or sings about women or politicises women’s bodies. There is no separating the art from the artist. There is no separating the things our minds consume from the environments in which they are made. What we can do is separate ourselves from ideas we recognise to be harmful, however we find them.

For many of us patriarchy will be the reason we make specific intimate choices with our bodies, it will be the reason we don’t have the relationships/families/careers/lives we’d otherwise have. The opinions of white men are often more powerful than our own opinions and more influential to us than the perspectives of marginalised women. We all must wrestle with the patriarchs in our minds.

Author’s note: is it any surprise that my new favourite movie is The Matrix? It is a film that explores a lot of these themes, written and directed by trans women.