Chapter 1: Introduction

1Chapter Quote

Chapter Quote

The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.

— Audre Lorde

There’s a conversation happening right now about young men. They’re struggling, we’re told. They don’t know how to talk to women. They don’t know how to talk to other men. They’re asking: Am I toxic? How do I be a man? What are the rules?

In response, we see some positive developments — men’s groups focused on vulnerability, discussions about mental health, encouragement to express emotions. This is good work. But there’s an elephant in the room that mainstream media refuses to acknowledge: patriarchy.

When patriarchy does get mentioned, it’s treated as some vague, mystical entity — a buzzword that means everything and nothing. Or it’s dismissed as academic jargon, feminist conspiracy theory, something that doesn’t apply to “us” or “here” or “anymore”. But patriarchy isn’t mystical or abstract. It’s a concrete system of control, as real and material as capitalism or white supremacy (Johnson, 2005). It shapes how we organize families, workplaces, schools, and societies. It determines who has power and who doesn’t, whose labor is valued and whose is invisible, who gets to be fully human and who must shrink themselves to fit into rigid boxes.

And we can’t address the crisis of masculinity — or build liberatory education — without naming and dismantling this system.

2A Moment in the Classroom

Let me share something that happened in my classroom. We were having a discussion, and one of my students — a young man — started talking about what makes a “good girlfriend”. According to him, a good girlfriend must not have male friends. She must not dance with anyone except other girls. She must not “go out”.

Another student, a young woman, challenged him. His response? If his girlfriend ever behaved like her, he would punish her. Maybe even kill her. The room went silent.

I call this an extreme example, but I need to acknowledge my privilege in doing so. This kind of explicit threat feels extreme to me because it’s not my everyday reality. I’m not the target of it. But for many women and girls — particularly women of color, trans women, and those in marginalized communities — this isn’t extreme at all. It’s Tuesday. It’s the walk home from school. It’s a family dinner conversation. It’s the price of saying no.

What feels shocking to me is someone’s lived reality. And that gap — between my perception of this as “extreme” and someone else’s experience of it as “normal” — is itself a function of patriarchy and the privilege it affords me.

So while this example may be stark, it’s not an outlier. It’s patriarchy speaking through a teenager who’s learned — from family, peers, media, culture — that men control women, that love means ownership, that a girlfriend is property to be managed. And while most young people wouldn’t articulate it so violently, the underlying logic — that men should control women’s bodies, friendships, movements, choices — shows up constantly in heteronormative relationships among young adults and older adults alike.

This isn’t about one “bad” student. This is about a system that taught him these ideas and will continue teaching them to the next generation unless we actively interrupt it.

This must be challenged. And challenging it requires more than calling out individual instances of sexism and misogyny. It requires understanding and unlearning the system itself — and recognizing how our own privilege shapes what we see as “extreme” versus “everyday”.

2.1What “Normal” Control Looks Like

But let’s be clear about what this looks like in practice, because it’s rarely as explicit as threats of violence. In “normal” teenage relationships — the ones adults smile at as “puppy love” or “just kids figuring things out” — controlling behavior shows up constantly and gets romanticized as care or devotion.

A boyfriend who checks his girlfriend’s phone “because we don’t have secrets”. A girlfriend who gets upset if her boyfriend talks to other girls “because it makes me feel insecure”. A boy who shows up unannounced at his girlfriend’s house “to surprise her” (read: to monitor where she is). A girl who expects her boyfriend to respond to texts immediately and gets angry when he doesn’t. Partners who share phone passwords and social media logins “to prove we trust each other”. Jealousy treated as evidence of love — “he only acts like that because he cares so much”.

These behaviors are so normalized that young people often don’t recognize them as controlling. They’ve learned from movies, music, social media, and the adults around them that this is what romance looks like. Possessiveness equals passion. Jealousy equals investment. Monitoring equals care. The boy who won’t “let” his girlfriend wear certain clothes or talk to certain people isn’t being abusive — he’s being protective. The girl who demands constant contact and gets upset when her boyfriend spends time with friends isn’t being controlling — she just loves him and wants to feel secure.

But here’s what’s actually happening: one person is asserting ownership over another person’s body, time, relationships, and choices. One person is restricting another person’s autonomy and freedom. One person is using emotional manipulation — guilt, anger, threats of breaking up — to control another person’s behavior. This is patriarchy in practice: the belief that in romantic relationships, especially heterosexual ones, one person (traditionally the man, but these patterns appear across genders) has the right to control the other.

And we teach this. We teach it when we say “boys will be boys” about jealous behavior. We teach it when we tell girls that male attention — even controlling attention — means they’re valued. We teach it when we frame possessiveness as romantic in the stories we tell. We teach it when we don’t explicitly teach what healthy relationships actually look like: mutual respect, trust without surveillance, autonomy within intimacy, support without control.

The student who said he would punish or kill a girlfriend who disobeyed him wasn’t inventing these ideas. He was taking the logic of “normal” controlling relationships to its conclusion. He was saying explicitly what patriarchy teaches implicitly: women are property, men are entitled to control them, and deviation from male authority deserves punishment.

This is why we can’t just address the extreme cases. We have to challenge the entire logic — the “normal” controlling behaviors that create the foundation for extreme violence.

3What This Book Will Do

This book is for anyone who wants to understand what patriarchy actually is — not as an abstract concept, but as a tangible system that operates in our daily lives. It’s especially for educators who want practical tools to challenge patriarchy in their teaching and create more liberatory, authentic educational spaces.

We’ll begin by examining what patriarchy is with concrete, recognizable examples from everyday life. Then we’ll explore how patriarchy operates specifically in schools — the ways it shows up in curriculum, discipline, classroom dynamics, and institutional culture. Building on Daniel Baryon’s (Anark’s) concept of “near enemies” (Baryon, 2025), we’ll develop a framework for understanding healthy versus toxic masculinity that can be adapted for classroom use. Throughout, you’ll find practical tools for teachers: self-reflection exercises, classroom strategies, lesson plans, and ways to navigate the inevitable resistance.

4Before You Continue: A Challenge to Your Certainty

Before we go further, I need you to set aside some common defensive reactions: “We don’t have these problems at our school”. “I’m already doing good work on this”. “I correct sexism when I see it”. “This doesn’t apply to my students, my community, my context”. “I’m not sexist, so this isn’t about me”.

These thoughts are understandable. They’re also barriers to real change.

Here’s what I’m asking instead: Approach this with genuine self-criticism. Not self-flagellation or guilt, but honest examination. Really think — actually pause and reflect — about your own actions, assumptions, and biases. Consider the ways you might be unconsciously perpetuating patriarchal norms even as you consciously oppose them.

Everyone suffers from patriarchy and heteronormativity — not just cisgender people, though the harm isn’t distributed equally. We’ve all been conditioned by these systems. We’ve all internalized messages about gender, power, and hierarchy. Women uphold patriarchy. Non-binary people can internalize it. Queer people aren’t immune. And yes, people actively working against oppression still carry its marks.

This isn’t about being a bad person. It’s about being shaped by bad systems. The question isn’t whether you’ve been affected — you have. The question is whether you’re willing to examine how and do the uncomfortable work of unlearning.

5Demystifying Patriarchy

Let me be clear about what patriarchy is and isn’t. Patriarchy is not a shadowy group of powerful men meeting in secret to oppress women. It’s not a conspiracy theory. It’s not something that only exists “over there” — in other countries, other communities, the past. It’s not simply individual men being mean or sexist. And it’s not something only men perpetuate or benefit from.

Rather, as Allan Johnson explains, patriarchy is a system of social organization based on male dominance and rigid gender hierarchies (Johnson, 2005). It’s a set of institutions, practices, beliefs, and norms that concentrate power with men — especially wealthy, white, heterosexual, cisgender men — and subordinate everyone else. It’s a structure that predates any individual and will outlast us unless we actively dismantle it. Most importantly, it’s something we all participate in, often unconsciously, through our daily choices and interactions. And yes, it’s a system that harms everyone, including men, though not equally.

Like capitalism, patriarchy is a system of control. It determines who does which labor and whose labor is valued. It shapes family structures, workplace hierarchies, legal systems, and cultural norms. It tells us who gets to be rational and who’s “too emotional”, who’s a leader and who’s “bossy”, whose anger is righteous and whose is hysterical, who’s protecting and who’s controlling, who’s confident and who’s arrogant.

And critically: we are all part of this system. We all suffer from it, and we all, to varying degrees, perpetuate it — often without realizing it. Women police other women’s femininity. Men enforce rigid masculinity on each other through mockery and violence. We all use gendered insults. We all make assumptions based on gender. We all carry this conditioning in our bodies, our language, our automatic reactions.

The good news is that because patriarchy is a system — not natural, not inevitable, not hardwired into human nature — it can be changed. It can be unlearned. But only if we’re willing to name it, examine it honestly, and do the difficult work of building something different.

6Why Schools Matter

Schools are crucial sites in this work because they’re where gender norms are heavily enforced and internalized. By the time students reach adolescence, they’ve already learned elaborate rules about how boys and girls are supposed to act, think, feel, and be. They’ve learned these rules from families, media, and peers — but also from schools.

Schools teach patriarchy through who gets disciplined and how, whose voices are centered in curriculum, what behaviors are rewarded or punished, how space and resources are distributed, what language is normalized, how authority is modeled, which emotions are acceptable, and what counts as knowledge. Most of this teaching is invisible. It’s not in the lesson plans. It’s in the daily practices, the unexamined assumptions, the “that’s just how things are”.

And here’s the crucial point, one that Paulo Freire emphasized in his foundational work on critical pedagogy: you cannot teach liberation using oppressive methods (Freire, 2000). If we want to help young people unlearn patriarchy, we have to unlearn it ourselves. We have to examine how our schools reproduce these systems and actively build alternatives.

This isn’t easy work. It will be uncomfortable. You’ll face resistance from students, parents, colleagues, and administrators. You’ll confront your own conditioning and complicity. You’ll make mistakes. But it’s necessary work. And you don’t have to do it alone.

7How to Use This Book

This book is designed to be both theoretical framework and practical toolkit. You can read it through for understanding, then return to specific sections as needed. You can use it for self-reflection, working through the audit tools and reflection prompts. You can adapt the lesson plans and activities for your context and grade level. You can share it with colleagues to build collective understanding and action. You can reference it when facing resistance, using the language and examples to explain your approach. And you can treat it as a starting point, not an endpoint — this is ongoing work that will evolve.

Throughout, you’ll find concrete examples, practical strategies, and honest discussion of challenges. The goal isn’t to overwhelm you or demand perfection. It’s to provide a framework for understanding patriarchy as a system and tools for challenging it in your daily practice.

Because every time you interrupt a sexist comment and explain why it’s harmful, every time you make space for a boy to cry without shame, every time you call on the quiet girl whose hand isn’t up, every time you examine whose voices are missing from your curriculum, every time you refuse to enforce arbitrary gender rules — you’re planting seeds.

Those seeds might not flower in your classroom or even in your lifetime. But they matter. They’re part of a much larger project of collective liberation that spans generations and geographies. This is the long game. And it starts with understanding the system we’re trying to change.

8Let’s Begin

In the chapters that follow, we’ll move from understanding patriarchy as an abstract system to seeing it concretely in everyday life, then to recognizing it in schools, and finally to challenging it through individual practice and collective organizing.

Chapters 1, 2, and 3 builds theoretical foundation. We’ll examine what patriarchy actually is, how it operates in concrete ways across different domains of life, and what myths obscure our understanding of it. Chapters 4 and 5 applies this analysis to schools specifically. We’ll see how patriarchy shows up in discipline, curriculum, classroom dynamics, and peer culture. We’ll also explore frameworks for understanding healthy versus toxic masculinity. Chapters 6, 7, and 8 provides practical tools. We’ll work through self-reflection exercises, classroom strategies, essential concepts and teaching approaches, and assessment strategies. Chapter 9 addresses resistance. We’ll prepare for the backlash you’ll face and build strategies for collective action beyond individual classrooms.

Each chapter builds on previous ones, but you can also jump to what you need most right now. The important thing is to start somewhere.

The work ahead is challenging. It will require you to examine beliefs you may have held your whole life, to see patterns you’ve been trained not to notice, to change practices that feel natural, to face resistance from others and from yourself.

But the work is also hopeful. Because every day, educators around the world are doing this work. Students are unlearning patriarchy and building alternatives. Movements are growing. Change is happening. You’re not starting from scratch. You’re joining something already in motion.

As bell hooks reminds us, teaching can be a practice of freedom (hooks, 1994). Welcome to the work. Welcome to the struggle. Let’s begin.

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