Patriarchal Propaganda and the devaluation of the feminine: Medieval misogyny, modern philosophy

“Do men even like women?”

TW: Unaliving, vulgar language use

With openly misogynistic men such as Andrew Tate, Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, and the likes continuing to be spread far and wide, inundating us with their hateful, anti-woman messaging, it’s easy to understand why the question ‘do men even like women?’ is being increasingly asked.

Fuck Patriarchy’s Instagram feed

The recent reaction of these misogynistic men to comedian Chelsea Handler’s social media post about her childless lifestyle would be quite comical if it wasn’t playing into the larger political landscape that is continually stripping women of their rights and dignity. While American policies continue to shift towards the othering of women, systematically signing away their autonomy, personhood, and rights, these very men are screaming that ‘masculinity is under attack,’ churning the “masculinity moral panic” as author Liz Plank calls it.

In Liz’s novel, For the Love of Men, she writes “there are many symptoms of what I call the masculinity moral panic. The perceived fear of men acting like women is so strong that it’s also used to bully cisgender men out of having thoughtful, nuanced conversation about masculinity.”¹ Men bullying men into conforming to patriarchal gender roles and behaviors is a long practice of patriarchal males. “When a culture sets up specific rules about men, they don’t need to be imposed by a higher power because men end up imposing them on one another. They police others in an effort to express their respect of the code that our culture has established.”² It’s all performative.

Sadly, this behavior isn’t exclusive of men. Women uphold other women to unrealistic and harmful patriarchal standards every single day. Women have been surviving within the patriarchy for a thousand years, there’s generational trauma there and that trauma has been internalized. Have you ever judged a woman for what she was wearing, or perhaps wasn’t wearing? Have you judged a woman for choosing to cover her hair? Or ever wondered “well, what was she wearing/drinking/taking” after learning of an assault? Defended a light sentence because ‘it’ll ruin his life?’ Or perhaps thought “I’m not like other women” simply for the fact you have rational thoughts, interests, and pleasures? Or, maybe, you’ve put another woman down because she was thriving while you were not. Regardless, that’s your internalized patriarchy sitting in the driver’s seat of your unconscious behavior.

Our internalized patriarchy is often the source of our shame when: we have big feelings, when we are challenged, when we make a mistake, when we feel joy without financial gain, when we feel we need rest without “earning it,” when we believe we aren’t enough. Without a doubt, the patriarchy has been the leading cause of death and depression for 950 years.

“If a man is not willing to break patriarchal rules that say that he should never change – especially to satisfy some else, particularly a female – then he will choose being right over being loved. Choose his manhood over his personhood, isolation over connectedness.”³ This choice of isolation over connectedness, self over community, is why the male suicide rate continues to top charts, why wars were and are still fought, why men continue to work in dangerous working conditions yet vote for political candidates that dismiss their safety, why American mass shooters are majority males with prior domestic violence incidents, why men are less likely to seek therapy, and why men’s life expectancy is shorter than women’s. The patriarchy is killing men and then teaching them it’s women’s fault.

Utilizing women as a means to a patriarchal-end goal isn’t anything new. The patriarchal propaganda machine has been churning out violent reactions from disassociated men for hundreds of years. It’s what allowed George W. Bush to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of American military service members to what we later found out to be lies, it’s why 65,000 more men have died from COVID in the US (mask wearing and handwashing are seen as feminine behaviors,) and it is why Richard Neville, 16^th Earl of Warwick is remembered in history as the ‘Kingmaker’ instead of the greediest man of the 15^th century. The patriarchy glorifies men who take risks without protection and enshrines them within textbooks that for hundreds of years were written by men for men. Again, the patriarchy doesn’t need to police men’s behaviors, men enlist and sacrifice themselves willingly, projecting internal shame as external degradation at the cost of their integrity.

Alongside the bombardment of patriarchal propaganda permeating our mainstream media and social apps, we as women are constantly subconsciously reminded of our lesser-than status by the everyday use of language around us. In American English, we’ve colloquialized much misogynistic rhetoric. “Don’t be a pussy,” “don’t be a bitch,” “don’t be a little girl about it.” Or, the ultimate form of patriarchal propaganda, “be a man!” “grow a pair!” which both uplifts masculine superiority while also degrading the individual for their humanness, guiding a man’s behavior into a cognitively disassociated state. This unconscious misogynistic rhetoric also shows up in corporate America. “Hard Skills” are the technical skills required for a job and “soft skills” are the behaviors, yet one has been prioritized over the other in this white-man-meritocracy system we’ve inherited – and guess which one! Which gender have we been socialized to see as ‘hard’ and which gender have we been socialized to see as ‘soft?’  It runs deep and we all have a lot to unpack. But the ‘great resignation’ has showed us that when leadership lacks human skills (the feminist rebrand of soft skills), workers are unsatisfied and willing to leave in droves.

As we move to a more automated world, hard skills are going to be learnable by AI technology whereas feelings and behaviors will not. This will be yet another thing the patriarchy has overpromised and underdelivered to the next generation of men. We don’t have to guess who will be blamed for this.

Farida D.’s Instagram feed

Though women of the 15^th century weren’t in the workforce as we know it today, medieval women were just as inundated and burdened with misogynistic rhetoric, the 2^nd shift, and the mental load as 21^st century women. “I could scarcely find a moral work by any author which didn’t devote some chapter or paragraph to attacking the female sex. I had to accept their unfavorable opinion of women since it was unlikely that so many learned men, who seemed to be endowed with such great intelligence and insight into all things, could possibly have lied on so many different occasions.”⁴ From scripture to story time, women were receiving the message that their sex was undignified, undeserving, inferior, and lacking, though they were expected to do the child-rearing, homemaking, indoor commerce production, and step in for their husbands/brothers/fathers anytime their ‘manly’ duties required them to step away from the fields. The minimization of women has been happening far longer than the patriarchy would like us to realize.

15th century feminist author Christine de Pizan

Outside of nobility, women of the 15^th century were largely uneducated, not due to women lacking comprehension or desire, but lacking access and support. Women were made to be reliant on men to access history, information, politics, philosophy, and religion through verbal storytelling. Stories written by men, read by men, and repeated by men. The misogynistic messaging of the Middle Ages is what has led us to the generational internalization of the patriarchy we’re experiencing now. As Christine de Pizan wrote in 1405, “men have criticized women for different reasons: some because they are themselves steeped in sin, some because of bodily impediment, some out of sheer envy, and some quite simply naturally take delight in smearing others. There are also some who do so because they like to flaunt their erudition: they come across these views in books and so like to quote the authors whom they have read.”⁵ Men in the early 15^th century were broad-chest boasting patriarchal propaganda from Aristotle like modern men quote Andrew Tate on TikTok.

When Christine wrote “they are themselves steeped in sin,” she was revealing her own unconscious internalized patriarchy. Women are not inherently steeped in sin, this is patriarchal propaganda of the Christian-variety. “The Middle Ages inherited a tradition of anti-feminism from two different sources: Judeo-Christian theology and the medical science of classical antiquity.”⁶ The latter believing women to be deformed men and that menstrual blood, in the extreme views, was poison. Misogynists then, as misogynists now, love to explain to women how their own menstruation works. This paired with “the Church [that] provided two models for women: Eve the temptress and Mary, the mother of God; thus society viewed woman as either pure or virginal or filled with the carnal lust of the deceitful Eve,”⁷ gave women little wiggle room for autonomy and personhood.

This strict dichotomy that patriarchal males uphold women’s behaviors to hasn’t changed much since 1405. We see that in the talking-heads reaction to Chelsea Handler’s aforementioned post, as well as the reaction to Alexandra Hunt, a political candidate in Philadelphia’s, campaign and life experiences. Alexandra has been the target of much patriarchal propaganda, as a former sex worker, misogynists are having a field day over her sexuality and intellect, while at the time same revealing that 21^st century men still don’t understand consent. Misogynists hate when women capitalize on their own sexuality. The patriarchy upholds men who seek sexual gratification from women against their will and when women give their consent to be sexualized, this devalues the “masculine” nature of it. The patriarchy hates ethical sex work because they can’t control and manipulate it for their own sexual and financial benefit. “Patriarchal pornography has become an inescapable part of everyday life because the need to create a pretend culture where male sexual desire is endlessly satisfied keeps males from exposing the patriarchal lie and seeking healthy sexual identities.”⁸

Last week I wrote about how the misogyny of the middle ages was the foundation in which modern patriarchs built their house upon. The same is true regarding patriarchal propaganda. We see women written about much in the same way then as they are now. And with women having to exist within this strict dichotomy between Eve and Mary for hundreds upon hundreds of years, it’s easy to see how most women have a lot of internalized patriarchy to unlearn. That juxtaposed against the backdrop of some 15^th century women utilizing that very internalized patriarchy to rise to the upper echelons of patriarchal males, who unironically applaud them for their conformity, modesty, and piety, makes it hard to distinguish the true puppet master. The deeper your internalized patriarchy, the more pseudo-respect earned. The likes of Candice Owens comes to mind here.

Margaret Beaufort, matriarch of the Tudor dynasty

One such medieval woman that benefited from recycled patriarchal propaganda is Margaret Beaufort who utilized her piety to dilute her savagery. She has been weaved into historical fabric for her modesty and goodness, yet she participated and perhaps was even the catalyst for rebellions against Richard III’s short and tumultuous reign, she benefited greatly from the deaths of the Princes in the Tower, and because her son, yet another man with deep evidence of the use of patriarchal propaganda, Henry Tudor, founded the most famous dynasty in imperialist history, she’s remembered for her grace and goodness rather than her guts and glory.

Since March is Women’s History Month, I will spend the next four weeks introducing four badass medieval women that have been the victims of patriarchal propaganda, 3 of which have been villainized, erased and bestialized because of their non-conformity and open rebellion to patriarchal roles, and 1 whom was ultimately rewarded for utilizing her internalized patriarchy to come out on top. We’ll peel back the layers of patriarchal propaganda and put these women back into the time they existed, providing them with their personhood and dignity, telling the story of their power, intellect, resilience, diligence, grace, and political prowess.

Enter: Elizabeth Woodville, Jacquetta of Luxembourg, Elizabeth Lambert, and Margaret Beaufort. Powerful women that wielded the very agency the misogynists claimed didn’t exist against them for their own gain and livelihood. Join me next week as I explore how patriarchal propaganda erased Elizabeth Lambert’s name from history and how Richard III is still benefiting from the modern version of the same dirty game. It’ll be juicy; ripe with medieval scandal, pleasures of the skin, double standards, affairs, and nepotism.

1. Page 49, For the Love of Men by Liz Plank is an excellent read, especially if you are trying to understand the harmful impacts the patriarchy has upon men. As a feminist, Liz understands that men need healing from the patriarchy too if we are to ever move forward into a more peaceful, community-based existence. Highly, highly recommend also subbing to Liz’s Substack here.

2. Page 45, see above.

3. Page 162, The Will to Change, bell hooks - see previous posts’ footnotes to read why you should absolutley be reading bell hooks.

4. See below.

5. Page 18, Rosalind Brown-Grant’s translation of Christine de Pizan’s 1405 The Book of the City of Ladies, is a wonderful read to feel the connectedness of women then to women now. Rosalind’s introduction into Christine’s experience and the world she inhabited is helpful to understand how Christine’s brand of feminism is separate but equal to ours in the 21st century.

6. See above.

7. Pulled from the introduction to Phillipa Gregory’s The Women of the Cousins' War.

8. Page 86, The Will to Change, bell hooks