On masculinity, patriarchy, accountability, and the courage to choose differently
Patriarchy has ensnared all of us.
But let’s be clear: women and marginalized people have been saddled with the weight of it. Women have spent generations learning to temper our rage. Not because we don’t have it. But because we have, for the most part, learned to wield it wisely. To protect ourselves. To protect our children. To protect the people we love. To protect our communities and those who inhabit them.
Our rage is sacred. And it is growing.
I think this is a moment for the men who love women. The men who are actually doing the work of examining themselves and what patriarchy has imparted to them. The men who are learning how to transmute their own hurt, pain, and grief into anger that protects rather than violates, debases, and defiles everything sacred and holy, including human life and our planet.
Men. Brothers. Allies. I implore you.
When you see or hear something, say something.
It begins with your friend making a comment about a woman, including his own wife, whom he secretly resents. It starts with questioning what you have been taught instead of laughing along. When you’re out together and a woman catches your friend’s eye, and he takes liberties by sexualizing, demeaning, and reducing her to her body, and you know it’s inappropriate, SAY SOMETHING.
But it also means cultivating loving, honest relationships with your male friends. Demonstrate vulnerability. Make it okay to talk about the hard things like grief, fear, loneliness, heartbreak, shame, and the things you were taught to keep buried. Sometimes that means being vulnerable first. Sometimes it means putting down the armor and saying, “I’m struggling," so your friend knows he can do the same.
It starts with teaching your sons how to develop a relationship with their inner world. Teaching them what it means to provide safety and care. Acknowledge their hurt. Let them know they are seen and loved. Teach them that crying gives their emotions somewhere to land.
For fuck’s sake remind them and yourself, that their tenderness, and yours, is not a weakness.
Demonstrate what it actually means to respect all human beings, regardless of race, gender, creed, identity, or circumstance. Teach your sons that no one person has the right to be an arbiter of another person’s human rights or worth.
Do the work and learn to embody what it means to be a fierce protector. Model how to care for the women in your life.
Dismantling patriarchy is not just women’s work. It asks all of us to examine what we have inherited and to get curious about the places within us that still need work.
For the men who are doing that work:
We see you.
And the invitation is to keep showing up. Keep examining what you were taught, what you inherited, what you’ve internalized, and where patriarchy continues to show up in the way you move through the world. Then model something different. With your friends, your family, your colleagues, your neighbors. Call it out when you see it. Challenge the joke, the assumption, the behavior. Be willing to have the uncomfortable conversation. Let the people around you see that accountability, vulnerability, tenderness, and respect are not weakness. They are ways of being a man that make room for all of us to be more fully human.
This work is not about getting it perfect. It is about being willing to acknowledge, to see, to question, to listen, and to keep choosing something different. To recognize patriarchy for what it is: an antiquated system and paradigm that must be dismantled, not simply in the world around us, but within all of ourselves.
© Alana Foy 2026
