We live in a country where seven men at Cornell can rape a woman, inform dozens of their fraternity brothers of what they were doing without any of them stepping in to stop it, and yet only be required to write essays as a “punishment” for their atrocity. Additionally, we are faced with the fact that the United States is controlled by a convicted rapist dictator who has called for the destruction of Los Angeles and San Diego, has gutted the Endangered Species Act, has sent masked agents to invade Democratic cities and murder protesters, openly toys with the idea of annihilating entire civilizations in front of the UN, and has as an official position that my trans friends don’t exist. The leader of our armed forces has completely integrated Christianity’s antithesis, Christian Nationalism, into our military operations, has murdered noncombatants in boats, and has an obsession with testosterone levels.
Patriarchy is death. It destroys everything that it touches. Insecure men rape our world because they hate themselves and want to consume others in order to make up for a perceived lack of their inherent self-worth. They then try to dominate the world to make up for that lack, trading in their actual inherent self-worth for power over creation. And that is precisely what Patriarchy does – it causes men to become blind to the fundamental reality of humanity’s infinite inherent value. Men then fail to see that humans are loved precisely as we are.
Men are led to believe that they are perpetually victimized by the feminine, by half of humanity. This is because men are taught to despise the feminine that always exists within ourselves. Patriarchy is therefore self-hate. Toxic masculinity is informed by a world that perceives all of the goodness of humanity, our compassion and gentleness, as weakness. The virtues within the Beatitudes are therefore actually abhorrent to a social system that believes domination is the ultimate virtue.
And women have lived in a world where men cannot and should not be trusted for the entire span of human existence. Why should women trust any man at this point? Women have had to endure our self-hatred as it poured out of ourselves and onto everything around us. And the lack of actualized accountability and consequence has resulted in the crucial understanding that the power structures on which American society rest only favor domination. Why should any marginalized voice trust in such a virtue-less world?
This is what Empire must be: a man who hates himself so much that oppression overflows out of him and onto the civilization around him. All of the military parades, the masked ICE agents, the murders, the wars, the genocides, the Epstein class – all of it is an outpouring of the self-hatred bubbling out of the men who control the world. If they loved themselves they wouldn’t try to acquire everything around them. They would want to promulgate their love. Yet all love pours from creation’s divine Source, through us, and onto the world. This is why Patriarchy is completely antithetical to Christianity – Patriarchy is an outpouring of hatred of oneself and the Spirit of God is a river of love being poured into everyone. They are two opposed rivers, and hatred is so weak in comparison to love.
So Patriarchy and Empire are the products of men who have become so self-absorbed in their hatred of themselves that they cannot comprehend that they already had their self-worth before they tried to devour the world. They are the result of incurvatus in se, the curving inward that one does when they have become blinded to the realities around them. The Patriarchy turns men into singularities, black holes of despair that absorb themselves and all light around them.
May we build a world of cuddled men, a world where boys can cry without fear. May we build a world where gay boys can fall in love openly, where boys can hold each other’s hands. Let us be a world where masculinity is gentle, sweet, sensitive, kind, confident, and loving. The Kingdom of God is feminine and God is queer.
