Patriarchy has started a new PR campaign – rebranding the male jailors as emotionally wounded inmates. In The Indian Express, for instance, Shraddha Upadhyay declares that while “masculinity poses an obvious danger for women,” it is “self-destructive for men as well”. At the heart of this assertion is the myth of male inarticulacy. The author writes: “Men have not collectively spent enough time articulating their experience.” What sounds as progressive empathy is actually an elision of patriarchal power.
Silence Is a Privilege, Not a Wound
Men don’t need to “articulate” their experience because the entire world already does it for them. Male subjectivity isn’t hidden; it’s hegemonic. It’s the silent setting on which the rest of society performs. To say men haven’t spoken is like saying a ventriloquist has been quiet because the puppet is the one moving its mouth.
The truth is: not speaking has never been their burden. It’s their privilege. The unmarked status of masculinity is not a void begging to be filled with emotional journaling – it’s the luxury of never having to explain yourself.
Feminist speech was born from necessity – from being written out, flattened, erased. When feminized subjects speak, it is often insurgency. When men stay silent, it isn’t absence – it’s structural dominance. It’s how power hums when it doesn’t have to shout.
The author mourns a supposed “deficit”: men, she says, are trapped in cycles of inherited emotional silence while women have “led movements,” been “theorised into feminist studies,” and had their “upliftment” turned into a charity case. Poor men – left behind by all the crying and organizing!
But here’s the thing: the son doesn’t copy his father’s silence because due to a historic pattern of emotional deprivation. He copies it because it pays dividends. A father who didn’t hug isn’t a tragic figure – he’s a blueprint for power. Emotional silence isn’t a burden men carry; it’s the currency they trade. It cloaks them in control, competence, and patriarchal seniority, making them legible as “real men,” inscrutable and in charge.
To put it plainly: silence isn’t an emotional wound. It’s a weapon. A performance of stoicism that conveniently blocks accountability, shields them from vulnerability, and renders their inner life everyone else’s problem to decode.
In contrast to men, women, according to the author, “bicker, gossip, complain, cry”. But this isn’t just a different mode of sociality. This expressivity arises from a political necessity. Women talk because they must, because they’re not presumed to be heard otherwise. Their speech is not a sign of comfort but a sign of survival in hostile terrain.
Emotional honesty among women is not a luxury – it’s a counter-practice to the violence of the masculine norm. But the author turns this into a “deficit” – as if women’s ability to collectivize and express somehow leaves men behind. This is classic reversal: the victim’s coping strategy is treated as privilege, and the perpetrator’s comfort zone is cast as a site of suffering.
The System Isn’t Failing Men — It Is Men
The author’s errors of understanding can be attributed to how they imagine masculinity as a vertical, top-down ideal—a towering, ever-receding image of the “real man” against which individual men constantly fail. Hence, the male psyche becomes a space of insecurity, lack, and failed performance. But this misunderstands what masculinity is under patriarchy. Masculinity isn’t something alien imposed upon men. It is the very atmosphere—the air they breathe, the medium through which they navigate the world. It is structural comfort, not structural strain. Men may agonize over whether they’re man enough, but that anxiety occurs within a world designed to support their authority, emotional entitlement, and ontological centrality.
So when men feel “insecure,” it’s more like a snag in the system – a temporary turbulence in a flight path that remains otherwise guaranteed. Their minor inconvenience doesn’t disturb the broader field of privilege they move through. In fact, their insecurity is often just a form of recalibration, a way of realigning with that horizontal force field of normalized male dominance.
Contrast this with what women face: they don’t live within masculinity; they live under it. For them, masculinity is a vertical structure of domination. It bears down on them through: legal institutions (e.g. marital rape being uncriminalized in India), economic dependence (unpaid labor), sexual violence and coercion, aesthetic and emotional policing. Their “insecurity” isn’t about failing to measure up to a standard—they are often excluded from the standard entirely. It is not about failing to become something, but about being made to endure something—being misrecognized, violated, or erased.
The pressure women experience in patriarchy is structural antagonism, not a gentle dissonance. It is not a failure to harmonize—it is being fundamentally inharmonious with a world built without or against them. So when the author uses “insecurity” to name the male condition, she erases this profound difference. The word suggests fragility, even innocence – that men are under siege by masculinity just as women are. That is a false equivalence. For men, “insecurity” is often the feeling of being insufficient for privilege – not the pain of being its object. It is the twitch of a subject who feels he is not dominating well enough, not the pain of being dominated.
Once we recognize patriarchy not as an overhanging code that imposes psychological burdens on men but as an architecture of power, we gain the political ability to single out actors for their complicity and responsibility. The author notes that “they [men] are, as per societal norms, to provide for home while being away from home.” But who produces these norms? The implication is that “society” or “patriarchy” is some faceless external authority that imposes a rigid mold on poor individual men.
There’s a deep sleight of hand in the author’s theoretical strategy. She positions men as: emotionally burdened by the system they didn’t create, structurally uncomfortable with roles they’re expected to fill, and passively conformed to a masculinity they didn’t choose.
This is a false split. The “system” is men — their actions, their silences, their choices, their privileges. The “pressure” to conform isn’t external; it’s the mechanism by which men ensure the system continues to produce their privileges. The unease of masculinity is not a tragedy — it’s a tactic.
Men, as a historically dominant class, collectively produce, enforce, and benefit from patriarchal “norms.” The standard of masculinity is not something imposed on men from outside — it is the very grammar of power that secures their privilege. Men don’t just “conform” to patriarchal standards. They write them. And they do so in order to: externalize reproductive labor (onto women), consolidate public space as male space, and secure the affective and material advantages of being the one who is “served” at home.
The Energetics of Collapse
If men benefit from patriarchy, then why should they participate in its destruction? As we have seen, the dominant discourse around patriarchy and men tends to center their emotional suffering, pitching feminism as a kind of therapeutic offering: “patriarchy hurts men too, so they should care.” But this framing misdiagnoses the problem. Patriarchy doesn’t primarily harm men—it benefits them through unearned authority, affective entitlement, and material deference.
What needs to be foregrounded is not how patriarchy damages men’s feelings, but how it depends on a fantasy of infinite energetic extraction—from the emotional, physical, and reproductive labor of feminized and subaltern subjects.
This isn’t a metaphor. The emotional depletion, physical exhaustion, and psychological distress of women and queer people constitute a measurable and mounting energetic debt. Stress hormones, burnout, mental illness, chronic fatigue—these are not just “soft data.” They are thermodynamic signals of a system consuming more than it can replenish.
Just like capitalist agriculture depletes the soil, patriarchy depletes care economies. The result? Collapsed families, the “birth strike,” increased intergenerational trauma, rising gendered violence, and global declines in marriage and childbirth—all signs that the system can no longer reproduce itself smoothly.
Every thermodynamic system faces entropy: energy dissipates unless new input is generated. Patriarchy, like capitalism, arrogantly presumes an infinite capacity for care. But energy doesn’t lie. Feminized care work is being withdrawn, refused, or redirected. Queer and trans kinship formations are not anomalies—they are thermodynamic reorganizations. They reroute energy away from extractive systems and toward reciprocal, low-entropy bonds.
This is resistance not just in a political sense, but in a metabolic one. It’s a refusal to continue powering a machine that runs on asymmetry and erasure.
So, should men be interested in feminism? Yes – but not because they are the hidden victims of patriarchy. Rather, because patriarchy is an unsustainable mode of living, one that increasingly undermines its own conditions of possibility.
The privileges men receive from patriarchy are not eternal. They rely on a system that is actively eroding its own foundations. Like climate change, this isn’t a doomsday prophecy – it’s a call to recognize material limits. The world that gives men symbolic authority is also the world whose reproductive and affective infrastructure is collapsing. Men can no longer assume that the housewife will stay, the daughter will care, or the mother will provide. That world is melting.
This isn’t about fatalistic collapse. It’s about unsustainability. Just as capitalism faces planetary limits, patriarchal masculinity faces energetic limits. And just as ecological breakdown demands a green transition, patriarchal breakdown demands a political-energetic realignment.
If men want to live in a world where intimacy is still possible, where relationality is not forced labor, and where social reproduction doesn’t implode – they must invest in the dismantling of the system that has served them. Not out of guilt. But because even power, once it overspends, crashes.
Yanis Iqbal is an undergraduate student of political science at Aligarh Muslim University, India. He is the author of the book Education in the Age of Neoliberal Dystopia. He has published more than 350 articles in different magazines and websites on imperialism, social movements, political theory, education, and cultural criticism.
