Reclaiming Authentic Connection—Say Patriarchy

What men and boys can show us about healthy relationships, if we let them.

Posted May 30, 2026 | Reviewed by Margaret Foley

This post is Part 2 of a series. Read Part 1 here.

Too many of us are afraid of sounding “woke,” boring , provocative, irritating, or radical if we point out everyday acts of gender policing. We avoid getting the response, “Ugh, this again?”

I, for one, have noticed this fear and cynicism brewing in myself over the past decade.

Sparked by the devastating losses of queer youth to suicide in the early 2010s, I consistently wrote and spoke publicly, for years, about the connections between patriarchy, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia. For clinical journals and popular media, I wrote dozens of articles with titles like “ Bully Gets ‘Girl' ” and “ Don’t Act, Don’t Tell ,” a phrase I developed to illuminate the social regulation that demands gender conformity in appearance and mannerisms—mainly in males—to avoid prejudice and discrimination (O'Connell, 2012).

(Along these lines, in her new book, Man Up: The New Misogyny and the Rise of Violent Extremism , Cynthia Miller-Idriss cites studies showing that while American youth are increasingly more accepting of same-sex sex , being a “fag”—displaying nonconforming gender expressions—continues to be met with harassment. (Miller-Idriss, 2025; Mittleman, 2023).

But gradually, I got quieter.

The backlash to my observations seemed less and less worth the effort. I grew tired of increasingly circular debates with family and friends about whether or not misogyny and homophobia were even real. Straight men in my life would insist that "everyone gets called 'faggot,'" and that I should "get over" myself. Some male clients would begin couples therapy combatively (“I guess you’re gonna see me as the ‘bad guy’”) and then proceed to blow off my attempts to help them empathize with their female partners, believing I was against them.

Of course, throughout America over the past decade, what began as defensiveness and minimizing of these conversations has accelerated into direct, openly hateful targeting of women and LGBTQ+ people, not to mention relentless attacks on people of color, immigrants, and all other minorities who are seen to threaten white patriarchal power.

The reflexive takeaway (on all sides of the political spectrum): You pushed your “liberal agenda” too far.

And so it goes, patriarchy and its ill effects continue to be denied, avoided, and flipped using DARVO (deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender) (Rosenthall & Freyd, 2022). As if those of us who call it out are actually the ones harming our country.

But in calling out misogyny (along with homophobia, transphobia, racism, and xenophobia ), my end game was never to shame “bad boys” or claim moral superiority. It was, in fact, to invite recognition, empathy, and connection by exposing a system that stifles us all, even as it brutally punishes some more than others.

Reading Miller-Idriss’s book reawakened me to what is lost when we don’t call it like it is.

She clarifies how the seemingly innocuous “everyday” misogyny enacted by all of us, including youth in the schoolyard and online, not only functions as juvenile behavior, but also serves as a crucial, early stage initiation into an ecosystem that too frequently escalates into domestic and public violence.

As psychoanalyst Ken Corbett writes in A Murder Over a Girl , in which he investigates the 2008 murder of a transgender teenager , Leticia King, by one of her male classmates, we often learn to push unwanted vulnerability, deviance, and shame out of ourselves and into others. And when this form of self-regulation in a patriarchal system remains unobserved and unacknowledged, well… we see the consequences everywhere, every day: bullying , misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, racism, xenophobia, violence, isolation.

I was recently moved by a male client who had served in the military. Throughout his life, so much of his relational world involved competition , proving his strength and worth in the form of toughness/“masculinity.” (His father, for example, showed him warmth only when he was in high school, when he won a football game.) His service in the Army was no exception. But he recalled a pivotal existential moment, when he bonded with another soldier who invited him to connect emotionally. The two of them verbalized a range of feelings with one another, including vulnerability, without fear of rejection, emasculation, or shame. This meaningful friendship opened up their lives and has proven to endure. It made them even more attuned to their jobs, allowing them both to create deep, human connections with their fellow soldiers, making sure they felt truly supported and had what they needed to serve. Several of these soldiers had wanted to end their lives before receiving the generous attention of my client. Before the “blessing of that friendship,” my client said, the men he worked with only knew how to connect by fighting with one another physically: “That’s what they thought they needed to do to be men.”

We too often dismiss the practice of social policing, of pitting boys and men against one another as a way to dominate women, before it develops into full-blown, hateful violence. And then repeats itself.

As a psychotherapist, my job is to help people to name experiences they never learned to acknowledge, as my client’s friend did for him in the Army. It is in this naming, this breaking of silence, that shame is disrupted—and fear and cruelty along with it. From there, we can imagine connecting with other people with openness and creative possibility, free of punishing societal control.

Our kids understand this intuitively.

Recently, when my son came home from school, he wanted to talk to my husband and me about an incident on the subway during his school trip, which I described in Part 1 of this series. (To recap: One of the girls in his class wanted to sit with the boys on the subway—the kids were otherwise divided by gender. One of the boys dared the other boys to sit next to her. And then suddenly all of the kids began to feel self-conscious and ashamed.) Our son initially came to the teasing boy’s defense. The first words out of his mouth when we asked him how the boy's behavior made him and possibly everyone else feel were “Yeah, but…”

Then, after thinking about it a little more, he got quiet. He selected one of his longtime favorite books from the bookshelf: I am Rosa Parks . And he re-read thoughtfully about how social exclusion becomes normalized without naming it. He then reminded us how necessary it is to walk in the shoes of those who feel that exclusion the most.

Say gay. Say trans. Say girl.

Our children are listening.

Corbett K. (2016). A murder over a girl: Justice, gender, junior high. New York, NY: Henry Holt.

Miller-Idriss, C. (2025). Man Up: The New Misogyny and the Rise of Violent Extremism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Mittleman, J. (2023). Homophobic Bullying as Gender Policing: Population-Based Evidence. Gender & Society , 37 (1), 5-31.

O'Connell, M. (2012). Don't Act, Don't Tell: Discrimination Based on Gender Nonconformity in the Entertainment Industry and the Clinical Setting. Journal of Gay & Lesbian Mental Health , 16(3), 241-255.

Rosenthal, M. N. & Freyd, J.J. (2022). From DARVO to Distress: College women’s contact with their perpetrators after sexual assault. Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment, & Trauma, 31, 459-477. https://doi.org/10.1080/10926771.2022.2055512

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Mark O'Connell, LCSW-R, is a psychotherapist in private practice and the author of the books The Performing Art of Therapy and Modern Brides & Modern Grooms.

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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.