The Fifth Wave of Feminism

We Realize That Patriarchy Hurts Men Too

If women wear pants now, why don’t more boys wear dresses? Good question, Dina

Little boys are made of love… So what happened to them?

I’m not a scholar of Women’s History, or Feminist Theory, or Gender Studies. My field is Mythology, but hear me out. Last week, Dina Honour posted this essay, If Men are in a Crisis, I Know Something that Might help, and ProfessorMeredith posted Patriarchy Created the Skill Issue, Women are not the Repair Shop, and, well, it got me thinking. That sound you hear is my husband running for cover. Nevertheless, I’m ready to declare that the 5th wave of feminism is starting. That’s right. You heard it at Modern Mythology first. Don’t forget that. There’ll be a quiz. When some qualified researcher inevitably says it, you can pick multiple choice option A: “Susan said it first.”

In the fifth wave of feminism, I predict that we’re going to insist that patriarchal indoctrinates do their emotional work. We’re going to say: Sounds like a YOU problem. We’re going to suggest you see a therapist, preferably a somatic therapist or someone who does Internal Family Systems work. Check it out. We’re going to insist you get help for the things that are killing you. Join a twelve-step program. You are going to have to break your addiction to power, and your right to abuse it. You act as if you could stop anytime, but we know that you can’t even see the mechanisms of addiction or the ways they fling you around. It’s making you unfit for relationship. And that is making you resentful, arrogant, snappish, and other unattractive qualities. Perhaps you should smile more?

I’m sorry, that was snarky, and you’re in pain. My bad.

It’s inevitable that the shoe would end up on the other foot. If the patriarchal system is rotten, and it is, then all parts of the system have to be healed. That means you, the true believer. I know it’s terrifying.

Just before I started my healing journey, I had a nightmare. I was standing before a huge tsunami, a wall of water fourteen stories high, about to crash down on my head. It’s like that. But don’t worry. We, the individuals hurt by dominance culture so badly that we couldn’t avoid our own wounds, have been doing this work for a long time. It took decades to get free of the domestic violence and sexual abuse of my family, and then, the domestic terrorism and sexual abuse of the larger culture, which are mirrors of one another. By age 30 or so, I was trapped in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles while dating the Father with a Thousand Faces. But I got out, and you can. too.

I’ve spent enough time curled in the fetal position, releasing trauma through my eyes, to know that no one can do the work for you. Those of us who have been through “the change of life” can assure you that not only will you be all right, you will be much better off in the end. And, when enough of you do your work, the culture will be better off. See, human beings actually need the parts of us that our patriarchal culture lops off. We can reassemble the shards that our culture shatters us into. We can be kintsugi masterpieces.

Did you perpetuate harm? Did you coerce a young woman so terrified by her upbringing that she couldn’t squeak out the single syllable, NO, through the tiny hole in her clamped-shut throat? Did you exert the “come on baby,” pressure? Or, if you’re a woman, did you ever slut-shame someone? Humiliate a geeky boy? Statistically, odds are, you did. I know. Boys will be boys, mean girls rule, and not all men. And I get that. You still have to do your own work, pull on your oar, row the boat.

I say this as a woman married to one of those good men who would never assert his male dominance, and who raised a son to become a man who would never abuse anyone. But, I’m going to say this, too. Even if you’ve never abused a woman or bullied another man to gain status, you still need to decenter men and decolonize your minds from an extractive capitalist worldview that makes you think any of the myriad harms we have done happened because human beings are terrible. It simply isn’t true. People aren’t naturally terrible. Our culture is. So, I’m asking you to do the work; throw out your conditioning; ask the question over and over: Who am I, once I remove the culture, the gender, the race? Who am I in this situation? Who am I really? This is a practice called self-inquiry.

The answer is some form of: YOU ARE LOVE.

Ever seen a newborn baby? I have. When a newborn looks at you, the whole ocean pours through that tiny body, swirls around you, and swallows you whole. It even gets into your lungs. My baby was bigger than the room, uncontained by that tiny body. When he met my gaze, it was a guru transmission from a vastness so huge I could only call it Space. The sky. Love without ego. My 7-pound Buddha. No filter. Undifferentiated wholeness. Pure, unemotional love. When my son was born, I understood for the first time that love is not an emotion. Love stories are only ABOUT love. Actual love is something else. It felt like he didn’t even have pupils or a center of gravity. Every person who came into his presence fell into love. He was powerful like that. A daughter would have been just as powerful.

When he was comfortable, he glowed. When he was not, he stormed. When the sky was clear again, there was not a trace of resentment. He was not a tabula rasa, one of the stupidest theories ever put forth by educated men who didn’t check with… mothers. Even so, this baby, born into another culture, would have an operating system tuned to a different mythology, and so, he would have a vastly different experience of life on Earth. I’m saying that the harsh way we raise our children here, in American culture, with our belief in Original Sin and not sparing the rod, and the abuses of power we believe in from the get-go, is what’s spoiling them. You don’t need me to cite the statistics. Men are suffering. We all know it.

The fifth wave of feminism is the recognition that patriarchy hurts men, too - not just women.

The first wave focused on expanding women’s rights within the system of oppression. First, we needed the vote. Textbooks say we “were granted” the vote. That passive voice is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Women fought for that right and won it against incredible odds. And we’re still working on this one. If you expand the meaning of “vote” to take in all the halls of power, such as boardrooms, you can see where we don’t have votes. And now, our current backlash is trying to take our vote away or mute its effect. So not only do we still fight, we now have to protect what we have gained. Patriarchy is a many-headed hydra.

In the second wave, the work focused on economic equality and bodily autonomy. Still working on that one, too. The Equal Rights Amendment, for example, and the rollback of reproductive rights. So, that fight, too, is ongoing. After that, in the third wave, the fight moved to intersectionality, realizing how seemingly disparate areas of life conspire to keep us in our place. Now, some people say intersectionality, and it sounds like a swear word - a DEI slur.

I can still hear the “if only” under each wave of feminism. “If only we had the vote. If only we had access to banking systems, mortgages, higher education, the professions… If only we were safe.”

But all those “if onlies” still live within the rotten system. At first, we wanted to alter the system, to enlarge it, to make room for ourselves within it. We wanted the boys to let us play. Once we stood in the doorway, though, we had a look around. And guess what? That boy’s club was an ugly frat house after the keg party. We saw the radioactive debris that needed cleaning, the once-stately house, falling down from neglect, the boys dying from hazing, and the grim hangovers, hoping for a coffee. We caught sight of all the victims of date rape tiptoeing out the back door in shame.

In the fourth wave, we connected with each other and compared notes. You, too? Yes, me too. And the scale was so unbelievable, the scales fell from our eyes in a tsunami of tears. So we argued that rape was more than a crime. It was a widespread cultural orientation toward the abuse of power for the pleasure of gaining status through domination. Men and boys were almost never held accountable. Unbelievably, the victim of the crime was! People pushed back. No! What? Come on. Now, you’ve gone too far. STFU. We don’t live in a rape culture.

Then the Motherless et al scandal broke, and now the Pre-workout drink spiking, and well, you just can’t deny it anymore. This is rape culture, and, unfortunately, culture is made up of individuals. So, here we are, back at personal responsibility and self-respect. Make no mistake, no self-respecting man could put drugs in his partner’s drink without her consent. No. Not even pre-workout drugs. And yes. Caffeine is a drug. So many of you obviously need to get help.

This is when we get the STOP hand from the traffick(ing) cop.

Here we are. The fifth wave. This one’s a tsunami, a surge of right action, and that’s a good thing. It will wash the land clear of old structures and create the conditions that leave us no choice but to start again. From scratch. To build a better culture. Once our collective shadow has finished revealing itself, we’ll have to. Don’t be fooled. Right now, it looks like a dead low tide. Mud flats are exposed. Can it get any lower? Yes. In the deep unconscious, this wave is pulling the water away, growing, towering above us, exposing us. After it crashes on our heads, there will be no un-seeing.

I say: Bring it. Let it rise up. Let us see all the abuses of power that this culture worships.

All those whinging, fussing, powerful people who say they can’t do the work, or who want women to hold their hands, wipe their tears, or do it for them? To those brittle people who think they can’t be vulnerable, can’t feel their grief, their suffering? I say, in the most loving way: “You chuckleheads. You are already feeling it.”

You know that moment, when the old ways of coping aren’t working, you can see how destructive they are… and yet you are pasting a smile on it and heading out to the bar anyway? That’s where we are. Even men know this damage is unsustainable. Even men know we haven’t fully seen the receipts from our domestic violence problem, our mass shootings, which are so often in schools, our suicide rates, the Epstein kompropat files, the Motherless scandal, and now this new one?. And I haven’t even touched on our state-sponsored wars, genocides, climate change, and their related refugees, and all the pollution our over-packaged consumer culture has created. Or, we could point to our culture of work, our system of extraction capitalism, where what’s being extracted is our lifeblood. This god-like male daddy keeping us safe from death thing is not working. Every single person born since the patriarchal project began has died - so far. But those billionaire bros will keep throwing money at that problem regardless. The money they extracted from us.

But here’s the truth. There is already enough. What if we provided for one another rather than allowing some small minority to extract our life force as personal wealth?

The second question of self-inquiry is: WHAT DO I WANT? I mean, really. Be honest. Is it money? Then, good. What would having all the money you could ever need give you? Safety? Peace? What is it? Keep asking until you get a real answer. Is it power? Now we are getting somewhere. What would all the power in the world give you? Freedom? Respect? Keep looking until you see what’s really under it. Then give that quality instead of trying to get it. What if you WERE peace, and everywhere you went, peace just unfurled from you? What if you became safety or joy? Pure happiness? Grace.

The one irrefutable thing the war in Iran has shown us is that all along, we could have afforded to create a compassionate community. But we were being manipulated by the short hairs of our worldview, which is our fear of death. Why do we need a Strong Daddy President who won’t be constrained by ethics? We are terrified. Traumatized. They spend a lot of time and money keeping us that way. I’ll never forget the Springfield pets being eaten by refugees. Even after they admitted it wasn’t true, they kept saying it. To keep us angry. and afraid someone was going to kill us next.

Here’s a little self-inquiry. What’s just under the anger? Fear. And what are we really afraid of? Death. That’s what the angry, jealous war god (and his presidential avatar) is supposed to protect us from: Death. How’s that going? Not one saved yet? So, what if we embraced our impermanence instead? I call that the “You Can’t Take it With You ” culture. That culture would recognize that giving, welcoming, healing, taking care - in the first place - is actually less expensive than war, genocide, and the whole industrial for-profit prisons project combined.

Here’s what the fifth wave of feminism is going to show you: We can save ourselves. We can love ourselves. The antidote to patriarchy is compassionate community. There’s more than enough money. All the stories about why we cannot are false, created by people who have an investment in dominating us, farming us, and extracting wealth from us. This effort hurts men every bit as much as it does women. It just hurts them differently. The costs, though, are incalculable. How much longer will we agree to pay them? I’m betting not all that long.

Women are getting free. Men have begun to see the need to do their own work. And it’s true. Men have to change. Until then, they are being kicked out of the big bed, relegated to the couch, until they can see all the ways they have been harmed and become willing to heal. I think that’s going to mean letting go of power for a while. Women and minorities should take the lead. Think of it as abstinence from the intoxicating substance: power. Think of it as sobriety.

Now, in this fifth wave, feminists are insisting that individuals have to unpack their personal baggage. Get the system out of your system. What’s the collective noun for a group of people doing their own work? I’m calling it a tipping point.

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