Rick Santorum, Keepin Patriarchy Real (aka, It’s All About Teh Menz)

While some Republican presidential candidates are skillfully using coded racial language (“food stamps”), I’ve gotta hand it to Rick Santorum for being super, extra explicit about how patriarchy actually works. As he tells ABC News here, patriarchy oppresses women not because it directly hates women, but because it wants to protect men, masculinity, and the privileges that go with them. Qualifying his earlier remarks about women in combat, Santorum says:

“I was talking about men’s emotional issues; not women,” Santorum told ABC News. “I mean, there’s a lot of issues. That’s just one of them…So my concern is being in combat in that situation instead of being focused on the mission, they may be more concerned with protecting someone who may be in a vulnerable position, a woman in a vulnerable position,” Santorum said.

I’m really amazed and thankful that Santorum so overtly and explicitly lays bare how patriarchy actually works. According to Santorum, the reason why women shouldn’t be allowed in combat positions has nothing to do with actual women, and everything to do with men’s inability to grow the eff up and deal with the fact that women are around. So any discussions of the women-in-combat issue (which is problematic for militaristic-imperialist reasons above any gender reasons) that focus women miss the underlying issue: part of male privilege is not having to feel uncomfortable, especially if that discomfort is caused by women. From patriarchy’s perspective, this issue isn’t actually about women. It’s about protecting male/masculine privilege. It just frames the issue as a “women’s issue” in order to deflect attention from the real problem. Yet again women are the scapegoats for men’s problems.

Patriarchy is male/masculine hegemony. It makes sense that patriarchy wouldn’t center women/femininity, even as the object of derision. We need to be careful not to get caught up in patriarchy’s attempts to re-frame men’s issues as problems with/for women. Sometimes, the apparent centering of women actually only serves to obscure the fact that the underlying issues are not actually about women, but about patriarchy’s sentimentalization of women in service of male/masculine privilege.