You could say a central antifeminist argument is that gender is natural, and thus should be biologically determined. Conversely, the central feminist argument is that these naturalist arguments all too often conflate gender with sex. Sex is biological: it indicates what one’s body parts look like, and what reproductive organs and hormones they have. Gender is a collection of meanings made up by human societies to dictate the behaviour and power position of those biological bodies. How do we know for sure that gender is not biological? Sex exists as it is without interference nor the moral judgement of people. Gender is policed, meaning gender norms—what it means to be a man or masculine and what it means to be a woman or feminine—are upheld and maintained through the policing of behaviour.

Similar to the social invention of gender, there are many other social constructions we take for granted in our societies—we take them to be natural and forget they were made and are maintained by people. Take the legal system. If the legal system reflected the universe’s natural moral compass, there would be no need for law enforcement. Even that term “law enforcement” implies that people need to be policed to uphold the legal system. However, societies need a legal system to protect human lives and ensure justice (ideally anyway). What do societies use a gender system for? It is also a set of laws that needs policing to be enforced. What is its primary purpose? Power. Domination. Exploitation. This is patriarchy.

Unlike the legal system, the patriarchal system does not exist to protect human lives or ensure justice, in fact, quite the opposite. It serves to make some human lives seem more worthy and more valuable than others—by definition, patriarchy is injustice because it seeks to establish a hierarchy for the sole purpose of domination and exploitation. Patriarchy is the gender system that constructs man and masculinity as the superior default human state and woman and femininity as the subordinate sub-human state.

However, patriarchy is far more subtle than the legal system. Its laws are unwritten but enacted in everyday life, embedded in the language and expressions we use, and solidified in how we organise social life. Patriarchy operates under the invisible cloak of normalisation, naturalisation and socialisation, and it colours every aspect of the social world: culture, religion, the workplace, family, intimate relationships and sexuality, social institutions, the government and any other part of social life you can think of.

The premise of patriarchy (or so it appears on the surface) is that it protects and serves the interests and well-being of men through dominion over women. Through the abuse of women, the control over their bodies and choices, the belief in their inferiority, the imposition of limitations on what they can achieve, men are promised a lifetime membership to the all men’s club. In fact, men are promised as boys that if they do all the right things according to the unwritten but well-documented masculinity rulebook, they will be rewarded with happiness, a woman they can call ‘my woman’, as much sex (and unconditional love) as they desire, and endless handshakes of respect from other men. This is the great lie of patriarchy.

What we are seeing now—this ‘crisis of masculinity’—is symptomatic of a fumbling and crumbling patriarchal system. Feminism has not caused this crisis—it has rather exposed it, spoken it out loud, shone a blinding light on it. The ‘male loneliness epidemic’ where young, single males are feeling isolated and disconnected, struggling with depression, feeling unsupported, is indicative of how patriarchal masculinity (more famously called ‘toxic masculinity’) strips men of their capacity to emotionally regulate and support each other. The policing of emotional sensitivity and awareness amongst boys begins as adolescents.

Policing is done through shaming, implying that emotional sensitivity and intimacy is feminine or homosexual, that male peers being emotionally intimate is an infringement on masculinity. This policing comes from everywhere you look. All of social life is imbued with patriarchal values—shaming comes from fathers, mothers, grandparents, friends, siblings, bullies, coaches, and mainstream media. ‘Patriarchy’ does not mean that it is only men who uphold its values. Feminist arguments are often disputed with examples of how men struggle in the modern world: higher suicide rates, military conscription, dangerous workplaces and pressure to earn and provide. What is interesting about these examples is that their cause can be traced back to the patriarchal system.

The ‘suicide argument’ for one is more complex than people realise. Women show higher rates of depression and attempted suicide, while men show disproportionately higher rates of ‘completed’ suicide. Women’s attempts are generally to do with their mental health struggles, while men’s are to do with their mental health in addition to psychosocial factors such as singlehood, unemployment, and retirement. These psychosocial factors are not exclusive to men but affect them much worse than others. Consider that men might be mentally healthier if they were socialised to express emotion, be vulnerable and seek help without being told to suck it up and be a man.

If boys were encouraged to foster real intimacy with their male and female friends, and not have intimacy conflated with sexuality, maybe single men would not feel so isolated out of romantic relationships. Male friendships in particular are a largely untapped well of intimacy and comfort. If men’s self-worth and value were not governed by their work and ability to provide, maybe unemployment and retirement would not be as devastating.

As for military conscription, a system that values violence as a means of domination, a patriarchal masculinist system, values war and relies on men’s blind loyalty to the ultimate masculine hero—the soldier. Men’s perceived superiority due to their physical strength also means they are preferred for jobs that require hard physical labour in dangerous environments—make no mistake, it is considered very masculine to work in dangerous environments and masculinity is revered by a patriarchal society. The pressure to be the sole financial provider is a blatant requirement of patriarchy; it requires that of men as it requires of women to be in the home and be the sole child carer and domestic labourer. Women who demand their male partner be the sole earner simply because they are men are patriarchal women, not feminist women.

What feminism as a movement has done well is transform the meaning of ‘woman’ for women. Feminist women no longer base their selfhood on arbitrary meanings associated with their biology, with the construction of femininity. Womanhood has become vast and creative, and it's constantly evolving. Feminism has failed to do this for men and manhood. Granted, feminism has been a movement focused on fighting for the rights and equal treatment of women. They have been busy, to say the least.

And to be clear, if it was expected of women to do the emotional and mental labour of liberating men from the patriarchal prison, patriarchy would be re-enacting itself even in the context of liberation. However, men do need a movement to evolve past the shackles of patriarchal masculinity. Men need a conception of manhood that is fully human and does not require them to psychologically self-mutilate or act violently or show a rabid sexual prowess in order to feel worthy, in order to feel that they are enough.