I recently finished reading The Gender Knot: Unraveling Our Patriarchal Legacy, by the late sociologist and writer Allan G. Johnson, which was published in its third edition in 2014.1 (The book was first published in 1997.) I learned about The Gender Knot (which is a secular book) through my religious life, upon discovering that an earlier edition of the book had once been used (in the early 2000’s) as the core textbook for a Unitarian Universalist curriculum intended to empower U.U. adults and youth to examine patriarchy in religious institutions and everyday life.2
I want to spend a bit of time writing about the book, because I’ve found Johnson’s perspective on how to conceive of one’s own actions in response to oppressive social systems to be suggestive and helpful. Before getting to that, however, we need to understand Johnson’s underlying concept of patriarchy, so that’s the focus of this essay, the first of two. In a second essay, to follow, I’ll turn explicitly to Johnson’s discussion of action, responsibility, and social change.
Johnson was a sociologist and author who, beginning in the late 1970’s, was involved with organizations in the state of Connecticut that worked to protect women from domestic and sexual violence perpetrated by men. During that time, Johnson also developed an undergraduate course, geared toward helping students “explore the structure and culture of patriarchal systems and male privilege.”3
Drawing on that work and the insights of feminist scholars, The Gender Knot offers Johnson’s analytic framework for understanding:
What patriarchy is;
The illusions and stories that sustain patriarchy against cultural change; and
How to—and how not to—disrupt patriarchal patterns of living.
As a sociologist, Johnson wants us to understand that patriarchy is a system of relationships of power and privilege, through which our lives are positioned in relation with one another. Put another way, patriarchy is a pattern of social life that’s distinct from the individuals who live it (like you and me), yet which only exists through our concrete actions and the institutions and policies we build to organize our lives. Put still another way, patriarchy is a predicament that we’ve inherited, through which we encounter and make sense of one another as human beings. As Johnson is keen to insist, we are all participants, whether we like it or not, and patriarchy shapes “our sense of who we are and what kinds of alternatives we can choose from.”4
In Johnson’s formulation, patriarchy is:
Male dominated. This includes both the positional authority of men within family, social, religious, and political life, and the cultural myths of male superiority that rationalize that authority as somehow, supposedly, “natural” instead of historically contingent and changeable.
Male identified. When we imagine the qualities of self and society that we deem “good, desirable, preferable, or normal”5—and when we evaluate the conduct of ourselves and other people on those terms—our judgments tend to be steeped in our tacit ideas about manhood and masculinity.
Male centered. Men and boys and their actions, perspectives, needs, and life outcomes—whether understood thinly or generously—occupy the focus of social concern.
Obsessed with control over self and other. Control is fundamental to patriarchy, as are fear and anxiety about having it, exercising it, losing it, and so forth. This way of evaluating our place in the world requires a stance of separation from the object of control, and as a result, “controllers come to see themselves as subjects who intend to decide what will happen and to see others as objects to act upon.”6 Anxiety and fear about maintaining one’s positional autonomy, both over one’s own situation and compared with other people, are intrinsic to this way of life.
I want to dwell on that last point for a moment, because obsession with control and fear of losing it are deadly for learning and love. Learning and love—such as in caring relation with our children, our spouses, our friends, and our fellow travelers—require vulnerability. On this point, I remember especially the wisdom of bell hooks, who wrote in All About Love:
The desire to be powerful is rooted in the intensity of fear. Power gives us the illusion of having triumphed over fear, over our need to love . . . . We cannot know love if we remain unable to surrender our attachment to power, if any feeling of vulnerability strikes terror in our hearts.7
As with bell hooks, the clarity of Johnson’s analytic and moral vision is such that, when reading The Gender Knot, you begin to see the patriarchal dynamics of everyday life more clearly, and once you do, you can’t “unsee” them.
I make the connection with bell hooks, in part, to acknowledge what you may be thinking: feminist writers have been saying things like this for a long time. And that’s exactly what one reviewer of Johnson's third edition of the book observed: “[w]hile reading The Gender Knot, I found myself saying aloud Women have been saying this stuff for years! too many times to count.”8 For my part, while reading The Gender Knot, I often felt inspired to re-read passages from hooks’s All About Love and The Will To Change,9 in order to grapple more directly with the intimate implications of Johnson’s argument.
But as that same reviewer argues, and I agree, Johnson is best read as a pro-feminist ally in the cause of disrupting patriarchy. As defined by the nonprofit Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network (GLSEN), an “ally” is a “member of the majority or dominant group who works to end oppression by recognizing their own privilege and supporting or advocating for the oppressed population.”10
Johnson is keenly aware of and discusses his own privilege and blindspots in being a white man wrestling with patriarchy. And indeed, The Gender Knot does have limitations. For example, the intersection of patriarchy and racial inequality deserves a great deal more examination than Johnson provides. And although Johnson observes correctly that “discrimination and persecution targeting gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people is a linchpin of patriarchy,”11 Johnson’s discussion of the rights and status of LGBTQ people occupies only a few pages, far short of what’s warranted. Had the book been written today, I'm certain that such dynamics would have featured more prominently in Johnson's analysis.
That said, I think The Gender Knot can be especially helpful for men who want to contribute to a more-just world, but whose ingrained cultural habits have led them to reach first for books by other men instead of by people of other genders. Johnson’s trenchant critiques of the mythopoetic and men’s rights movements of the 1990’s, and his meticulous debunking of common arguments that claim to demonstrate either the non-existence or the “naturalness” of patriarchy, offer men invaluable tools for navigating the confusing world of “men’s movements.” (The most-recent season of the Modern Manhood podcast is great for that, too.) Johnson also offers men an extensive reading list at the back of the book, so they can dig deeper into feminist writing and scholarship, including books that attend more deeply to matters of race, class, heterosexism, and sexual orientation and gender identity.
For me, the most helpful aspect of Johnson’s analysis is his discussion of how patriarchy is sustained over time. This is partly a matter of socialization, whereby we “develop a sense of personal identity—including gender—and how this positions us in relation to other people, especially in terms of inequalities of power.”12 But the deeper question is, how are the small, iterative, everyday performances required for that socialization achieved in everyday life?
Johnson’s answer is that we are continuously making choices, and steering the choices made by others, that enact these inequalities through paths of least resistance. This concept of “paths of least resistance” and its implications will be the focus of my next essay. But for now, I want to give an example of what this means in practice.
Consider an example from my series on bullying, wherein I recalled being squared off with a former-friend-turned-bully, at the edge of a fight and surrounded by a crowd of fellow middle schoolers, with no school staff in sight. No one intervened, whether classmate or adult. No one said “stop.” Instead, people I knew, including some people I knew well, sustained the situation’s focus on violence, whether through their silence, their commentary, or their outright encouragement to fight.
Did anyone in or around that crowd, whether classmate or adult, want to intervene and put a stop to the situation? Maybe. Probably. But no one did, and that’s what taking the path of least resistance is all about. There was no shared language or precedent for pushing back, so contrary impulses were withheld in the face of an exciting male struggle for dominance and control—in my case, for control over my own safety. The two things that got me out of that situation without injury were:
The understanding that my safety depended on me refusing the constant invitation to violence; and
The ringing of the school bell at the end of the lunch period, which broke the spell of the crowd and ushered us along a new path of least resistance toward class.
Or consider another example from my bullying series, wherein I took part in bullying a girl on the school bus, inflicting the same kinds of harm that, on a different day, might have been inflicted on me. I, too, took the path of least resistance, and it wasn’t merely a matter of me acquiescing to the situation silently. Rather, I was filled with a fleeting sense of power not usually afforded me by the more-dominant boys, and my actions and my character fused with the situation.
In essence, Johnson is asking us to see patriarchy as a set of relationships that channel the flow of our actions and their consequences in certain directions and not others. This doesn’t mean that you or I can’t stand in the way of the flow—we can, and for any change to occur, someone (or many someones) must, repeatedly. But we do so against the current, and there are costs for doing it. To paraphrase a comment that a professor once made to me in graduate school: your actions may have ripple effects on others, but the river you’re splashing about in has a direction and a current, and there are much bigger waves about, too.
Sometimes you get dashed on the rocks—or at least you fear being dashed on the rocks.
But this doesn’t mean all is lost. So, how do we take responsibility for the patriarchal dynamics of our own lives? Next time, I’ll explore Johnson’s answer to that question.
Allan G. Johnson, The Gender Knot: Unraveling Our Patriarchal Legacy, 3rd edition, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2014.
Barbara Schonborn, Alison Campbell, & Rosemary Matson, Unraveling the Gender Knot: Challenging the System that Binds Us (A Course for Unitarian Universalist Adults and Youths). Mountain View, CA: Unitarian Universalist Women & Religion, 2004/2005.
Johnson, pg. 17.
Ibid., pg. 7.
Ibid., pg. 14.
hooks, All About Love: New Visions, New York: NY: William Morrow, 2001, pg. 221. [Originally published in 2000.]
Katherine Cumings Mansfield, Review of The Gender Knot: Unraveling Our Patriarchal Legacy 3rd Ed., Teachers College Record, Date Published: July 23, 2015, https://www.tcrecord.org/Content.asp?ContentID=18045
bell hooks, The Will To Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. New York, NY: Washington Square Press, 2004.
Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network (GLSEN), Key Concepts and Terms, 2014, https://www.glsen.org/sites/default/files/2020-04/GLSEN%20Terms%20and%20Concepts%20Thematic.pdf
Johnson, op. cit., pg. 243.
Ibid., pg. 29.