I was not prepared to hear over and over from men how the women — the mothers, sisters, girlfriends, wives — in their lives are constantly criticizing them for not being open and vulnerable and intimate, all the while they are standing in front of that cramped wizard closet where their men are huddled inside, adjusting the curtain and making sure no one sees in and no one gets out. There was a moment when I was driving home from an interview with a small group of men and thought, Holy shit. I am the patriarchy.

Too often white women decide that when they feel uncomfortable, upset, or threatened, they can turn to the patriarchy for protection. Because they don't want to lose that protection (dubious as it is), they stand by when it's convenient, and challenge it only when it directly threatens them. Yet, they know they benefit from it being challenged, and thus rely on others to do the heaviest lifting. They fail to recognize the conflicted relationship they have with the patriarchy includes a certain cowardice around challenging not only it, but other women who have embraced it.

What feminism calls patriarchy is simply civilization, an abstract system designed by men but augmented and now co-owned by women.

We need to highlight the role women play in perpetuating and sustaining patriarchal culture so that we will recognize patriarchy as a system women and men support equally, even if men receive more rewards from that system. Dismantling and changing patriarchal culture is work that men and women must do together.

Under patriarchy, every woman's son is her potential betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman.

Many women do not join organized resis­tance against sexism precisely because sexism has not meant an absolute lack of choices. They may know they are discriminated against on the basis of sex, but they do not equate this with oppres­sion. Under capitalism, patriarchy is structured so that sexism restricts women's behavior in some realms even as freedom from limitations is allowed in other spheres. The absence of extreme re­strictions leads many women to ignore the areas in which they are exploited or discriminated against; it may even lead them to imagine that no women are oppressed.

The past and the present offer an obvious truth: the fate of women – of all sexualities – and LGBTQ people are bound together. While women are the principal targets of patriarchy (that is, a society rigged in favour of men), this system also punishes those seen to deviate from rigid gender norms. Improving the position of women will probably be accompanied by progress for LGBTQ people; likewise, rolling back women's rights will also mean those of LGBTQ people deteriorate in tandem.
This underlines why it is wrongheaded to claim that trans rights and women's rights are on a collision course.

Understanding the total impact of the patriarchy on the female experience is endlessly elusive. ... It is a constant process, perpetually blurred by the ebb and flow of so many epiphanies clouded by self-doubt.

Nothing indicts female allegiance to patriarchy more than the willingness to behave as though the problems created by cultural investment in sexist thinking about the nature of male and female roles can be solved by women's working harder.

Matriarchy is a stage on the way to patriarchy, to man’s fullest realization of himself; he goes from worshipping Nature through women to conquering it. Though it’s true that woman’s lot worsened considerably under patriarchy, she never had it good; for despite all the nostalgia it is not hard to prove that matriarchy was never an answer to women’s fundamental oppression. Basically it was no more than a different means of counting lineage and inheritance, one which, though it might have held more advantages for women than the later patriarchy, did not allow women into the society as equals. To be worshipped is not freedom. For worship still takes place in someone else’s head, and that head belongs to Man. Thus throughout history, in all stages and types of culture, women have been oppressed due to their biological functions.

I think patriarchy is an issue all over the world, not just in Africa. Men have been running the world for so long that modern women have no choice but to take back their power.

Women must fight and realize the system that is controlling and denying them, that system is patriarchal and phallocratic. Many were unconscious whether to rebel against this system that exploits them or accept it and remained in slavery. So many women were confused on what they should do because if they rebel they were dehumanized and disposed of.

t’s just the tip of the iceberg. Real equal rights are still lacking for women on the ground. We still have a patriarchal system, as seen in gender-based violence and the burdens women carry as providers and carers

For women of color, the expectation that we prioritize gender over race, that we treat the patriarchy as something that gives all men the same power, leaves many of us feeling isolated.