Audre Lorde’s “There Is No Hierarchy of Oppressions” and Allan Johnson’s “Patriarchy, the System: An It, Not a He, a Them, or an Us” discuss and stress the importance of recognizing patriarchy as a system and not as an individual. Throughout my life, I have always heard about this “system” and the problems it has caused society. Although I never understood who exactly we were blaming, I had always assumed it was people in political power. The reason I thought this for so long was that I felt that the only group of people that can affect an entire society, or various groups of people, are those in politics. Yet after reading this weeks’ readings I now understand that the system along with the patriarchal culture we have all grown up in was made up by society as a whole, not by specific individuals.

Johnson defines patriarchal culture as “how social life is and what it is supposed to be, about what is expected of people and about how they feel, how they are expected to look and behave”. Being a woman, especially in today’s society, means getting critiqued often. We are measured to meet the standards that have been set forth for us, and if we are unable to meet these requirements, our value in society drops a few points. We face a structural/cultural level of oppression by just being. But then again, if you are a specific gender or race, you may not have anything to worry about anyway due to the privileges you may or may have not known you have. How we present ourselves, how we think, the color of our skin, etc., all have huge implications. Though we may not realize it, we enact patriarchy in many ways. Our feelings, beliefs, practices/organizations we belong to, are all levels of oppression we experience in our everyday lives. In his writing, Johnson also states “The symbols and ideas that make up patriarchal culture are important to understand because they have such powerful effects on the structure of social life. By ‘structure,’ I mean the ways privilege and oppression are organized through social relationships and unequal distributions of power, rewards, opportunities, and resources”.

As I think back to the many times I have heard “Well, I blame the system.”, I now realize that in blaming others, we try to make ourselves feel better since, in the end, the system has been participated in by all of us. We, consciously and unconsciously, have taken part in forming this social system ourselves, yet had no choice in whether or not to participate because we were born into it. It is critical to recognize patriarchy as a system rather than as an individual because I believe that we must take responsibility, as a society, in trying to change it. We have seen that it is capable of periodically changing, so why not come together, as a system, and create a world with better opportunities and equal advantages that work for us and not against us.