You Can’t Girlboss Your Way Out of the Patriarchy
If we’re being honest, fighting the patriarchy can be exhausting, not to mention wildly inconvenient.
Leaving a marriage that doesn’t feel authentic or equitable, advocating for yourself at work and calling out inequality wherever it shows up (which is basically everywhere), standing up to powerful men who move through the world as if everything they have is divinely ordained… Some days, it’s just a lot.
On a day-to-day level, pushing back against an entrenched system is not some bright, breezy path of least resistance. We wouldn’t blame you for the moments when you feel too tired to push, when the Instagram sheen of “letting a man take care of you” starts to look, briefly, like it could be real and relaxing.
We don’t blame you for any of this, because we know that after a few minutes, you’ll snap out of it. You’ll eat something, take a nap, and come back to yourself. Because what the actual fuck.
We also know that there is no version of the world where submission to the patriarchy delivers real safety or security for women, or is actually more convenient. If anything, recent weeks have made that painfully clear.
Take Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem, and Karoline Leavitt, for example. These are women who have, in different ways, upheld and advanced a system that does not love them back. Not because they necessarily lack intelligence or agency, but because the system rewards proximity to power only until it doesn’t.
These women have held up the patriarchy like atlas holding up the world, except instead of sporting big muscles, they have big lips, full cheekbones, and perhaps some giant lopsided knockers borrowed from their husbands for the occasion. Not to mock a woman’s appearance or anything. As feminists, we would never.
Last month, Kristi Noem, once a high-profile enforcer of Trump’s egregious immigration policy, was abruptly dismissed. Pam Bondi was ousted after she fell out of favor for failing to meet Trump’s expectations that she prosecute his political rivals. Karoline Leavitt has recently been publicly undermined, even if we’re told it was “a joke.” Maybe it was, but when power makes you the punchline, it’s worth asking who’s actually laughing.
The patriarchy isn’t just a collection of men, it’s a system that can be upheld by anyone, regardless of gender. But it has rules, and those rules were not written with women’s long-term safety, dignity, or agency in mind.
You can serve and defend the patriarchy, you can contort yourself to fit inside it. You can dress up like Homeland Security Barbie and parade around like you have harnessed its power. But it will still, eventually, turn around and bite you.