{"id":612542,"date":"2026-05-30T19:44:11","date_gmt":"2026-05-30T19:44:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/612542\/"},"modified":"2026-05-30T19:44:11","modified_gmt":"2026-05-30T19:44:11","slug":"reclaiming-authentic-connection-say-patriarchy-psychology-today-united-kingdom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/612542\/","title":{"rendered":"Reclaiming Authentic Connection\u2014Say Patriarchy | Psychology Today United Kingdom"},"content":{"rendered":"

This post is Part 2 of a series. Read Part 1 here.<\/a> <\/p>\n

Too many of us are afraid of sounding \u201cwoke,\u201d boring<\/a>, provocative, irritating, or radical if we point out everyday acts of gender<\/a> policing. We avoid getting the response, \u201cUgh, this again?\u201d<\/p>\n

I, for one, have noticed this fear and cynicism<\/a> brewing in myself over the past decade. <\/p>\n

Sparked by the devastating losses of queer youth to suicide<\/a> in the early 2010s, I consistently wrote and spoke publicly, for years, about the connections between patriarchy, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia. For clinical journals and popular media, I wrote dozens of articles with titles like \u201cBully Gets \u2018Girl’<\/a>\u201d and \u201cDon\u2019t Act, Don\u2019t Tell<\/a>,\u201d a phrase I developed to illuminate the social regulation that demands gender conformity<\/a> in appearance and mannerisms\u2014mainly in males\u2014to avoid prejudice and discrimination<\/a> (O’Connell, 2012). <\/p>\n

(Along these lines, in her new book, Man Up: The New Misogyny and the Rise of Violent Extremism<\/a>, Cynthia Miller-Idriss cites studies showing that while American youth are increasingly more accepting of same-sex<\/a> sex<\/a>, being a \u201cfag\u201d\u2014displaying nonconforming gender expressions\u2014continues to be met with harassment. (Miller-Idriss, 2025; Mittleman, 2023).<\/p>\n

But gradually, I got quieter.<\/p>\n

The backlash to my observations seemed less and less worth the effort. I grew tired of increasingly circular debates with family and friends about whether or not misogyny and homophobia were even real. Straight men in my life would insist that “everyone gets called ‘faggot,'” and that I should “get over” myself. Some male clients would begin couples therapy<\/a> combatively (\u201cI guess you\u2019re gonna see me as the \u2018bad guy\u2019\u201d) and then proceed to blow off my attempts to help them empathize with their female partners, believing I was against them.<\/p>\n

Of course, throughout America over the past decade, what began as defensiveness and minimizing of these conversations has accelerated into direct, openly hateful targeting of women<\/a> and LGBTQ+<\/a> people, not to mention relentless attacks on people of color, immigrants, and all other minorities who are seen to threaten white patriarchal power.<\/p>\n

The reflexive takeaway (on all sides of the political spectrum): You pushed your \u201cliberal agenda\u201d too far. <\/p>\n

And so it goes, patriarchy and its ill effects continue to be denied, avoided, and flipped using DARVO (deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender) (Rosenthall & Freyd, 2022). As if those of us who call it out are actually the ones harming our country. <\/p>\n

But in calling out misogyny (along with homophobia, transphobia, racism, and xenophobia<\/a>), my end game was never to shame<\/a> \u201cbad boys\u201d or claim moral superiority. It was, in fact, to invite recognition, empathy, and connection by exposing a system that stifles us all, even as it brutally punishes some more than others. <\/p>\n

Reading Miller-Idriss\u2019s book reawakened me to what is lost when we don\u2019t call it like it is.<\/p>\n

She clarifies how the seemingly innocuous \u201ceveryday\u201d misogyny enacted by all of us, including youth in the schoolyard and online, not only functions as juvenile behavior, but also serves as a crucial, early stage initiation into an ecosystem that too frequently escalates into domestic and public violence.<\/p>\n

As psychoanalyst<\/a> Ken Corbett writes<\/a> in A Murder Over a Girl<\/a>, in which he investigates the 2008 murder of a transgender<\/a> teenager<\/a>, Leticia King, by one of her male classmates, we often learn to push unwanted vulnerability, deviance, and shame out of ourselves and into others. And when this form of self-regulation<\/a> in a patriarchal system remains unobserved and unacknowledged, well\u2026 we see the consequences everywhere, every day: bullying<\/a>, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, racism, xenophobia, violence, isolation. <\/p>\n

I was recently moved by a male client who had served in the military. Throughout his life, so much of his relational world involved competition<\/a>, proving his strength and worth in the form of toughness\/\u201cmasculinity.\u201d (His father, for example, showed him warmth only when he was in high school, when he won a football game.) His service in the Army was no exception. But he recalled a pivotal existential moment, when he bonded with another soldier who invited him to connect emotionally. The two of them verbalized a range of feelings with one another, including vulnerability, without fear of rejection, emasculation, or shame. This meaningful friendship<\/a> opened up their lives and has proven to endure. It made them even more attuned to their jobs, allowing them both to create deep, human connections with their fellow soldiers, making sure they felt truly supported and had what they needed to serve. Several of these soldiers had wanted to end their lives before receiving the generous attention<\/a> of my client. Before the \u201cblessing of that friendship,\u201d my client said, the men he worked with only knew how to connect by fighting with one another physically: \u201cThat\u2019s what they thought they needed to do to be men.\u201d<\/p>\n

We too often dismiss the practice of social policing, of pitting boys and men against one another as a way to dominate women, before it develops<\/a> into full-blown, hateful violence. And then repeats itself. <\/p>\n

As a psychotherapist, my job is to help people to name experiences they never learned to acknowledge, as my client\u2019s friend did for him in the Army. It is in this naming, this breaking of silence, that shame is disrupted\u2014and fear and cruelty along with it. From there, we can imagine connecting with other people with openness<\/a> and creative possibility, free of punishing societal control. <\/p>\n

Our kids understand this intuitively. <\/p>\n

Recently, when my son came home from school, he wanted to talk to my husband and me about an incident on the subway during his school trip, which I described in Part 1 <\/a>of this series. (To recap: One of the girls in his class wanted to sit with the boys on the subway\u2014the kids were otherwise divided by gender. One of the boys dared the other boys to sit next to her. And then suddenly all of the kids began to feel self-conscious and ashamed.) Our son initially came to the teasing boy\u2019s defense. The first words out of his mouth when we asked him how the boy’s behavior made him and possibly everyone else feel were \u201cYeah, but\u2026\u201d <\/p>\n

Then, after thinking about it a little more, he got quiet. He selected one of his longtime favorite books from the bookshelf: I am Rosa Parks<\/a>. And he re-read thoughtfully about how social exclusion becomes normalized without naming it. He then reminded us how necessary it is to walk in the shoes of those who feel that exclusion the most. <\/p>\n

So say patriarchy.<\/p>\n

Say misogyny.<\/p>\n

Say gay. Say trans. Say girl.<\/p>\n

Our children are listening.<\/p>\n

Copyright Mark O’Connell, LCSW-R<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This post is Part 2 of a series. Read Part 1 here. Too many of us are afraid…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":612543,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-612542","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/612542","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=612542"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/612542\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/612543"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=612542"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=612542"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=612542"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}